(The Tribune
May 5, 2007)
Not by de-recognition
BJP’s CD calls for a bolder response
by J. Sri Raman
TO derecognise or not to derecognise — that is not the question. It, certainly, is not the real issue raised by the infamous compact disc (CD), which records the unwritten manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the ongoing Assembly elections in the country’s most populous and therefore politically most important State of Uttar Pradesh.
At the time of writing, the Election Commission has reserved its ruling on the issue. It has done so after hearing the legal luminaries doubling as the leaders of the BJP and the Congress, besides others. The former, who leave all crude propaganda to compact discs and similar other devices, have taken a lofty stand against the commission deciding questions of ideology like secularism. They have also taken the technical plea that a party cannot be derecognised for such a minor delinquency as violation of the non-enforceable model code of conduct. The Congress, for its part, has combined its demand for derecognition of its main rival at the national level to one for a public apology for the offending disc.
The contents of the disc, meanwhile, have received far wider dissemination than the cadre of the BJP and the “parivar” (the far-right “family”) could have given them in the sprawling State. For those who take an elevated view of our electoral exercises and disregard sordid details such as found in reports on the disc, it presents issues of fundamental importance to the party in a dramatic format.
It depicts the threat from a terrorist minority in diverse and dire forms. Without mumbling about “members of a certain community”, as “pseudo-secularists” may do, the disc has identifiable Muslims impersonating Hindus and committing heinous crimes and sins like killing cows and stealing girls of the majority community. It also talks of the Muslims engaging in rapid reproduction in order to reduce the Hindus to a minority. And, of course, it tags them as the “terrorists” who
threaten India.
Given the poisonous potency of the package, the mention of the Babri Masjid demolition would appear to be its only milk-and-water part. The immediate response of the BJP to the revelation of the contents of the CD, released officially, was to disown it and attribute it to outside conspirators. After its chief-ministerial candidate, Mr. Kalyan Singh, spoke up in defence of the disc (“nothing wrong with it”), the party has also moved to the aggressive mode. Elder non-statesman L. K. Advani even saw “an Emergency-type situation” developing as a result of the demand for action on the disc!
The party-political debate may continue until the cows come home (unless ambushed by those minority miscreants). Some of the basic facts about the BJP’s poll propaganda, however, are yet to figure in the debate, and unlikely to do so.
The first of these facts is that the disc really says nothing different or new. It only uses a new technology to repeat the traditional poll-time message of the “parivar”. No reporter, who has covered any election campaign of the BJP or its parent Jan Sangh at the grassroots, can really be shocked at the electronic version of the same. Election after election, strident calls for arms against the “enemies within” have been issued in street-corner rallies, without provoking so much as a mention of any model code of conduct.
Another basic fact, which media apologists for the BJP are trying hard to fudge, is that the disc’s contents are not just a crude version of the party’s policies. A “liberal vision of democracy”, according to this line of defence, demands that the disgust at the disc should not be allowed to obfuscate the serious issues it poses, even if in an inelegant manner. The argument cannot be more absurd.
It is the party’s policy, its propaganda that represents a crude distortion — or communalisation — of serious issues before the country. Nobody can deny, for example, that terrorism is indeed a serious issue, but it is only communalised when presented as nothing but a product of pampered “minorityism”. Even cow protection can be propagated as the need to preserve milch cattle, as done by Mahatma Gandhi who blamed Indians as a whole for neglecting this national resource. Or it can be communalised, as done by the disc and devotees of Godse, by portraying the Muslims as indulging in a massacre of cows just for some “jihadi” fun.
(It is hard to see any serious issue behind the dramatic scene in the disc that depicts some Muslims having non-“jihadi” fun with a Hindu girl. But, the party propagandists may see it as the “masala”, the spice, needed to sell the party’s serious message.”)
Just as the medium is the message in modern advertising, crudity is indeed the content of such propaganda. What devices like this disc are designed to promote is a debate that generates not mere heat, but murderous hate. The BJP remembers how the Babri Masjid demolition and its bloody trail helped transform it from a two-member party in the Lok Sabha into the main Opposition. The party is also proud of the way it used a pogrom to polarise the vote and score a major electoral victory in Mr Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. It is trying a similar track in UP.
More absurd than other arguments in defence of the disc and the BJP is the claim that equates such a rude, utterly uncultured campaign with “cultural nationalism”. If the disc has little to do with culture, the divisive propaganda has even less to do with a nationalism that sees a need for the Indian people’s unity. The anti-minorityism that finds an obscene display in the disc is actually a policy against the interests of India’s majority in any but the sectarian, religious sense.
It is a doubtful if the disc will lead to the BJP’s de-recognition. Even if the party faces some other legal action, it will have little effect on the electoral campaigns of the “parivar”. Mr Balasaheb Thackeray of the Shiv Sena was disenfranchised for six years for his communally inflammatory speeches during a Maharashtra Assembly byelection campaign in 1987. Can anyone claim that this turned the Fuehrer of the country’s financial capital into a practitioner of more tolerant politics?
Not legal derecognition of the party, but a clear political recognition of its ideological character is what the contents of the BJP’s disc call for. No such recognition is evident, alas, in the Congress counter-campaign, the main highlight of which in UP has been a bratty boast about a former Prime Minister’s role in “breaking Pakistan”.
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