Daily Times
March 20, 2009
Tangled in tapes
by J Sri Raman
For many in New Delhi, it must be one of the enduring memories around the infamous Emergency, the one Indira Gandhi imposed on India way back in 1975. A friend passed me a magazine called Surya, doing the rounds in all newspaper offices, and I was soon telling him that I had seen nothing quite like that in either in a non-yellow periodical or in national politics.
The issue carried the most candid pictures of a couple in passionate intimacy and the young man locked in embrace with a college-going lass (so the caption told us) was the son of a veteran leader who had just walked out of Indira’s cabinet and raised the standard of revolt against her.
The issue drew notice for another reason as well. It was edited by Maneka Gandhi, known until then only as the Punjabi spouse of Sanjay Gandhi. While Indira’s second son was destroying her image through what are described as “Emergency excesses”, Maneka was trying to damage her rivals with her foray into frothy photojournalism.
Over three decades later, Maneka’s son is whining about being the victim of what may be called video-journalism. Twenty-nine-year-old Varun Gandhi has not been caught with his pants down, but he and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — yes, that was the last resort of a Maneka rejected by her mother-in-law — could not have been exposed more politically.
Indian television channels have been repeating videotaped shots of him addressing a BJP rally in the Pilibhit constituency of Uttar Pradesh, which Maneka has represented so far in Parliament but is leaving for her son to contest in the coming general election. The vitriol spewed by Varun on the minority population of Pilibhit, portrayed as fearsome members of a fifth-column mafia, is really vintage far-right stuff. He only made it worse by rubbing the law on the wrong side and threatening violence against anti-”Hindutva” villains, a folly that more experienced fascists would have eschewed.
The exposure has embarrassed a section in the party, especially the ones that combine their “Hindutva” with high living in the capital’s India International Centre and cocktail circuits. Varun himself, however, has made a valiant effort to appear unfazed. The boy, once projected as the bard of the BJP (next, of course, to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the versifier), has alleged a “conspiracy” against him, even while sounding unapologetic about his offence.
“I never made those remarks,” he says, “the tapes are doctored”. In the same breath, he adds, “Every time someone identifies with Hindus, he is branded communal.”
The party has taken its cue from Varun’s two-pronged counter-offensive. It has fielded its Muslim faces, Shahnawaz Hussain and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi to express controlled fury over the party candidate’s comments. The tapes may be doctored, they say, but still the party “dissociates” itself from their message of anti-minorityism.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, the party’s preferred face for couch potatoes, declares a similar dissociation from the taped anti-Muslim tirade. Former party president Venkaiah Naidu, not quite the BJP’s man for the media, has meanwhile been allowed to defend Varun and disavow any intention to pull him out of the electoral contest.
The “parivar”, the far-right family of which the BJP is the political front, has kept prudently silent. Varun, however, is reported to have been in contact with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) through his election campaign. But vigorous support for Varun in trouble has come from an extended member of the family.
The Shiv Sena of Bal Thackeray has heaped praise on Varun for putting pro-Hindutva valour before poll-time discretion. It has echoed and endorsed his view that “anyone speaking for Hindus is castigated as communal”. The Sena has “advised” the BJP to stand by Varun. Maneka’s son may be the first north Indian in a long while for the Sena to welcome in Mumbai.
This is not the first time that the BJP has been entangled in tapes. It all started in 2001 when the famous Tehelka tapes tripped up the party. Former BJP president Bangaru Laxman never really recovered after the widely viewed tape showing him taking a hundred thousand rupees “for just the beginning, as a New Year gift” from a purported agent of a corporate house seeking a defence contract in return for kickbacks to the party and government leaders.
Two years later, in November 2003, came yet another tape to torment the BJP. Party leader in Chattisgarh Dilip Singh Judeo, then Minister of State for Environment and Forests in the Vajpayee government, accepted money from someone acting as the agent of an Australian firm for a mining licence in Judeo’s mineral-rich tribal majority State. Viewers of the video heard the minister, nursing a drink in a New Delhi hotel room and quipping: “Paisa khuda to nahin, par khuda ki kasam khuda se kam bhi nahin” (Money is not God but, by God, it is no less than God).
We don’t know whether either money or God will help out Varun in this case. But the BJP, aiming at temporal power through temple-related tactics, is unlikely to worry unduly about it. The party knows, after all, that what Varun said in Pilibhit represents its ethos more than the veneer put on it by a Vajpayee and adopted now unconvincingly by an Advani.
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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