(Daily Times
February 08, 2006)
HUM HINDUSTANI: How the South can be won
by J Sri Raman
Elsewhere, given its special constituency, the far right might have used civic and other issues to improve its competitive edge in electoral politics. In the South, where Islam and Christianity are long-established religions, it has had to first create its communal constituency and then consolidate it
By all media accounts, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made a breakthrough, hyped by some as “historic”. It has, at long last, managed to enter a government in South India. What does the party’s partial success in capturing power in the state of Karnataka really signify?
A decade and a half ago, this would have signified a startling change. The Vindhyas, the mountain range demarcating India’s geographical North-South divide, were then presumed to be an impregnable barrier for the BJP; its base was limited mainly to the country’s Hindi-speaking heartland. In the days of the Jan Sangh, the party’s parent, of course, the idea would have been utterly unthinkable. It would have run directly counter to the Sangh’s then rationale and rhetoric of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”.
It would have been as unthinkable, say, as the electoral success of the Pakistan Muslim League or the Pakistan People’s Party in the East Pakistan of the 1960s. In other words, an ethnic divide distanced India’s main far-right party from the South.
But this divide disappeared quite sometime ago. The Karnataka development thus did not indicate the breakthrough it would have spelt for the pristine BJP or its parent party. When a coalition government of the BJP and the so-called Janata Dal (Secular) was sworn in on February 3, it did not strike anyone as an inexplicable miracle.
It was not as if the BJP had materialised from nowhere and barged into the government. It has been the single largest party in the legislative assembly, though its political isolation obliged it so far to sit in the opposition. Also, it is not as if the BJP does not exist in the rest of the South.
In the three other southern states, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the party and the parivar (the far-right ‘family’) have made their presence felt for quite some time. Andhra Pradesh, it must be remembered, sent the largest contingent of demolitionist devotees to the Babri Masjid in 1992. In Tamil Nadu, the renowned home of ‘Dravidian rationalism’, the far right has been a reckonable (if still non-electoral) force ever since the mass conversion episode in Meenakshipuram and, more conspicuously, the Coimbatore bomb blasts of the late 1990s. And in Kerala, considered a bastion of the left, the social influence of the communal right is an ill-kept secret.
Communalisation of the South has been proceeding apace for over 15 years. The BJP has achieved a breakthrough in Karnataka only in converting communalism into political capital. The party’s national leadership and its lieutenants in the other Southern states will naturally look for lessons they can profitably learn from Karnataka. Whether or not the avowedly anti-communal and secular forces and parties will make an effort to learn similar lessons from the same episode is unfortunately quite uncertain.
One of the main lessons, of course, is about how not to fight the far right. In Karnataka, a so-called secular party has handed power to the BJP on a platter. Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy did this by splitting the JDS, despite his father (former prime minister HD Deve Gowda) going through the motions of trying to dissuade him. There is nothing to deny the BJP similar gains elsewhere from similar opportunism by its declared opponents.
After all, the ‘secular’ Telugu Desam Party had no qualms in Andhra Pradesh about allying with the BJP and remaining the mainstay of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in New Delhi. In Tamil Nadu, the two main ‘Dravidian’ parties have only been taking turns at rolling out the red carpet for the far right that they are sworn to fight. In Kerala, where parivar outfits have pursued communal campaigns to the point of creating communal tensions when none existed, the BJP may soon acquire enough clout to become a balance-tilting factor.
There are two points to ponder for the forces and parties serious about containing the far-right forays in the South. They must, first and foremost, recognise the even more fundamental importance of purely communal issues and planks for the far right in the South. Elsewhere, given its special constituency, the far right might have used civic and other issues to improve its competitive edge in electoral politics. In the South, where Islam and Christianity are long-established religions, it has had to first create its communal constituency and then consolidate it.
It was an attempt to create an Ayodhya in the South, for example, that gave the BJP such a constituency in Karnataka. State BJP president and now deputy chief minister BS Yediyurappa, a staunch member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), shot to prominence as an LK Advani-style leader of the campaign to hoist the Indian national flag on the Idgah Maidan of Hubli, carrying an obvious message that sets the minority community apart from the nation.
The second point to ponder, however, is that communalism alone did not bring BJP into power in Karnataka. Ayodhya might have helped the BJP become the main opposition in India’s parliament and the Gujarat pogrom might have helped Narendra Modi and his party win an election in that state; but Yediyurappa and his party needed no such issue. They managed to secure a share in power solely through manipulation.
After Modi’s return to power, the BJP toyed with the idea of “repeating Gujarat” elsewhere. The party, however, wisely refrained from trying the uncertain tactic. It remains to be seen if the BJP tries to repeat Karnataka — riot-mongering communalism followed by cynical politics — in the rest of the South.
The writer is a journalist and peace activist based in Chennai, India
|
