Demolishing India's ethos of pluralism

In the history of a political party, there comes a moment which it believes is momentous. More often it is not. The action it takes under the misconception has often resulted in the withering of the party. I am afraid the BJP is misreading the present situation in the country. This also happened when the Bharatiya Jana Sangh walked out of the Janata Party in 1979.

As the Jana Sangh, which merged with the Janata in the wake of the emergency in 1977, it never reached the two-digit figure in the Lok Sabha. When it was in the Janata, it won 80 seats. The success was because of the Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) movement and Indira Gandhi's excesses.

Even when the BJP left the Janata, its aura of credibility, which JP had bestowed on them by making them a part of the secular combination, lingered for a time. That helped the BJP confuse the Hindus. The liberals had shunned it and its fountainhead, the RSS, after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. The disgust and suspicion against it lasted for almost four decades.

The Hindu card that the BJP played in 1990 paid dividends, primarily because of V.P. Singh's acceptance of the Mandal Commission's recommendations, which made the upper strata of Hindus feel insecure. Some Hindus at that time accepted the BJP because reservations for the backward classes, in addition to those for the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes hit the middle class most.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee also said at that time that had there been no Mandal, there would not have been kamandal (water vessel for sadhus). What he meant was that if the Janata government led by VP Singh had not tried to implement the Mandal Commission report, there would have been no Ram mandir movement.

The Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri masjid dispute was a shot in the arm for the BJP. LK Advani really believed that the entire northern India lay at his feet. His rath yatra created a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. Never had communal riots taken place on such a wide scale since partition as they did during Advani's yatra. Where he went wrong was that he mistook the simulated Hindu feelings as the real ones.

The BJP came to grief when after the demolition of the Babri masjid, its graph of support dipped abruptly. The party was defeated in state elections in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh and just managed to scrape through in Rajasthan.

The BJP also saw that no political party was willing to join hands with it until it kept apart its 'Hindu' agenda: the construction of a temple on the Babri masjid site and the abolition of Article 370 which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir. So the party put these two issues on the back burner and formed the government at the centre.

But after having stayed in power at the centre for nearly four years, it has begun feeling as if it is the BJP's pro-Hindutva policy which has brought it dividends.

In reality, it was the fear of the Congress coming to power at the centre that made some of the once-upon-a-time secular parties join hands with the BJP. Because they felt that a Congress government at the centre would make the party stronger in the states and capture power.

The Telugu Desam from Andhra Pradesh also put its weight behind the BJP for the same reason. The predicament of the Telugu Desam is that it cannot afford to break away from the BJP-led combination at the centre because then the Congress will stage a comeback in the state.

I do not know how the BJP can construe the Telugu Desam's negative support as something in its favour or, for that matter, in favour of Hindutva. The reason why the Telugu Desam has decided not to accept the Speakership, which has been lying vacant after the death of Balayogi, is this: It has already registered its protest over the Gujarat happenings under the BJP-led government at the centre. It is difficult for the party to accept Speakership after that.

The polarisation of Indian society after Gujarat is a figment of the BJP's imagination. Even though Gujarat has been polarised by the BJP in the state, Narendra Modi will not be returned if there is an election. People are too conscious of the economic problems.

In the 546-member Lok Sabha, Gujarat has only a handful of seats. Even if all of them go to the BJP, it does not help the party. The killings and the atrocities in Gujarat have spread such a wave of revulsion and disgust in the country that the party would face a straight defeat. See what the intelligentsia did in the Delhi election after the Gujarat happenings. The party was pulverised.

There is an attempt at polarisation in the sense that the RSS parivar is trying to destroy the pluralistic character of the country. It is not the consolidation of Hindu votes but of those few who want the fundamentalists to establish a theocratic state.

The south, which I toured recently, would rather be another country if the future face of India is Gujarat, where even Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram is not a safe place to hold a peace meeting and where peace-makers face the threat of death.

Famous danseuse Mallika Sarabhai has taken refuge in another house since last week after her house was stoned because she was doing some relief work in Muslim refugee camps.

The BJP will rue the day when it put Narendra Modi, an RSS worker, as the state chief minister. Gujarat has aroused all forces which want the country to stay pluralistic and democratic. They are marshalling themselves in different ways.

On April 17, Delhi will see thousands of people on the streets demonstrating against those faces which are trying to kill the open and tolerant society that India is.

I am surprised over the absence of action against religious terrorism. Members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal are no different from the Taliban. The world woke up to their obscurantism and violence after their attacks in the U.S. India is waking up to their barbarism after their massacre in Gujarat. The Taliban disfigured Islam, the RSS parivar Hinduism.

Gujarat may well be a laboratory for the parivar. It is also a laboratory for others. They can draw the lesson that by effecting killings in the minority community the BJP will only lessen its strength or sway. Fanatics who control the RSS should realise that democracy does not go well with theocracy.

India needs economic development that could give two meals to hundreds of thousands of people who go hungry every night. As Maulana Abul Kalam Azad said long before independence, "The most vital and urgent of India's problems is how to remove the curse of poverty and raise the standards of the masses.

It is to the well-being and progress of these masses that the national struggle has directed its special attention and its constructive activities. And it will be judged by the well-being and advancement that people make. Anything that comes in the way of the good of the masses of our country must be removed."

The Hindutva representatives - the VHP and the Bajrang Dal - are destroying the lofty aims of the independent struggle. Not only that. They are also demolishing the country's ethos of pluralism.

This comment is by Kuldip Nayar, a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a Rajya Sabha MP.