M.J. Akbar: BJP out to beef up its election strategy

The opposite of Opposition is not government. It is, more logically and more correctly, position. In theory, a government takes a position, and the parties across the dividing aisle in parliament, oppose. Since a government has the executive authority, it is expected to set the agenda for the nation by instruments of legislation and Cabinet decision.

When this goes awry, you can be sure that a government is in trouble. If the Opposition sets the agenda and the government begins to respond, it is almost axiomatic that the latter has lost the natural advantage that power provides in politics.

Digvijay Singh is in trouble in Madhya Pradesh. There is no other explanation for the curious somersault that politics has taken in his state in this, an election year. Digvijay Singh, keeper of the secular flame, now wants to get re-elected because he insists that he loves Mother Cow more than his BJP opponent Uma Bharati.

He also wants the voter of his state to believe that the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, eats beef! The unsaid part of this allegation is that he himself would never indulge in such sacrilege.

This is not the first time that beef has been an election issue. The reasons are obvious. Hindu sentiment is by and large against cow slaughter, because of the reverence accorded to the cow in Hindu scriptures.

Most sensible Muslim rulers of India have accepted the need to respect such sentiment; and only fools considered an indulgence to beef worth the price of stability. (Aurangzeb, incidentally, for those who might consider this interesting, was a vegetarian, but this did not make him a sensible ruler.)

The Congress government of independent India also recognised this, and banned beef where it could. You can eat beef at five star hotels now, but it is imported. That, by and large, is where the matter rested, except when partisans of the Hindutva family wanted more than this. The Congress has never attempted to make beef into an election campaign issue in the past.

Perhaps Digvijay Singh has not heard of a man called Prabhudutt Brahmachari. He was a candidate in the first general elections held in free India, in 1951-52, from a constituency called Phulpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He had the support of all the non-Congress parties, from the socialists to the Jana Sangh (the original name of the BJP).

The Congress candidate from Phulpur was a gentleman called Jawaharlal Nehru. No one in his senses expected the unknown Brahmachari to win, but at some point in the campaign he began to pick up steam. He had only one charge to make against India's first prime minister: that Jawaharlal ate beef. It was hardly a secret that Nehru had some very English tastes.

While Jawaharlal never touched alcohol, his breakfast was more kidney and toast than samosa and puri. (Motilal, his father, incidentally, did drink for most of his life, and, on his deathbed, teasingly accused Mahatma Gandhi of denying him this in the last decade of his life after converting him to the Gandhian ethos during the non-cooperation movement.)

'Soft' faction

Nehru treated Brahmachari's accusation with the contempt that it deserved. He refused to come to Phulpur to answer such a question. The UP Congress was not so sanguine, and all the local bigwigs camped at Phulpur to ensure Nehru's victory. The times were less than secular.

Partition had unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, and Uttar Pradesh was boiling. Nehru had been personally challenged within the Congress by a 'soft Hindutva' faction led by Purushottam Das Tandon. (There has always been a 'soft Hindutva' lobby in the Congress. There is nothing new in the country's oldest party.) Nehru's reply was simple and consistent: he refused to purchase electoral victory at the cost of the soul of the Congress.

What would Jawaharlal Nehru have thought of his heirs? Digvijay Singh, astonishingly, has learnt nothing from the humiliation of his fellow-Madhya Pradeshi Kamal Nath in Gujarat.

Kamal Nath should have made governance the central issue. Sonia Gandhi should have started her bid for victory in Gujarat from an earthquake-ravaged village without water and shelter years after the tragedy, instead of launching her campaign from a temple.

Digvijay Singh is as blind as Kamal Nath. He cannot see the obvious. If the voter has to vote on cow-protection, who will he opt for? A party that has made this a part of its agenda from the day it came to life, or a party that has Sonia Gandhi as its president?

There is nothing wrong with Sonia Gandhi eating beef. She is a Christian and permitted by her faith to do so. But how can the Congress make this an issue against a party that has as its mentor a Guru Golwalkar? This is a no-brainer. But perhaps you need some brains even to recognise a no-brainer.

Target Sonia

When you begin to sink, there is never a depth to which you will not go. To accuse Prime Minister Vajpayee of eating beef is absurd. It must be an act of desperation. To accuse him of exporting beef is an utter nonsense. His angry response will only increase his support.

It only remains for the BJP to accuse Sonia Gandhi of eating beef, which they will do happily. It is astonishing that the MP Congress never realised that this charge could boomerang. A Narasimha Rao could have fended off that boomerang. Sonia Gandhi cannot. It is not her fault that she cannot, but that does not help much.

The beef campaign has injected a religiosity into the election atmosphere that suits the BJP perfectly. The BJP has something far bigger than cow-protection on its electoral agenda. It is going to offer a solution to the Ayodhya problem, and do so with the full support of all its allies in the NDA because the solution has been carefully hedged by all the required checks and balances.

First, 'evidence' will be offered to show that there was a temple to Lord Ram at the site where the Babri mosque was constructed.

Second, the Supreme Court will be involved in the decision-making process. This effectively finesses other parties, since they have all given a public commitment that they will abide by any Supreme Court ruling. They cannot now refute their previous stand. Third, temple construction will start on undisputed land. This too is intelligent, because you cannot argue too strongly about land that is undisputed. Fourth, a mosque will be constructed nearby, although not at the precise spot on which the Babri mosque stood.

This is the perfect position from where the BJP can launch its bid for re-election, along with its allies, for five more years at the Centre. It indicates, if nothing else, that the party has not allowed itself to become complacent after its revival-victory in Gujarat.

It has not made the mistake of believing that victory in Gujarat was sufficient to ensure victory in a national general election. Contrast this with the Congress attitude, where the party thought that power in 15 states of variable size would translate automatically into power at the Centre in the next general elections.

The beef campaign will not bring Digvijay Singh to power in Madhya Pradesh, but it will help legitimise the infusion of religion into politics by hopeless emulation.