On the eve of its ninth anniversary the UPA government
is besieged by scandal and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is under personal
attack from every end of the political spectrum, including from within his own
party. These are the dying embers of a failed ministry and an election is the
only remedy. So we must first attempt to pick through the fog of scam after
scam that engulf our television screens nightly and only then look past the
chaotic immediate to the far ground of the electoral battlefield, our ultimate
concern.
Modi, Rahul, Mulayam, Advani and the rest of the pack of
aspirants have had their chances ebb and flow in recent weeks. But their prime
ministerial ambitions have had to play second fiddle to an astonishing period
of news that has involved everything from a border standoff with China,
tit-for-tat murders of inmates in Pakistan and Indian jails, the Supreme Court
ravaging of the government on the Coalgate cover-up, the Railway Minister
involved in high corruption, the resultant sacking of two senior cabinet
minister after their protector the PM was brutally and publicly cut down to
size by the Congress President. The astrologers blame these events on Saturn’s
presence in Libra, and no doubt there are more than a few politician like the
desperate Pawan Bansal who will resort to such horrid rituals such as
sacrificing a goat in full media glare to appease the gods. Indeed even the PM
found a scapegoat for his troubles in the form of an unrepentant Ashwani Kumar.
How can a political novelist possibly compete with such a
reality as currently exists in sarkari Delhi. The rules of the game in the
political arena have been irrevocably transformed by a lethal combination of
the Right to Information Act, feral television news channels, an aggressive Supreme
Court, and a booming economy being matched by an exponential growth in
opportunities for graft. But India’s politicians seem still to be playing by
the permissive rules of the past, incapable of adapting to a new world, and so
all their shady doings have become transparent to the world. It beggars belief
that so many senior politicians thinks it a good alibi to claim to be blessed
with a family full of genius entrepreneurs in industries that plainly mirror
their ministerial portfolios. Times have changed and voters are angry. Thus,
after nine years in power the UPA government has stalled under the weight of a
lengthy incumbency, accentuated by it owns incompetence and blatant corruption.
No CBI witch-hunts or glitzy PR blitzkrieg like the government’s recently
launched Bharat Nirman campaign, carrying with it the stench of desperation as
it does, are going to make people forgive and forget. It is time for an
election, and for us to continue our foray into the electoral landscape once
again. When election season does arrive at our doorstep in four to nine months
the scams and cover-ups that so intensely cloud our horizon now will become a
part of the larger tapestry of issues that will sway voters and affect the
formation of post-poll coalitions. The communal conundrum is sure to be
foremost in everyone’s thoughts.
There is no greater insult in Indian public life than to be
tarred with the charge of being ‘communal’, even a murder indictment may not be
perceived as being equally damaging to a leader’s electoral prospects. To
explain how this state of affairs came to pass is also to retell the story of
India’s creation and historical experience as a nation-state. The debate about
who and what is communal and secular goes to the core of the argument of what is
India and who is Indian. It is the defining issue of our times and shows no
signs of being displaced from its perch in the foreseeable future. Without
satisfactorily coming to terms with the secular-communal divide, no political
party or leader can hope to rule India with any degree of coherence.
Let’s start at the beginning, as to how the word ‘communal’, generally recognised as a hospitable term for community and inclusiveness in the
English-speaking world outside South Asia, came to take on a sectarian
connotation in our part of the world. The British Raj and its cynical policy of
divide and rule are to blame, initially at least. The Communal Award of 1932
provided separate electorates on the basis of religion, thereby assuring that
division and discord would forever more be equated with the communal. It set
the stage for the partition of India and extension of sectarian strife for
generations into the future. It is the main fault line upon which India’s
polity still rests.
At first there was a bit of confusion in south India
regarding the meaning of the term as there had been an existing communal award
in the form of a 1927 government order dealing with caste-based job reservation
aimed at loosening Brahminical dominance in Madras state. But by the time India
and Pakistan come into existence in 1947 there was no doubting what it meant to
be communal, it was a lesson drenched in the blood of untold masses across the
breadth of the sub-continent. The word embodied a scar to the national psyche.
