BJP for Godmen in Govt: Advani's letter to a 1000 religious 'leaders'

Outlook Magazine, 27 april 2009


Enter, Hindu Ayatollahs
Advani's missive to sadhus portends a turn towards darkness .........

by Neelabh Mishra

Be prepared to make some room for armchair economists. If elected prime minister, L.K. Advani of the God's Own Party might like to consult ash-smeared Naga Sadhus on how to fight the recession. And in Advani's promised dispensation, the Shankaracharya's views on India's foreign policy and strategic options would vie for the government's attention with the advice of experts in these areas. Please do not take this as the usual liberal hyperbole about the swinging Hindutva bluster of the prime ministerial aspirant and his BJP.

This is because Advani has written to over 1,000 religious leaders, most of them Vishwa Hindu Parishad-affiliated sadhus/sants, earnestly assuring them: "It will be my endeavour (as prime minister) to seek on a regular basis the guidance of spiritual leaders of all denominations on major challenges and issues facing the nation. For this, we shall evolve a suitable consultative mechanism."

In thus seeking the 'support' of assorted godmen for his campaign, Advani has gone beyond just vague assurances of informal consultations with the sadhu samaj, as some apologetic BJP functionaries have tried to spin it so as not to alarm middle-class opinions. In promising to "evolve a suitable consultative mechanism", Advani has proposed an institutional arrangement, something like the National Advisory Council set up by the UPA government under the chairpersonship of Sonia Gandhi and later abandoned in the wake of the Office of Profit controversy.

It is a pity that the party that had castigated a consultative mechanism to seek expert non-governmental advice from qualified activists and academics—some with long records of engagement with development issues—has no qualms in proposing a parody like this. Religious leaders, whatever else their accomplishments, simply have unproven abilities on these complex issues. It is impossible to divine who Advani is fooling—the VHP's sadhu-sant following, gullible and devout voters or himself. The Congress and the Left have of course criticised Advani's letter on the ground that it violates the secular character of the Constitution by brazenly mixing religion and politics.

While the criticism is valid, the BJP would hope to wish it away by showing the disconnect between the secularists and a generally religious India and exploit the gap to its political advantage. But it forgets simple truths: even a deeply devout farmer does not consult a priest or sadhu on which crops to sow or which fertiliser or pesticide to use. And while an industrialist might consult an astrologer for an auspicious date for launching a new venture, he or she would never dream of soliciting advice on running the ebusiness from the family priest. They necessarily operate on a clean separation of categories. Thus even the average, religious Indian voter might regard the BJP leader's proposal with some ridicule. It was not for nothing that the most genuinely religious of Indian leaders, Gandhi, had said he would have insisted on a secular constitution even if there had been no religious minorities left in the country.

As the election campaign has progressed, the BJP has increasingly raised its Hindutva pitch, probably trying to humour its core RSS support base. It defended the indefensible misdemeanour of Varun Gandhi, and the party manifesto resurrected core Hindutva issues like the Ram temple, Article 370 and the Ram Setu, which were earlier denied prominence for fear of alienating the BJP's allies in the NDA.

While issues perpetuating a sectarian schism in the polity along Hindu-Muslim or Hindu-Christian lines have been central to the BJP-RSS ideology of Hindu nationhood, its use of religious symbolism for political mobilisation was not unregulated.The RSS-BJP kept religious and temporal issues under strict segregation: for instance, corruption or national security would never be melded with, say, the Ram temple. These would be used as separate nodes of mobilisation altogether. But these days, the BJP seeks religious endorsement for temporal issues. For instance, Baba Ramdev backed Advani's call to retrieve Indian black money from Swiss banks, and religious leaders can hope to be regularly consulted on other important issues. The BJP's old goal of a sectarian nationhood has taken on a pronounced theocratic hue, a retrogressive step from relative modernity to medievalism.

While blatantly fortifying its extreme positions, the BJP no longer cares about losing its allies or attracting new ones who lie outside the Hindutva fold. Is it a disdain born of supreme political confidence? Or a sense of deep resignation? In its attempted Hanuman leap of Hindutva, the BJP should mind the political chasm before it.