(Gulf News
30/12/2006)
Fundamentalism with a vengeance
By Kuldip Nayar, Special to Gulf News
Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP leader, chided the media once for dividing his party into hardliners and soft-liners. "All of us are the same," he said. He is correct. The competition now is: who is the hardest?
The reason why the media goes wrong is the thinking, probably wishful, that the Bharatiya Janata Party might realise one day that the modern age and the medieval period cannot be grafted together. Hindu fundamentalism is a line of desperation that the BJP has adopted. It should know that religion does not buy political support. This is as much true of India as the rest of South Asia. Pakistan and Bangladesh are Islamic republics but they have never allowed the clerics to cross the double-digit figure in their parliament.
Religious parties were able to do well in Pakistan at the last polls because the military rulers wanted political parties to do badly. The Jamiat-e-Islami prospered in Bangladesh with the support of the ruling Khalida Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Nepal, a Hindu state, has never seen a Hindu party winning, nor has Sri Lanka the Buddhist monks. Since history and geography have thrown the different communities together in the region, they have learnt to live with one another. They generally rise above religion, though not caste, when voting.
The BJP should know it better. It lost in the last election because the countryside voted against the saffron that the urban areas had begun to accept during the six-year rule of the BJP at the centre. The party's new president Rajnath Singh wants 10 years, not for economic development but for measures to stop "Muslim appeasement". When they have no jobs, no shelter, not even proper status, as the Sachar committee has proved through statistics, where is the Muslims' appeasement? This is another way of arousing Hindu passions. Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi whipped up frenzy and killed hundreds of Muslims and uprooted thousands of them a few years ago.
The problem with the BJP is that it has no other agenda, neither economic nor social. Its programme is to isolate and torment the minorities although the party's 2004 election manifesto promised all to minorities. The wilderness has made the party go berserk.
India's commitment is to pluralism. The freedom struggle consecrated this belief through sacrifices. The nation has developed a secular temperament which the BJP has been vainly trying to change. The party fails to understand that democracy and theology do not go together. No doubt, the British divided India on the basis of religion. But the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself changed the goalposts. His first announcement after the creation of Pakistan was that religion had nothing to do with governance. The BJP is resurrecting the discarded ideology. But the party has tried it earlier and failed.
After deluding even the liberal rightists, the BJP has taken off its mask of having a different entity from the RSS. The party even held ts executive meeting at a RSS building in Lucknow a few days ago i, where it proudly announced that the RSS pracharaks (preachers) would occupy key positions in the BJP. The party president, like an evangelist, has declared that they would construct the Ram mandir at the same place where the Babri masjid stood before destruction.
Failing to condemn
Also, Article 370 which gives a special status to Jammu and Kashmir is sought to be scrapped. But the party or its leaders did not utter a word to condemn the atrocities that the upper castes are committing against the dalits, constituting one-sixth of the Hindu community. Even the ban on the dalits' entry into temples in Orissa recently figures nowhere in the BJP's discussions. What kind of Hindu party is this?
The BJP's onslaught takes the shape of Hindutva with a vengeance - anti-secular and anti-minorities. The party will seek to communalise every field and try to polarise society. This may affect economic development adversely because the BJP's attention is going to be focused on how to Hinduise the country, not on how to harness all communities for people's welfare.
Institutions may face a relentless pressure from Hindu fanatics who will stop at nothing. Parliament and state legislatures may be hit. The BJP will measure every bill or business on the scales of religion. What pushes the cause of Hindutva will be the criterion, not the country.
It is difficult to imagine how secular parties can adjust themselves in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The Janata Dal (Secular) has left it. How can the Nitish Kumar government belonging to the Janata Dal (United) have in Bihar the BJP as its coalition partner?
Indeed, the BJP has thrown down the gauntlet. It is up to the nation to pick it up. It is a challenge to the pluralistic structure that the country has built in the last 60 years. True, the future may decide whether the nation can protect the ethos of secularism which Mahatma Gandhi provided while leading people to freedom. This will mean that all secular, democratic forces should join hands to kill the demon of communalism once and for all. But the question is why it raises its head again and again? The Pakistanis have a point when they ask me: why members from the BJP are increasing in parliament and in the state legislatures, particularly in the north? How does India, with its long tradition of secular democracy, return the BJP which is like any Muslim fundamentalist outfit?
- Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP.