Dawn.com, 21 December 2009
Congress needs BJP to sustain rightwing politics
by Jawed Naqvi
The secular-communal binary has just been shored up in India with the intent to further consolidate rightwing politics. A leadership tussle has thrown up an even more reactionary change of guard within the main opposition party. On the other hand, a controversial report has been placed before parliament, pretending to placate Muslims but actually providing traction to a more intense communal assertion in national politics.
The objective of both manoeuvres – the appointment of Nitin Gadkari by the RSS as the BJP’s new president and the placing of the Ranganath Mishra Commission report in the Lok Sabha – looks primed to revitalise a flagging bipolar system so that both poles could continue to represent rightwing interests.These interests have been on the ascent in India since the fall of the Soviet Union, a major trading partner and geopolitical anchor. A more immediate point of reference to explain the shift away from the country’s traditional centre-left economics, however, could be the arrival of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as finance minister in 1991.
Shoring up the right-right binary masked as a communal-secular discourse is easy and enticing and it addresses major compulsions. The overtly communal BJP was trounced in the last general elections. Its embarrassing performance in the more recent Maharashtra state polls seriously worried the overtly secular Congress.
Low morale gripping the BJP, reflected in the drastic changes in the party’s leadership last week, was seen as a potential invitation to centre-left rabble-rousers (who are no more than that really) to occupy the opposition space.At a time when the country, led by Prime Minister Singh and the inscrutable Congress high command, is bracing for a structured attack on the homes and hearth of adivasi forest-dwellers on behalf of powerful mining consortiums, it would be disastrous for the nation to have a non-rightwing opposition in place.
Prof Amit Bhaduri, who has been visiting the most vulnerable tribal regions of Chhatisgarh and Orissa, describes the state’s evolving strategy there as a move towards ‘internal colonialism’. It is not a coincidence that the BJP which rules Chhatisgarh and the Congress, the centre, are working in tandem.
So if the poor election results came as a series of heart attacks for the BJP, the consequent exist of Lal Kishan Advani of the Babri mosque notoriety and several others from the party leadership triggered equally turbulent convulsions. Not everyone goes contrite with age. Lots of third-raters go off on pilgrimages, and yet continue with their nefarious pastimes. Haji Mastan comes to mind. He continued to be a smuggler even after saying sorry to God.
The alleged accomplices of Ayodhya have not apologised to anyone in their religious pursuit of a high obscurantist order. They have resorted to equivocation instead. (‘Razing the mosque reflected nationalist upsurge but we didn’t do it.’)
The Liberhan Commission indicted Mr Advani and his partners for the destruction of the nondescript and probably crumbling mosque in 1992. The government in its response to the report has done little except promising more laws to shore up secularism. They can’t touch Advani, it is widely whispered. (Or even Bal Thackeray for that matter, indicted in another report damning the Shiv Sena for mass murder of Muslims, which is collecting dust in government archives.)
That is precisely the approach Dr Singh and his home minister are expected to take on the Mishra report, which promises a lot for Muslims but leaves it to the government whether it would eventually do anything at all about the findings and suggestions. Public relations and image-building is a Congress forte. In a build-up to its last-minute announcement, the Congress pumped up the Mishra report through clever advertising through leaked coverage.
‘After Liberhan, the UPA government is trying to hide another commission’s report because it seems like an even bigger political hot potato,’ wrote one reporter close to the Congress leadership on December 2. The Mishra commission’s recommendations are clear: 15 per cent reservation in jobs and educational institutions, and social sector schemes for Muslims and other minorities.
‘The government is in no position to implement the recommendations without major changes in existing rules and regulations, and that is one reason why it is sitting tight on the report,’ the newspaper claimed.
The National Commission on Religious and Linguistic Minorities was set up on October 29, 2004, under the chairmanship of retired chief justice of India Ranganath Mishra. He submitted the report to the government two-and-a-half-years ago on May 22, 2007.
There is nothing wrong with the report as such and that may be its undoing. It has recommended the inclusion of Muslim and Christian Dalits in the list of scheduled castes/scheduled tribes (SC/STs). This is red rag before the BJP bull.
Justice Mishra was asked to suggest criteria for the identification of socially and economically backward sections among religious and linguistic minorities, and also measures for their welfare, including reservations in education and government employment. He was also asked to suggest necessary constitutional, legal and administrative modalities for the implementation of the commission’s recommendations.
On the educational front, the commission recommended 10pc reservations for Muslims out of the total 15pc for minorities. The remaining 5pc is for the other minorities.
With regard to government jobs, the commission has said that ‘since Muslims are underrepresented and sometimes wholly unrepresented in government employment, they should be regarded as backward in this respect within the meaning of that term as used in Article 16(4) of the constitution, and that 15pc posts in all cadres and grades under the central and state governments should be earmarked for them’. It has made a similar recommendation in respect of social sector schemes.
If job quotas could solve the complex social, economic and political problems of Muslims, Dalits, and tribespeople among others it would be still worthwhile to look at the promise that reports such as Mishra Commission proposals hold. However, going by the less than a happy lot for the Dalits, the most impoverished and socially abused people of India, quotas have a limited role to play in their emancipation if and whenever that happens.
Meanwhile, Mr Gadkari will have dusted out the BJP’s response to the Mishra proposals it gave last year. ‘Minorities in India are entitled to a separate set of rights in relation to their educational rights. The socially and educationally backward are entitled to special rights, which are created. Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are thus entitled to reservations in jobs and the minorities are entitled to special rights to education. The attempt of the UPA is to create a new set of persons who on account of religious conversion to Christianity and Islam would be entitled to both sets of rights,’ says the BJP.
It insists that the Congress government wants to ‘incentivise’ conversion of Dalits to Islam and Christianity. Several states ruled by UPA partners have initiated the process of religion-based reservation. The BJP says such reservations are entirely against the constitutional mechanism. It accuses the UPA of persisting with a divisive policy.
‘The Sachar Commission recommendations constitute the most divisive step ever initiated by a government of independent India. Communal reservations and communal budgeting are a remedy worse than the problem being addressed. The 15pc allocation in the planned expenditure on basis of religion will set a divisive precedent in the country.’ It is in the nature of the beast. The BJP will make those noises, worse it has shown the capacity to back up its noises with reckless street power.
The Congress makes promises to vulnerable communities it knows it cannot and possibly should not be offering to keep. Remember that it was Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao who had promised he would reconstruct the demolished mosque in Ayodhya at its very own site. It would be a laughable idea were it also not a menacing suggestion. Rao retired after handing power to BJP’s Atal Behari Vajpayee. That’s how they work together – the BJP and the Congress. If they mean business, Muslim leaders should consider looking for less deceptive allies. But Muslim leaders are often more callous with their flock than any of the two knackers in this equation.
|
