The Telegraph, 29 October 2008, Editorial
NO OTHER NAME
No amount of smart talking is going to save the Bharatiya Janata Party embarrassment. The issue is not whether Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur has, or had, connections with the party, or with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or any of the other Hindutva outfits that make up the peripheries of the larger BJP family. Just as irrelevant, in the larger picture, is the relationship of a Congress minister and his son to the sadhvi’s mentor. The fact that Ms Thakur, arrested for her alleged involvement in the Malegaon blasts together with others, is reported to be associated with the women’s arm of a Hindutva group is enough to puncture the BJP’s propaganda against so-called Islamic terrorism. If the party has used her in its campaigns earlier, it may be all the more embarrassing, but ultimately, the issue is not about the sadhvi at an individual or personal, or even political, level. Her arrest and that of her colleagues challenge the BJP’s approach to terrorism and its association of religion with politics that it makes its unique selling point.
Since 9/11 and George W. Bush’s declared war against terror, the BJP had found it much easier to inject conviction into its propaganda. It is now too disconcerted even to claim retaliatory righteousness on the part of Hindutva groups, although state units of these groups are hoping for a more aggressive stance from the party. Terrorism and murder are exactly and only that; they cannot be given the colours of religion simply because no religion supports the killing of the innocent. That may be a hard lesson to learn because it takes the stuffing out of the propaganda that, even implicitly, targets particular communities. To harp on such polarities is always dangerous, especially in a country like India, where extremist violence springs from many sources, ethnic, economic and ideological. On the one hand, communally divisive rhetoric makes other types of terrorism either invisible or less important. On the other, it sets out to alienate and indirectly threaten whole segments of the Indian population in the name of religion, thus undermining the secular ideal on which the republic was built. Fanatics and killers exist in every group and every community. They are simply criminals and murderers, they can have no other identity once they have violated the law of the land.
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