Daily Times
March 01, 2007
HUM HINDUSTANI: Hitting secularism for a six
by J Sri Raman
The more serious and somewhat unexpected factor this time, by all accounts, has been a sudden and sharp spurt in prices, especially of vegetables, on the election eve. This is a factor that has led to the fall of governments and governing parties in the past. Onion prices, in particular, have brought tears to the eyes of ruling parties and politicians
Will Virendra Sehwag return to form? Will Irfan Pathan regain his rhythm? Team India has left for the World Cup cricket tournament in the West Indies, and India is in the midst of intense speculation about not just the eleven but the performance of individual players as well.
A retired cricketer, however, has just proved himself in a political game. Former Test opener Navjot Singh Sidhu even campaigned in the just concluded State Assembly election in Punjab as a cricketer. He was magnificent, clouting an imaginary ball with an invisible bat and clearing the top over the mid-off in a televised street-corner rally. And he won in the Amritsar constituency by a handsome margin.
The whole country once used to celebrate Sidhu’s towering, trademark sixers. His election victory, however, was no cause for national elation. He did not bring joy to everyone by winning a seat for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), an ally of the regionalist Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) that has recaptured power in Punjab. But few would see his score in this very different ball game as a blow for what India’s far right describes as ‘cultural nationalism’.
That catchphrase, of course, is a camouflage for majority communalism, which is not what has won in the home-state of India’s Sikh minority. Nor was ‘Hindutva’, as the far right calls its ideology, responsible for the simultaneous BJP victory in the hill-State of Uttarakhand. The party managers of the campaigns in the two States, Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad, admit that it owes the twin trophies to two factors of a far more mundane kind.
They and media pundits alike attribute the poll outcomes, primarily, to the ‘anti-incumbency factor’. In both the states, the people have voted out the party in power, the Congress in these cases. The assumption — true for a long while in all cases except left-ruled West Bengal and extreme-right-ruled Gujarat — is that any party is liable to get tainted after a term in office. Some other time, we will come to the question of what the exceptions prove, besides the rule.
The more serious and somewhat unexpected factor this time, by all accounts, has been a sudden and sharp spurt in prices, especially of vegetables, on the election eve. This is a factor that has led to the fall of governments and governing parties in the past. Onion prices, in particular, have brought tears to the eyes of ruling parties and politicians. This must have mattered far more in Punjab, for example, than the laughter to which the famous Sidhuisms may have moved his listeners.
This is a price, say Congress apologists, which must be paid for an inevitably inflationary growth of the economy. We will keep the question of whether there can be growth without tears, or with onions, for some other time again. The point made by all this is that the BJP is a beneficiary of popular discontent on issues that have nothing to do with its anti-people ideology.
Having discovered this silver lining to the dark cloud, those who consider themselves secular may hasten to close further discussion. They must not. The more important point to be made is that this makes no case for complacency. The vote may be against ‘incumbency’ and price increases, but it can still be a victory for the camp of ‘cultural nationalism’.
This is not the first time the far-right has won an election on people-friendly issues here or elsewhere. Nowhere has the fact prevented it from exercising democracy-given power in a far-right direction. The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, after all, had no popular mandate for enacting Pokharan II or presiding over the Gujarat pogrom of 2002.
These election results also come as a repeated caution against complacency of another kind. It deserves note that the BJP has done repeatedly well in elections in the period when it has been racked more by internal feuds and factionalism than ever in the past. The BJP and its parent, the Jan Sangh, were known for discipline when power remained its distant dream. It is perceived proximity to power that has promoted politicking inside the party.
Forces opposed to the far-right cannot win the good fight by merely gloating over its factional strife. They can do so only by exposing the divisive and destructive agenda that ‘cultural nationalism’, combined with pretended concern over the people’s problems, conceals. The BJP can be fought better by forging an alliance of parties that cannot back communalism at least for the sake of their constituencies.
The far-right, above all, needs to be engaged frontally. Sidhus of the political playground are good players of the googly!
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’
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