Equations changed after Independence with the Congress and
Muslim League rivalry giving way to the Congress and the Sangh Parivar. Mahatma
Gandhi’s assassination brought a flashpoint to the new rivalry that continues
to this day with the argument ebbing and flowing with the tides of history. The
Congress Party’s role transformed from being seen as a threat by Indian Muslims
in the pre-partition period to being seen as their protector after partition.
The Emergency and it excesses, particularly strong-arm tactics like forced sterilisations
and slum removal, alienated the Muslims from the party. But by Rajiv Gandhi’s
1984 landslide election win all was well again and they were firmly back inside
the Congress electoral tent.
Meanwhile there was trouble with another minority, the Sikhs,
who the Congress had enraged after Operation Blue Star and riots that followed
the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. A decade of strife
followed before Punjab could be brought back into the stream, but return it
did. In the meantime the forces of Hindutva had found their voice thanks to the
ham-handedness of the Rajiv Gandhi government in its handling of the Ram
Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute. While pandering to the ulema by legislating
to overturn the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgement that awarded maintenance
rights to Muslim women, the government sought to counter accusations of Muslim
appeasement by opening the locks of the disputed site in Ayodhya, hoping to
play the saffron card but not realising they had set in motion forces inimical
to the Congress Party’s own political fortunes. Rajiv Gandhi’s irresponsible
display of pendulum politics left the whole country dizzy.
L.K. Advani found his voice in his Rath Yatra that traversed
the Hindi belt in 1990 as he accused the Congress of propagating
‘pseudo-secular’ policies, finally finding a political phrase that could act as
a worthy rejoinder to the decades of unanswered political taunts. Although
Advani immortalised the word, it is less commonly known that it was Atal Behari
Vajpayee who is said to have coined it in his 1969 piece titled ‘The Bane of
Pseudo-secularism’. Thus ensued a rivalry between the communal and
pseudo-secular, for the first time it seemed like a fair fight and the BJP’s
increasing seat tallies in election after election bore that out. Backed by a
rising tide of support Advani seemed destined for the Prime Minister’s chair.
But the Sangh Parivar overplayed its hand and the demolition of the Babri
Masjid in 1992 took the steam out of the movement as nation-wide riots and the
Bombay bombings that followed in retaliation awoke the country to the dangers
of religious extremism in all its shades.
Nonetheless, in 1996 the BJP found itself the largest party
in the Lok Sabha but politically untouchable and marooned, a pariah to most
other parties. It formed a government that lasted a mere fortnight. The party
realised Hindutva had only brought them halfway to their goal and it would take
a moderating touch to take them the rest of the way. Cometh the hour, cometh the
man, as they say and that’s exactly what happened. Vajpayee gave one of the
great parliamentary speeches of India’s television age, or of any age, when in
a single peroration he reset the political map and how his own party was
perceived by allaying the fears of voters by making a flawlessly delivered
argument for the BJP as a safe pair of hands and the natural party of
governance. Vajpayee single-handedly dragged his party kicking and screaming
towards the respectability of the political centre. He won India’s trust that
day, and became the dominant politician of the land for the next decade,
decisively eclipsing Advani. He ended his speech by announcing his resignation,
saying that the BJP had shown its mettle by fighting its way into the mythical
maze that was the Chakravyuha and would soon enough show how to fight its way
out and return to power. It’s a speech that I often return to, as a way to
remind myself how political rhetoric, properly deployed, can inspire and sway
minds.
Two years later Vajpayee was indeed returned to power at the
head of a broad NDA coalition government. It wasn’t smooth sailing at first but
after the Kargil War the NDA was re-elected in a mid-term election with an
increased majority and the Vajpayee government found its footing. So much so
that I would venture to say that in January 2002 had there been a snap
election, the BJP on its own would have crossed the 200-seat mark. It was the
only period in my adult life that I would have voted for one of the two main
national parties, it would have been a vote for Vajpayee and not for the BJP. A
lot of people felt that way at the time, they trusted the Prime Minister not
his party. But then came the violence in Godhra and riots in Gujarat
thereafter, followed by Vajpayee’s failed attempts to remove Narendra Modi as
Chief Minister of Gujarat. That was the end of the dream, the attempt to
capture the political centre of India. So close, but not to be. Vajpayee would
continue in office for two more years but it was not the same government and he
knew it, almost resigning as Jaswant Singh has previously recounted. If he had
resigned, Vajpayee may still not have triumphed politically but his legacy
would have been unstained and set a precedent no PM has been equal to, that a
leader is known by how he relinquishes office just as much as his conduct
during his stay in power. One of history’s missed opportunities.
