(www.truthout.org | 3 November 2004)
INDIA'S FAR RIGHT DROPS ITS MASK
By J. Sri Raman
What does the far right do, when the people reject it in an election? The question may be of current interest to curious - and optimistic - Americans. Very distant and vastly different, India may still suggest an answer.
The larger answer from India is that the far right takes from its trouncing exactly the opposite of the lesson the people sought to teach it. It becomes more assertive and aggressive. It opts to assert its unmasked identity. It does so on the assumption that this will pave the way for its return to power.
The answer, of course, has taken an Indian form. No one ever considered George W. Bush a mask that concealed the US establishment's megalomania and militarism.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political front of the far-right 'family' (or 'parivar'), on the other hand, has dropped its 'mask' by dumping former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as its decorative head. Former party ideologue N. Govindacharya, in a moment of clarity and candor, once called Vajpayee 'our mask,' and the label has stuck. Former Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani is the face - real, revealing and reassuring, according to the party - that has replaced the 'mask.'
Vajpayee has served as the mask the party puts on, in power or in proximity to it. He has played to near-perfection the pretended role of a consensus-seeking politician in a coalition regime or a broad alliance bidding for power. Ever a loyal member of the parivar, he has still acquired a liberal image thanks to persistent efforts by powerful interests. The efforts have aimed at deceiving India into believing that, with him at the helm, the BJP and the motley combine it headed presented a safe bet for the country, including its minorities.
They have continued to call him 'the right man in the wrong party,' though he has been fully at home in it for four decades now. As Prime Minister, he proclaimed India a nuclear-weapon state, but they have continued to praise him as an apostle of peace. He presided over the parivar offensives against Muslim and Christian minorities. He watched on benignly as Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi waded through blood to the State-level throne. And still they hail Vajpayee as the voice of sanity and even secularism in the BJP.
The media came to believe in his plaster-saint image, one largely of its own making. It succeeded in selling the image to a section of the middle class. The masses as a whole, however, have preferred to judge Vajpayee by his deeds rather than by his verbal jugglery.
Advani, in contrast, has for two decades been assigned the function of the party's true face, to be revealed whenever the 'mask' is needed no more. Whenever, indeed, as now, the party feels the need to doff the 'mask.' He acquired his image as the spearhead of the Ayodhya agitation, which culminated in the crumbling of the Babri Mosque in 1992, and its bloody aftermath. The revanchist campaign yielded the party rich political returns, making it the main opposition in India's parliament.
Advani was declared the BJP president, for the third time in his political career, on October 19. The event has raised expectations in the party of a repetition of the post-Ayodhya reversal of the BJP's fortunes. In almost all other quarters, it has also raised apprehensions of more Ayodhyas, in the sense of socially divisive and destructive agitations.
Advani may have led the rabble-to-rubble Ayodhya agitation, but he enjoys the backing of BJP intellectuals, including editors and journalists of dubious eminence. While venting scorn at vandal campaigns of the kind, they have always voiced unabashed admiration for the master tactician who can thus mobilize mass support for militarism along with 'market reforms.' The same opinion-makers can be counted on to lend a similar legitimacy to the coming Advani campaigns.
Advani has announced no campaign so far. He is, however, trying to rake up the Ayodhya issue again, promising a Hindu temple in the place of the razed mosque if the BJP returns to power. It may take a while for the party to revive the issue. A more immediate threat, meanwhile, is an incendiary campaign against 'demographic invasion' from neighboring Bangladesh (coupled with a 'jihad' against Indian Muslims allegedly conspiring to outgrow the Hindu population!).
Sections of the populace do see the need to counter such campaigns, but they lack political support. If the Congress Party, heading the coalition government in New Delhi, feels any concern over the coming far-right offensive, it is a closely guarded secret.
It is not only the BJP that would seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the election results. The Congress has also, apparently, drawn the conclusion that it fended off the far right only by avoiding an ideological fight. It will be for the people to drive home the lesson that both the parties are anxious to disregard.
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