[Hindustan Times - September 8, 2004
URL: http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_995424,00120001.htm ]
Hearts all a-flutter
The Big Idea | Praful Bidwai
One characteristic of cynically devious politics is that it makes high moral virtue out of mundane, crass necessity. After the BJP’s strident agitation for Sibu Soren’s resignation following the issuance of an arrest warrant against him, Uma Bharti had no choice but to quit as Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister when the Karnataka courts issued a non-bailable warrant to her — for the 19th time. Bharti literally draped herself in the national flag and laid claim to martyrdom.
If Soren exited as a ‘tainted’ villain, then by that token, Bharti couldn’t have emerged a paragon of virtue. Indeed, to the larger public, her indictment seemed like long-overdue comeuppance for the BJP, which has been in the throes of a patently ludicrous campaign against ‘tainted’ ministers. Ludicrous because some of its top leaders, including L.K. Advani and M.M. Joshi, have for years stood charged with serious crimes. In India’s largest state, the BJP boasts of a disproportionately high number of criminals than any other party.
But rather than let Bharti stand trial to establish her guilt or innocence, her handlers decided she must be politically used: to transform a case of a particularly despicable form of communal incitement and attempt to invade Hubli’s Idgah maidan, into a lofty claim to nationalism and saving the honour of the tricolour.
It’s another matter that the tricolour isn’t quite threatened and doesn’t need to be defended — certainly not from India’s religious minorities. It’s equally relevant to recall that the BJP’s parent, the RSS, for decades rejected the national flag’s green (read, ‘Islamic’) colour-band and its (Buddhist) Ashoka Chakra. The Sangh’s primary loyalty is to the bhagwa dhwaj, not to the national flag. So this sudden emotional surge over the tricolour is at least as artificial and contrived as was its abuse as an instrument of communalism in Hubli in 1994. Then, the flag became a weapon to bludgeon and intimidate the Muslims into giving up the Idgah, where they offered Eid prayers for years.
The context? The BJP has been in constant search of ‘other Ayodhyas’ around the Vindhyas (Bhojshala) and to their north and south. In Karnataka, it discovered two: Hubli and Baba Budhangiri (Chikmagalur), where it tried to ‘capture’ a Muslim saint’s shrine, worshipped by Hindus. In both cases, bloodshed and mayhem followed. But so did votes, which pleased the BJP.
Votes, with an eye on the assembly polls, are yet again the main motive of BJP strategists who planned Bharti’s resignation and ‘Tiranga yatra’. But they seem to have three other objectives. First, the flag-based campaign would help them mount pressure for the resignation of ‘tainted’ central leaders and weaken the UPA. Second, the BJP can claim to be the true guardian of the nation, symbolised by the flag. Third, they can be rid of Bharti, who has become a nuisance for the BJP because of her family’s antics.
The first two stratagems involve a huge gamble. The BJP is as vulnerable on the ‘tainted-leaders’ issue as any other. Its agitation probably won’t take off. Manmohan Singh is unlikely to oblige it by sacking Lalu Yadav. As for the flag, it’s wholly extraneous to the Hubli charges. These are not about rioting, instigating a mob to violence, and attempt to murder — grave accusations, by any standards.
The BJP’s self-serving distinction between ‘political’ charges (like causing the Babri demolition) and ‘criminal’ cases (murder, assault, etc.) is utterly and perniciously spurious. The demolition was a vile crime whose gravity was compounded by the orgy of lynchings that followed. Such hate-acts are more reprehensible, and must be more severely punished, than individual crimes.
As for the BJP’s claim to be the nation’s guardian, it’s no legatee of the freedom movement. The RSS didn’t even participate in it. The Sangh parivar has done more than any other force to threaten India’s nationhood and its foundations in pluralism, multiculturalism and secularism. And yet, perniciously, it equates the Hindu majority with the nation, no less. It challenges the minorities to prove their ‘loyalty’ — by subordinating themselves to the majority. As Sumit Sarkar and others argue in Saffron Flags, Khaki Shorts (Orient Longman, 1993), this illegitimate equation is characteristic of majoritarian communalism and is profoundly anti-democratic.
Of the BJP’s three objectives, two are dicey. The only firm objective, with a controllable outcome, is Bharti’s dislodging from power. The BJP, then, might end up with a self-goal. Its gameplan is of a piece with its too-clever-by-half ‘strategising’ which lost it the Lok Sabha election.
This could well be the outcome of the BJP’s equally hysterical campaign on Savarkar too. It’s important to locate Vinayak Damodar Savarkar historically and politically. Savarkar, ‘Veer’ solely for Hindutva supporters, was the originator of ideologies connoted by Hindutva and Hindu-padpatshahi
(Hindu overlordship/suzerainty). Savarkar is doubtless a complex figure. He had bad personal relations with the RSS despite their mutual ideological congruence. He was against superstition and sacrificial rituals despite his fiery espousal of Hinduness, with a fanatical emphasis in defining nationhood on punyabhu (holyland) as well as pitribhu (fatherland).
Savarkar’s role in the freedom struggle was equally complex and contradictory. For all his early ‘revolutionary’ activities, he tendered abject apologies and undertakings of loyalty to the colonial government in 1911, 1913 and 1925 (and then to free India’s government in 1948 and 1950, to evade arrest/detention after Gandhiji’s assassination). In October 1939, he met Viceroy Linlithgow and pledged cooperation on the basis of ‘friendship’ between ‘Hinduism and Great Britain’.
Savarkar was not only Nathuram Godse’s greatest mentor, but was also part of the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhiji. The Justice Kapoor inquiry concluded as much — “conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group”. The ‘Veer’ wasn’t convicted only because one critical approver’s evidence could not be independently corroborated.
Savarkar’s disgraceful record of treacherous collaboration with the raj makes it hard to call him a ‘freedom fighter’ in a straightforward way. But in a sense, he did fight (uncertainly, parochially and often dubiously) for ‘freedom’, like many religious-chauvinists and ethnic ultra-nationalists. But their goal was freedom from ‘foreigners’, and freedom to create a Hindu/Muslim-supremacist society and State.
However, the mainstream freedom struggle wasn’t a movement against ‘foreigners’ at all. In its core values, ideals and methods, it was against colonialism and imperialism, and for the establishment of a modern, plural, inclusive, multi-cultural, multi-religious, democratic India free of the terrible burdens of the past, including mass deprivation, social hierarchy, casteism, religious bigotry and women’s oppression. Neither Savarkar nor RSS/BJP leaders can even remotely claim a legitimate place in this movement.
Savarkar, like the Hindu Mahasabha, was consigned to the dustbin of history ages ago. Even in Maharashtra, the Mahasabha has lost more election deposits than any other party and is held in contempt by the Bahujan Samaj. Trying to revivify such cadavers can only set this society back by decades.
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