So this brings us to our current political scenario where
the Congress and BJP fling charges related to the 1984 and 2002 riots at each
other almost weekly. Each party and its allies try to win nightly debating
point by saying your riot was much worse than our riot. Such is the state of
political discourse in the India of 2013. Comparing the innocent dead from two
politically-motivated massacres that the respective ruling governments oversaw
and both used the same self-exonerating alibi that the bloodshed was an
understandable reaction to an act of terror. As a Sikh who was in Delhi in 1984
which was my introduction to Indian politics as an eight-year-old, and then
again as someone whose political worldview was completely transformed by the
horrendous television pictures and stories of what took place in Gujarat in
2002 propelled me on the path to becoming a political novelist, I can unequivocally
declare that there is no differentiation to be made between riots when
innocents are murdered, raped, burned, mutilated, orphaned. Both riots brought
shame on India and Indians everywhere, but even now the Congress and BJP are
reluctant to accept responsibility for
the blood spilt by their leaders and cadres in the riots.
These differing perceptions and competitive propaganda about
the riots is also reflected in the response of Sikh leaders to the Gujarat
riots and Muslim leaders to the 1984 riots. BJP ally Akali Dal goes missing
when any 2002 Gujarat riot-related court case comes up and similarly the
part-time Congress ally Samajwadi Party goes uncharacteristically mute when
1984 riot-accused Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler burst into the headlines.
Competitive secularism is a game that can only be played if you have a
requisite quota of hypocrisy in the tank. Its this same fixation on sectarian
politics that forces Narendra Modi to avoid skullcaps like the plague and
confess to his biographer with pride that he never ever wears the colour green.
Conversely Congress slavishly panders to Muslims on issues as varied as the
Batla House encounter, religion-based reservation, and Rahul Gandhi’s
continuing obsession with a mythical creature called saffron terror that is
visible only to him and his acolytes. This dance between parties will continue
till the 2014 elections and beyond as Congress tries to brand the BJP communal
in the eyes of prospective allies and the BJP tries to evade that tag by
winning so many seats that the lure of power attracts allies to their cause,
even if the allies have to hold their noses while shaking hands. How the BJP
fares in the coming election only time will tell but without Vajpayee, clearly
irreplaceable, the BJP is struggling to find the right tone. Modi may be an
electoral asset but he does not bring the BJP closer to the political centre,
if anything he may push them further to the right. That’s not how you win
elections or form stable governments. If the BJP does not heed Vajpayee’s
example, it does so at its peril.
Nowadays the cloak of secularism provides the perfect alibi
for every non-NDA party to trot out when caught in an act of loot or blatant
political opportunism. A case in point, corruption-tainted Mulayam and Mayawati
have for years proclaimed their dedication to secularism in order to avoid
talking about how Congress ruthlessly extracted their critical outside support
for the central government with the CBI used as a spear in their backs. To be
secular in modern India is to be beyond the bounds of morality. Indira Gandhi
used the fight against communal forces as one of her excuses during her
infamous and shameful address to the nation on June 26, 1975, as she attempted
to explain why she was declaring Emergency and stomping on her father’s vision
of a democratic India. Just to drive home the point she even thrust the word
‘secular’ into the preamble of the Constitution. Needless to say the secular
principle in its truest form is a non-negotiable part of what India must stand
for, so there is no excuse for the Sangh Parivar’s utterly sectarian ideology
that would leave no room for most minorities to live in India with
self-respect. The Sangh must realise that though Muslims will not vote for the
BJP anytime soon, the Muslim vote in the normal course is as divided as any
other caste or community, unless they feel threatened and then they vote
strategically for the party that assures them of security and the defeat of the
BJP. There is a reason why Maulana Mulayam wears his title with pride. It is in
the electoral interest of the saffron forces to put Hindutva in cold storage
and provide some reassurance to Indian Muslims and Christians. I wouldn’t hold
my breath on this one, though.
