(Daily Times
December 10, 2007)
The Modi-India match
by J Sri Raman
Yes, I, too, would have preferred to write about Madhuri Dixit and her comeback bid with ‘Aaja Nachle’, which is proving to be no blockbuster. Or about the return of the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry, despite the difficulty spectators had keeping their eyes open during one of the dullest ever Test matches played at Eden Gardens. But, alas and alack, I will have to pass on these far more delicious subjects for the political fortunes of Narendra Modi, who has only danced to fascist tunes and who never played cricket (in the sense of that metaphor of pre-match-fixing days).
The comeback attempt of Modi is of much greater and graver concern to the country as a whole. Gujarat is to go the polls and the two-phase election to the State Assembly (on December 11 and 16) can prove a turning point in India’s politics.
The event will follow within a week of a historic date of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On December 6, 1992, the country was a horrified witness to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, preceded and followed by bloodshed in many parts of India. A decade later came the BJP’s next tryst with destiny. Modi presided over an anti-minority pogrom in the early months of 2002, a communal carnage with no post-Partition parallel in the subcontinent.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid put the BJP on the path to power in New Delhi. The pogrom under Modi came as a reminder and a reassertion of the roots of the party and the ‘parivar’ (the far-right ‘family’), of a terrible force that terms in power at the Centre and in some States alone could not tame.
The BJP could not repeat the demolition — in the temple cities of Mathura and Varanasi as it once planned. Ayodhya was to remain a one-election issue. The party could not “repeat” Gujarat again, either, as it threatened to do. There is no doubt, however, about the decisive role played by both events in the BJP’s history of divisive politics.
It is well known that, after riding to power through the Ayodhya route, the BJP adopted a “mask” in the form of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (as a prominent ‘parivar’ ideologue once described him). The party also sought to return to power with the electoral slogan of a “shining India”. The makeover efforts misfired. No one expected Modi to attempt such a metamorphosis.
A surprise, however, awaited Modi-watchers a couple of months ago. Appearing at the annual Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in October, the Gujarat Chief Minister, as much a product of the infamous Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse, declared himself a disciple of the Father of the Nation.
Interpretations of the intriguing move were quick to follow. The most optimistic of these was that the grassroots-level politician had adopted a Gandhian avatar because he sensed a shift in the popular mood that might not have been obvious to others.
Obvious, however, was a pronounced shift in the mood of major sections of the parivar vis-à-vis Modi. Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s “international vice-president” Praveen Toga-dia himself declared a war on Modi. Togadia soon had the open support of major dissident leaders and the Gujarat BJP, including former Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel. All of them agreed that Modi was not only a hated “dictator” but also hostile to Hindutva forces that had put him in power.
The Chief Minister has risen to this challenge as well. Along with his discovery of Gandhi, he has been at pains to display his continuing commitment to the cause of communal fascism, too. With just six days to go for the polls, he hit the headlines by taking credit in public for what a media euphemism calls “a fake encounter killing” or what really amounts to an illegal execution without trial and other such fussy formalities.
At an election rally, Modi roused his anti-minority audience and constituency by recalling the “encounter killing” of alleged terrorist Sohrabuddin Sheikh in 2005. The Gujarat government, under pressure from countrywide public opinion, had to go to court with charges of complicity in the crime by some top-level police officers. The head of the same government, however, roared his approval of the crime at the rally and defiantly asked the rulers in New Delhi to “hang” him if they disapproved of his stand and statement.
Until the moment of writing, Modi has not withdrawn a word of his statement, despite protests from a spectrum of political opinion. He has only desisted from a similar public defence of the alleged murder of Sorahb-uddin’s wife Kausar Bi, whom not even Togadia has accused of terrorism.
The response of the Congress, the main ruling party in New Delhi, to Modi’s comeback bid has, for the most part, been timid and tenuous. Until a couple of weeks ago, the party’s attempt was to avoid the primary issue at stake at all costs. As noted in these columns, the State unit of the Congress was more alarmed at a media exposé of the Chief Minister’s role in the 2002 carnage than Modi himself. The party expected the exposé to benefit Modi politically in the communally polarised State. Congress also seemed ready for a not-so-secret alliance with the BJP dissidents in Gujarat who were castigating Modi for an alleged compromise with a secular camp.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi, however, appeared to signal a turning point by taking on Modi and his main cause frontally right from her first poll rally in the State. But party leaders in Gujarat have not exactly rushed to emulate her example.
Media analysts, meanwhile, have been busy assessing the all-India implications of the outcome of Gujarat’s battle of the ballot. The largest agreement is about what the elections will imply for leadership issues in the two major national parties. A BJP victory, it is broadly agreed, will come as a morale-booster for Lal Krishna Advani, to begin with, and pave the way for the further political advance of Modi, a prime ministerial candidate of the farthest of the far right. A strong Congress showing, it is presumed, will be a shot in the arm for Sonia Gandhi and reinforce sections in the party rooting for a bigger political role for her son Rahul. The more pressing question, of course, will be what Modi’s electoral fortunes will spell for India’s future.
For Modi’s success to match his camp’s ambitions, his comeback will have to be more convincing than Madhuri’s has been. And the Congress will do well to realise that there is no such thing as a drawn political Test.
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’
|
