It must be exhausting battling the secular-communal labelwallahs, but isn't it time the admirers of Narendra Modi looked inwards to ponder why they permitted the Congress to brush aside its responsibility for not just 1984 but dozens of other wrongsIJ
BJP spokespersons who demand TV anchors stop portraying Narendra Modi in one-dimensional light sound a lot like feminists who insist that women are not all breasts. His three terms may have ensured the secular spread of purchasing power in Gujarat, but that notwithstanding, Narendra Modi is still a communal ogre, responsible for the massacre of “thousands of Muslims” in the 2002 riots.
Nobody can run away from the fact that the BJP has a problem of acceptability. Modi’s social network friends fail to understand that an “image problem” is half solved once an initial — and understandable — reluctance to admit that it exists is overcome. But no, in this camp, jobs are lost and reputations destroyed for articulating a simple truth.
There is this “idea of India” which militates against the persona of Narendra Modi. What's more dispiriting for Modi's fans is that the Nehruvian vision of Indian nationhood, with its marked disengagement from Hindu or other accents based on race and creed, is finally having its day in the West. Granted there's a lot of hypocrisy about it -just look at this week’s confirmation of an anti-India bias in the UK's latest Visa policy — but “pluralism” is an idea whose time has come. In streets and universities, coffee shops and parlours across countries, old barriers based on race and birth are crumbling. An African American is President of America. Even if the Duchess of Cambridge had a girl child, Britain would have had an heir. And so on, to stress the crumbling of staidness in public policy.
It isn’t helping Narendra Modi’s campaign that his cheerleaders are downright incapacitated in terms of profundity which is vital for staging intellectual counter-attacks. Yes, the Congress has engineered more riots and pogroms than the BJP could ever dream of in execution of some diabolical Hindu design. But the BJP’s backroom geniuses never pointed that out until too late.
Most of them have limited understanding of world events and have no tolerance for ideas enriching the contemporary global discourse on anything. If at least one from the handful of elegant writers from their tribe could produce a book outlining with some coherence the relevance of Hindutva in general (and Narendra Modi’s economics in particular), the whole movement could have leapfrogged out of the its traditional mediocrity.
It is not as if the “enemy” — those egregious pseudo secularists - is any better off. But at least they the tail wind behind them — global acceptability. Ross Mallick, the famous scholar on Indian Communists, once commented that though Marxism and its variants, including Marxism-leninism, came to India earlier than China or even most European countries, the failure of this country’s numerous Marxian intellectuals to produce even
one volume of any value was indeed surprising. In the twilight of his life, Mohit Sen, possibly the only Indian Communist with a gifted mind, rued much the same in his Traveller and the Road-Journey of an Indian Communist (New Delhi, 2002).
Preachers to the choir
like the Reds, people in the Hindutva movement write exclusively for each other. Since both have embraced market economics it is no longer viable to print little tomes for preaching to the choir. Social media may offer temporary relief because it’s free, but limited in terms of depth — how many characters go into a tweet IJ As for portals and “news sites”, credibility is an issue because Hindutva-biased media suffer deficits not only in terms of factual accuracy but also in the good taste department.
Even the odd exception to this rule finds it hard to sustain a lonely track. One time, rather impressed by what one of them had written on the burning issue of the day, I walked up to this prolific writer and TV performer and wanted to know why he didn’t consider writing booksIJ He gave me a “are you madIJ” look and I wondered why. later, I realized that the expressive powers of this writer had been reduced by years of newspaper
writing to bursts of 1,000 words. Add to that the attraction of instant fame by appearing on those bawdy TV debates. If their owners like you, you could be described as “India’s most gifted historian” without writing one original work; or a “celebrated political analyst” by predicting what everybody’s old aunt knows.
Writing a serious book to further a new political line, something Modi’s Hindutva desperately needs in 2013, demands months of hard work, painful research and the stamina to churn out hundreds of pages of original thinking at the end of which the monetary reward may be a few thousand dollars at the very most. Now, that’s tricky if you are an intellectual sold to St. Market.
Discounting the importance of an intellectual reservoir is not a recent problem with the Sangh Parivar, the powerhouse behind the BJP. At the hour of its great need in the summer of 2013, the Narendra Modi campaign finds itself emasculated by the lack of variety in terms of offerings. For instance, even though there is widespread awareness about the failure of neo-liberal economics enshrined in Manmohan Singh’s doctrine, Modi feels impotent in coming up with a counter doctrine. The best he can do is outdo Manmohan Singh in Manmohanomics. He must grandstand before the nouveau riche aspirations of concretized countrysides and villas fronting wasted rivers.