Being secular to the Akali Dal in Punjab means to be
pro-Sikh, to the Congress and Samajwadi in Uttar Pradesh it is to be
pro-Muslim, and so on and so forth. To be truly secular is to speak against
religious extremism in all its shades. The sad truth is that there are no
secular parties left in India, the concept died with Pandit Nehru and he had no
ideological heirs. Pandit Nehru, perhaps the most reviled Indian politician
currently, understood something his daughter and grandson forgot, that the
Nehru family itself was left refugees after the British recaptured Delhi in
1857 and wreaked havoc in the city. Which was why Motilal Nehru was born in
Agra in 1861. You could say the carnage of 1984 in Delhi was also the second
death of Jawaharlal Nehru, just as the 2002 riots in Gujarat showed how very
far the land of his birth had strayed from Gandhi’s path. History has shown
that without moral leadership, and left to its own devices, a nation will
revert to its worst self.
A symptom of this skewed perception of religion in India’s polity
is the one issue that no contemporary political party knows how to deal with
and that is relations with Pakistan. There is an impression among the so-called
secular parties like the Congress, Samajwadi Party, and Janata Dal (United)
that talking peace with Pakistan even in the face of terror will safeguard
their Muslim vote at home. On the other side you have the BJP, its Parivar and
not to forget the Shiv Sena whose hawks have yet come to terms with the very
existence of Pakistan even after almost seven decades. But what is more
interesting is how some among them like Advani and Jaswant Singh have tried to
showcase their moderate streaks by bizarrely talking up the supposedly
repentant deathbed pronouncements of
Jinnah, whom I personally consider the villain of the partition story
and no amount of bogus revisionist history is going to change that reality.
Jaswant Singh wrote a sympathetic biography of Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam and
suffered expulsion from party and parivar. Advani paid his respects at Jinnah’s
tomb in Karachi and was soon after forced out of the BJP’s presidency.
So both sides of the secular divide share a warped idea of
how Indian Muslims and their place in India. Neither realise that Pakistan
through its thoroughly dysfunctional history as a failed state is conclusive
evidence proving that the two-nation theory belongs in the ash heap of history
right next to Communism and the Berlin Wall. More than anybody Indian Muslims
realise this reality and for the most part no longer think of themselves in
relation to Pakistan, in fact they yearn
to break out of this enforced marriage of identities thrust upon them by every
secular fundamentalist on a book tour. They want the same thing the rest of
India wants, a chance to live in peace and have their children be part of the
promised Indian dream. Our politicians need to bury Jinnah once and for all.
Political parties in India have a long electoral history of
preying on the insecurities of the populace and winning elections as a result.
The Congress won an unprecedented super-majority in the general election of
1984, and Narendra Modi swept back to power in the Gujarat elections of
end-2002. The bare truth is that the politics of hate pays electoral dividends.
That’s why they do it. Some believe that in the age of television news the
atrocities of 1984 and 2002 cannot be repeated. Maybe not in metropolises like
Ahmedabad and Delhi perhaps, but India is a large country and ancient
animosities linger in innumerable dark and forgotten corners. Last year’s
sectarian clashes in rural Assam also had chilling repercussions in Bangalore
and Mumbai, showing us how new technologies can be used to spread fear and
violence at lightening speed.
