Asian Age - August 21, 2004
URL: http://www.asianage.com//main.asp?layout=2&cat1=6&cat2=44&newsid=115940
The fight is missing
By Seema Mustafa
Communalism cannot be fought with rhetoric. It cannot be fought by the one act of coming to power: we are here now, and so secularism is back. It cannot be fought by pious declarations and the odd anti-RSS statement. It can only be fought by sustained action on the ground, a mass movement at the political level to ensure that there is no room for complacency and that the communal forces are fought back inch by inch from the ground that they have occupied over the past several years.
Unfortunately, the Congress party and its allies, supporting partners and the rest of them appear to have decided that the very fact that the BJP and its government have been defeated at the hustings is reason enough to applaud the return of secularism. For many of us who have closely followed the travails of the Congress party over the last two decades, it is certainly not synonymous with secularism. There have been too many and too major secular upsets during its days in power – Shah Bano, Babri Masjid, Sikh violence – for its credentials to be over and above suspicion. Defeating the BJP for power is not enough, it has to match the political rhetoric with direct action as the first might fool the people for a second round at the polls but the second alone can restore the secular equilibrium that is so essential to keep India democratic.
Of course there is a tendency, very visible in the liberal classes, to heave a sigh of huge relief now that the saffron brigade has been ousted and embrace the Congress party with fervour. The five years of the Sangh in power were so very bad that the liberals – and even the Left – can perhaps be forgiven for seeking salvation from a party that has not particularly excelled itself in the secular field. It has always had its share of the Arjun Singhs, but it has also suffered from a good sprinkling of the Right in decision making positions. This has been matched by a reluctance to confront the communal forces in the field, and to project the easier policy of non confrontation as accommodation.
Nowhere has this been more evident than in Gujarat, a state that has suffered a communal holocaust and that is still not out of the woods. It was a very reluctant Congress party that entered Gujarat after the terrible violence, and never really established itself in the Narendra Modi controlled state. Central leaders did not bother to visit Gujarat, and the one visit that Congress president Sonia Gandhi did make after the violence had subsided, turned out to be a non-event. And was noticed only because she did not go to visit the widow of her senior state leader Ahsan Jafri who had been killed by the mobs, as she was not sure what kind of signal this would send out to the non-Muslim vote in the state. The Left Front left Gujarat to the Congress party to handle and except for a couple of visits by senior leaders there was no communist intervention worth a headline in the newspapers.
In fact the two leaders outside the BJP who started out as being regular visitors to Gujarat were Arif Mohammad Khan and Ram Vilas Paswan. The latter stayed on track and is now in the government as a Cabinet minister. Arif Mohammad Khan switched mid way and from shedding copious tears for the victims of the Gujarat violence, switched the tap off for a slice of the power cake from the BJP. The people of Gujarat fed up with Narendra Modi‚s violent political and non-existent economic policies gave a share of the vote to the Congress party as the only other alternative in the state, and since then the attack on Modi has virtually subsided. Surely even the Congress party cannot expect its occasional kneejerk verbal responses to be taken seriously by the rest of India.
The Supreme Court has now given sufficient ammunition to the secular political parties to go to the streets demanding the dismissal of the ugly Indian Narendra Modi. The very fact that the courts want the closed riot cases to be reassessed by a police panel is a strong indictment of the state administration and the chief minister who is now hiding behind the shrinking mantle of the RSS. The Supreme Court has ensured that none of the Modi favourites who had closed the cases without investigation, will be part of the police panel. Over 2,000 cases will now be re-opened with the Supreme Court doing what the secular political parties were unable to hold Modi accountable.
The victims in Gujarat are still lying in rehabilitation camps. They are too scared to go home. The secular parties are not holding their hands or wiping their tears, and if it had not been for active social activists and an alert and independent Supreme Court, they would have remained in their hell holes without help or recognition. The trauma that they have undergone is unbelievable. They have seen their fathers killed, their women and sisters repeatedly raped, their brothers torched alive, their homes destroyed. They have seen hopelessness and despair, experienced isolation and boycotts, and lived the hours and the days with no solace or hope in sight.
The one man who should have been boycotted and made to rue the day he was born is Narendra Modi. But instead he attends chief ministers‚ conferences, is the guest of honour at BJP and RSS functions, is seen laughing with leading Congress lights, and is in Delhi every other day negotiating for more grants for Gujarat. True, that the government has to deal with him so long as he remains the elected head of the government in Gujarat, but surely the Congress party does not have to give him any such respect. It should sharpen the knives against that man, more so now that the Supreme Court has said what the politicians have been afraid to, and jump into the political field brandishing these for a direct fight with the ugly Indian who epitomises the politics of hate and violence. But will it?
Highly unlikely as the Congress party prefers indirect speech, and inaction. For it fears that direct speech and action could alienate those that it believes are in the majority. The AICC will meet in New Delhi this Saturday to work out which way it should go but chances are that it will be reduced to a show of acute subservience and accolades for the undisputed leader Sonia Gandhi. She of course, is expected to rise above the occasion and speak her mind but again there is no certainty that the way forward will be that spelt out by human resource development minister Arjun Singh: confrontation. Or whether Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will get his way: non confrontation. Or whether Ms Sonia Gandhi and her coterie will look for a middle way out: status quo. Fight the RSS without fighting it: rhetoric. And let action be reserved for the field: elections. So while there will be a speech against the communal forces, or rather many speeches against communalism, the signal will not change to green in so far as tackling them on their home turf is concerned. Political rugby is for the unseasoned and the crude. The elegant and the cultured prefer a gentlewomanly round of golf.
The Congress party is a loose forum that has decided to adopt the middle course of accommodation as policy. It is uncomfortable with extreme opinions, although on many occasions it has supported communal extremists without a second thought. Arjun Singh has made the party uncomfortable and so no one is willing to take what he says on board. Instead motives are being attached to him, a new one every day. He did not get the ministry he wanted, he was being marginalised, he wanted attention, he wants to get into the good books of the Left Front, he is angry with Manmohan Singh ... the drivel goes on and on. In fact the whisper campaign against the minister has been more vicious than any campaign launched by the Congress party against Narendra Modi, a sad commentary on the leadership that has failed to keep the party hounds at bay.
Political virtue is being made out of the disinclination to throw a state government out. We are not like the BJP, we do not do such things, is an oft heard response. Fine, as a rule the Centre must not intervene and allow a state government to serve its full term in office. But there can be exceptions to a rule, in fact in a democracy it is imperative that such exceptions are dealt with squarely and justly. After all, if a state government has violated all the rules, massacred hundreds of Indian citizens, conspired to destroy the evidence, used its power to squash the cases, terrorised witnesses and allowed the perpetrators of the worst kind of violence this country has seen in years, it should be dismissed. And the man at the helm tried for crimes against humanity. Is this not what democracy is all about? Is this not what justice is all about?
But to sensitise the nation to these demands, and to give teeth to these demands, and to exert pressure on the government to concede these demands there must be a movement. For there can be no dismissal without a movement, as it is imperative to ensure that state action follows a demand for action from the people of India, and is not authoritative and arbitrary in nature. What better party to lead the movement than the Congress? What better person to lead the Congress into leading the movement than de facto Prime Minister Sonia Gandhi
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