Two wrongs one right
When I was growing up in the cold war era, “1984” was an awaited year because of George Orwell’s dystopic visions contained in his famous book by the same name. These days, 1984 is relived in the Indian media because of a late reaction in the “Indian Right” to the horrific, State-sponsored pogrom on Sikhs by Nehru’s successors.
I don’t dispute the right of Modi’s supporters to remind their secularist rivals of the shame-dipped memory of an Indian prime minister rationalizing the massacre of 3,000-plus innocent people just because of their own murdered his mother - a prime minister who had defiling their holiest shrine when a Frankenstein she herself had created went indy.
But the shrill ladies Modi recruited for his defense make a hash of it in two ways. At the base level, they fail to convince my young daughter, who I think is more of a representative of the “urban youth” than the types who cheer Modi, that they are not arguing that two wrongs (Gujarat 2002 and Delhi 1984) adds up to a right (Narendra Modi’s acceptability). At a higher level, they produce mirth — since when is the BJP shedding tears for dead Muslims and SikhsIJ And what about Hashimpura 1987, Mizoram and Nagaland (1950s through 70s)IJ
In November 1984, every Sikh who survived Rajiv Gandhi’s terrorism on them lost faith in the Indian statehood. But the BJP, then only four years old and in need of issues to help it grow beyond the Hindu-Hindi perimeter defined by the Sangh, did nothing to capitalise on that mood. When an outcry rose among the Sikhs to boycott the general election slated for late December of that year, the BJP, instead of seeing political opportunity decided to play statesman. Urged by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP went pro-active to get the Sikhs to participate in the election.
Very noble and righteous, but totally misplaced. The BJP only ended up crystallizing its image as a body of men and women who shed tears when Hindus are hurt, in ways both real and imagined. I am not saying this in retrospective wisdom -it’s a thought that had crossed many minds even then — that had the BJP lent its weight behind the Sikhs’ boycott of that year’s election, it would have succeeded in humiliating the Congress and provoked new alignments among the minorities. Who knows, maybe it would not have been necessary to demolish the Babri Masjid eight years later to posit itself as a politically relevant forceIJ
Upholding the “national interest” is a good thing, and sometimes it is necessary to rise about partisan thinking. But the BJP, lacking a vibrant intellectual reservoir of its own, has always ended up supporting the Congress’ vision of “national interest”. Was backing the gas price in the “national interest”IJ The roots go
further down. From Kashmir to the North-East, the Indian security forces have committed horrendous crimes against humanity whenever the Congress has been in power. In fact even today, any honest Kashmiri will readily admit that the only change they’d noticed in Delhi’s attitude came about in the Vajpayee era when “Indian soldiers” under lt-General VG Patankar behaved more like human beings than members of an occupying army.
But all that changed in the post-2004 era when the brick-by-brick effort of Vajpayee to build confidence in the average Kashmiri on India went to pieces. The BJP’s singular failure in persisting with its interest in the future of Jammu&Kashmir stands out as one of the looming manifestations of its failure as a national Opposition force. When the world condemns the Indian Army for excesses under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the shooting down of children, the BJP uttered hardly a word.
What’s whispered around in liberal circles constitutes a nightmarish situation for any nation. It is said, “The BJP secretly thanks the Congress for reducing the population of the minorities.”
There is also a fallacy in the upper echelons of the party that the “morale” of the armed forces would be weakened if the excesses in Kashmir, Manipur and elsewhere are discussed in public. Not only does such a viewpoint insult the Indian Army’s officers and men — depict them virtually as Nazis — it also leads to the Congress breathing easy. The “robust nationalism” of the BJP comes in handy for the grand old party and helps keep its “secular” credentials alive.
It’s a classic case of a ruling party recruiting the particular talents of its opponent when in need. This week we saw how glibly the BJP walked into the UPA’s parlour to “defend Parliamentary supremacy” to thwart the Election Commission’s ban on criminal politicians from contesting elections. It was plainly a Congress parlour game meant to keep prospective allies happy. What was BJP’s takeaway except earning the hatred of civilized peopleIJ Besides, this concept of “Parliament’s supremacy” is dipped in Indira Gandhi-brand autocracy. The Constitution of India never intended any of the three pillars of the State to be supreme but had tucked in checks and balances.Elections are not won and lost by shouting “economy stupid”. They are won through intelligent alignment of politico-socio-economic forces. When will Narendra Modi learn this simple truthIJ When the “Indian Right” has a book.
(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer)