(Tehelka.com
April 21 , 2007)
VIEW POINT
BULLY BY THE HORNS
PRAFUL BIDWAI
Independent India has dealt with many practitioners of strong-arm methods — from maharajahs to powerful landlords and dacoits, and from business mafias and self-proclaimed godmen-impostors to street-level goons.
But it has never seen anything akin to the political bully commonly known as the BJP, an entity steeped in self-righteousness and forever in search of martyrdom. Nor has India dealt with a challenger to democracy with as much confusion, vacillation and outright pusillanimity.
The BJP is sworn to transforming India into a Hindu-supremacist society and state. It has used democracy with the utmost cynicism merely as a means to power, while denuding it of its content, including pluralism and universal rights for all citizens. It’s a half-miracle — and a shame — that the BJP ruled India for six years.
It’s even more shocking that it has again fallen on outrageously communal campaigning in Uttar Pradesh. The CD it officially released on April 3 concentrates communal venom calculated to divide citizens, incite visceral hatred, provoke a reaction from its victims, and engineer a majoritarian backlash.
There is nothing unambiguous about the CD’s purpose. It was commissioned expressly for the UP elections by the party’s top leadership, which ordered all its content, dictated the revisions, and approved the product at every stage. It’s futile to say the party has “withdrawn” it. The CD is in circulation and has already served part of its purpose: to recapture a virulent anti-Muslim platform and prevent erosion of the BJP’s upper-caste base (from 72 to 50 percent, according to one survey).
The Election Commission has done well to file a First Information Report against the BJP under the ipc and the election law which prohibit/punish resort to inflammatory communal material. It must pursue the case with single-minded determination.
How should citizens understand the BJP’s deplorable conduct in using the CD even while “disowning” it? And how should it be punished, so there’s a deterrent effect?
The Jan Sangh-BJP has always pushed our political system to its outermost limits. The Hindutva mobilisation around the Somnath temple in the 1950s, the sadhus’ storming of Parliament House in the 1960s, the engineering of riots to gain votes in the 1970s, the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign of the mid-1980s culminating in the Babri demolition in 1992, and the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 all subjected the system to maximal stress and shifted the political goalposts to the Right.
Yet, Hindutva’s proponents weren’t penalised for their assaults on democracy. Almost 15 years after the Babri demolition, our courts have failed to bring its perpetrators to book. The murderers of Mumbai and Surat 1992-93 roam free. As do the perpetrators of India’s worst state-assisted communal butchery, in Gujarat.
The BJP was never punished politically for these — certainly not adequately. No prime minister since 1992 has dared to treat the patently illegal temple, erected on dubious religious grounds, as an affront to pluralism. If this speaks of indulgence towards majoritarianism and pandering to sectarian religious sentiment, the failure to punish Narendra Modi is even more distressing. India’s Milosevic now struts about as “development’s” messiah.
Such indulgence has allowed the BJP to become increasingly audacious. Three years ago, it vetoed the appointment of India’s prime minister after having lost the national elections! The BJP is deeply, naturally, duplicitous. It simultaneously expresses regret, and claims credit, for its shocking communal acts. Advani (unconvincingly) says December 6 was the “saddest day” of his life, but justifies the ideology that led to it and claims it removed “an ocular insult” to “Hindu India”. Gujarat “shocked” Vajpayee for a few days, but he was soon back taunting Muslims.
The party is being duplicitous about the CD too. That’s why it’s staging a lurid melodrama by courting arrest. No authority, it claims, can question it — that’s “emergency”.
The EC must not let the BJP off the hook. It must consider its de-recognition if the fir’s charges are established. In any case, it must formally reprimand the BJP and heavily fine it for the CD (itself akin to another one it issued “officially” in December).
More, it should extract an explicit, categorical commitment that the BJP will never resort to communal propaganda, directly or through innuendo, or question anyone’s patriotism on grounds of religion — on pain of de-recognition. The Congress may lack the will to fight the BJP. But the EC is duty-bound to reaffirm constitutional principles and discipline this communal bully. We must demand it succeeds.
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