We all bear hatred in our hearts born of prejudice, each of
us has a small part within that is a bigot and a hater, it is the part most of
us repress by silently admonishing ourselves when unacceptable feelings well up
involuntarily. Whether we speak of the barbaric events of 1984 in Delhi, 2002
in Gujarat, 2008 in Orissa, or 2012 in Assam, our blood-soaked history is
littered with countless similar atrocities where we the Indian people allowed
these horrible little men, who call themselves political and religious leaders,
access to that weak, insecure, hatred-filled, bigoted corner of our psyches and
thereby ensured that we remain shackled to decades and centuries of contentious
and ulcerous history that should have been wiped away when we started afresh
with a clean slate on August 15, 1947, at the midnight hour when our poet-Prime
Minister so eloquently declared a new beginning for all Indians and a promising
future ahead. Whatever you may or may not think about Jawaharlal Nehru, unlike
Jinnah he spent his life searching for the better angels in his countrymen and
tried to inspire them to better action. He was not perfect, possessing some
grave personality flaws, making more than his share of ghastly mistakes and,
god knows, his last years in office were disastrous, but not since his death
has any Indian Prime Minister really picked up the threads of the India story
and spoken unreservedly in full voice about the principles of tolerance and
strength though unity that above all else form the bedrock of the Indian ideal.
Democracy is about more than winning elections and managing fiscal deficits, it
is about a country’s common purpose as enunciated by its leadership. Indians
are now thirsting for an inclusive and inspirational vision of India fit for
the times.
No leader currently in Indian public life appears up to this
task, at least as far as I can see, so let’s instead identify the qualities
that would allow us to construct a composite of this purely hypothetical
leader. A leader who will be equally at ease wearing a tilak on the forehead or
a skullcap but would not hesitate to put a meddling Shahi Imam or a scheming
Shankaracharya in their place when they tried to infiltrate the political arena
with their medieval mindset. A leader who will accept that overwhelmingly
terror in India is of Jihadi origin but also understand that an unacceptable
proportion of Muslim youths in jail on terror charges are apprehended for no
reason other than the names they bear and how they look. A leader who will take
pride India’s multi-faceted heritage in all its hues but also understand scars
of the past will not heal overnight by themselves and require the careful balm
of rhetoric from the bully pulpit by a Prime Minister able to reach the hearts
and minds of every Indian. A leader, in short, that India deserves and still
awaits.
For these thoughts I fully accept some may think me among
other things communal, pseudo-secular, naïve, insensitive, anti-Congress,
anti-Sangh, and god forbid even a Nehruvian—or New Nehruvian if you please.
Guilty as charged!
The poorer Muslims are, the easier it is for parties like the SP/RJD/CONGRESS to bank their votes. Well read Muslims, the intellectuals and public figures rarely challenge such regressive politics. It is a pity intellectual, creative Muslims – in business, films and the arts – don’t speak up for real secularism. Their silence can be mistaken for complicity. Akhilesh Yadav’s decision to re-examine the cases of jailed Muslims charge-sheeted for terrorism is the latest example of how “secular” parties communalise society for narrow political ends.
ReplyDeleteThe principal culprit: politicians who wrap their communal, divisive policies in the name of secularism. They promise Muslims job quotas and other sops but keep them buried in poverty. They always show them the wrong agenda and harm the cause of Muslims while projecting as their protectors. The result: a community's alienation from the mainstream and a sense of victimhood.
Islam in India is almost as old as Islam itself. The British replaced the decaying Mughal Empire and created new cleavages between India’s communities. Given this history, it is not difficult for chep political and religious leaders to whip up communal sentiment, where none would normally exist, to serve their narrow electoral ends.
Indian politicians have done a painful wrong to the cause of Muslims by treating them as votes rather than a minority needing education and empowerment. Liberal Muslims and Hindus must in one voice condemn political parties which preach secularism but practice communalism. They are the real threats to a plural, peaceful and prosperous India.
Hinduism is the world’s most evolved and tolerant religion. It is so open-ended that it is vulnerable to both internal and external abuse. But men of peace are sometimes taken for granted by those who mistake tolerance for weakness. And so it has been with Hinduism. Its civilizational character – tolerance, generosity and uncritical acceptance of other faiths – has allowed political parties to sell their brand of secularism to enough liberal Hindus and paranoid Muslims to win elections.
However, this trend is rapidly changing as Muslims gain education and lose their false sense of paranoia. Reality meanwhile will dawn on all liberals that they have been dealt a counterfeit hand by secular poseurs.
This can’t continue forever. Those who believe in being Indian first, and everything else second, must take the lead to compress the time period in which modern secularism replaces the fraudulent, toxic variety we have today. So …….
This is such a brilliantly written post.
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