Some of the Sangh Parivar's ploys are likely to prove harmful for the nation: review of the Constitution, the nuclear tests and the Gujarat order on the RSS.

Evidently, the best Constitution so far as the Parivar is concerned is one which will disenfranchise the minorities and lay down that only a Hindu Brahmin can be the President who will rule the country in the manner of the all powerful kings of the Vedic age. But since this is not possible in Kalyug, the BJP is opting for the next best alternative - that of hinting ... that the present Constitution has proved fallible and needs to be changed.

This is typical of all fascist ... outfits which pretend that the past policies were all wrong since they were formulated by anti-national, or anti-people groups. Now that the "patriots" are in charge, all the mistakes will be set right. Even if they are not, at least the process of re-examination will create a sense of uneasiness which will be helpful to the ultra-right cause.

An obvious absence of a mandate has not stopped the party from initiating changes with unforeseeable consequences. Neither the party, nor the opportunistic political carpet-baggers who are its allies, are bothered if their partisan pursuits undermine the national interest. Nothing is more evident about their recklessness than the nuclear tests which have now proved to be more beneficial to Pakistan than to India ....

Even the mad mullahs of Pakistan now know that India's huge conventional superiority has been nullified by the Chagtai Hills explosions. They have made it much easier for Pakistan to step up its proxy war in Kashmir for it knows that India will never be able to repeat the threat it posed to Lahore in 1965. While Pakistan ... is now clearly more secure and more belligerent ... Pokhran II has not made India any more secure against its potential enemy No. 1 ... China ...

Obviously, the BJP did not consider the nuclear scene in its totality while deciding on Pokhran II. All that it was interested in was to boost its sagging image by holding the tests, thereby recklessly undermining India's carefully crafted nuclear policy of ambiguity which ... The BJP was pursuing its own interest instead of the nation's.

The RSS is not quite the innocent social outfit which it pretends to be. Its central role has been to create an atmosphere of hate against minorities.

Commenting on its methods, the Justice Venugopal Commission, which inquired into the Kanyakumari riots of 1982, said: "The RSS adopts a militant and aggressive attitude and sets itself up as the champion of what it considers to be the rights of the Hindus against minorities. It has taken upon itself the task to teach the minority their place and if they are not willing to learn their place, to teach them a lesson .... The RSS methodology for provoking communal violence is: (a) rousing communication feelings in the majority community by the propaganda the Christians are not. loyal citizens of this country; (deepening the fear in the majority community by a clever propaganda that the population of the minorities increasing and that of the Hindus decreasing; (infiltrating into the administration and inducing the members of the civil and police services to adopt and develop communal attitudes.

None of this has ever been a secret. As Rajeshwar Dayal noted in his autobiography, A Life of Our Times, when he was home secretary in UP in the years immediately after Independence, he came across "incontrovertible evidence of a dastardly conspiracy to create a communal holocaust throughout western districts of the province. The trunks were crammed with blueprints of great accuracy and professionalism of every town and village in that vast area, prominently marking out the Muslim localities and habitations .... Timely raids conducted on the premises of the RSS had brought the massive conspiracy to light."

In addition to fiddling with the Constitution and the nuclear policy, besides giving a Helping hand to the RSS, the BJP is known to be tampering with the school  level may have an even more poisonous impact than the other tamperings ...

Strangely enough, there is not much concern about this slow sabotage from within. While the Congress seems to have woken up belatedly about the (Gujarat) government's machinations, the others, including the Left, have made no more than routine protests. One reason for this reluctance to recognise any danger is perhaps that nothing of this kind has ever been seriously attempted before by any political party ... The fascists, however, mean business. It will be a serious mistake, therefore, not to take their attempts to undermine the system seriously and take preventive measures. (Source: The Hindustan Times, 7 February, 2000)

Saffronisation of Administration

Editorial, The Greater Kashmir, 7 Feb., 2000

.. Indian politics has already been saffronised and the Prime Minister's stand may result in saffronisation of the administration as well ...

.. Gujarat Government and even the Prime Minister cannot afford to annoy the Sangh Parivar brigade. The Gujarat employees will join RSS to 'strengthen' secularism, and above all, it is in the best interests of the nation if staunch Hindus, or in plain words, the members of the RSS run the administration.

Garimella Subramaniam On Lessons from the BJP's Success

It must be emphasised that it is the BJP's predisposition to go out and seek allies, maintaining a deliberate ambivalence towards the Hindutva ideology, that made Vajpayee emerge with a back-to-back victory nearly three decades after Indira Gandhi's in 1971. Thanks to this rather convenient marriage between national jingoism and regionalism, even though there is no substantial improvement in the BJP's own individual tally, ... it will be able, as it did in its previous term, to pursue its agenda without hiccups from the allies ... Therein lies the danger for the future of democracy in the country, and unless the Left and the Congress cast themselves in a new mould, it is most unlikely that the regional allies by themselves will be able to or even want to contain the BJP.

.. Practically every single recognised political party in the country was pitted against the BJP just three years ago. The very same BJP has since acquired allies across ideological divisions. The fact that it dared to go into this election without a separate manifesto is enough indication of its readiness to shed the traditional umbrella image of the dominant partner in the coalition and instead want to be seen as an equal in the joint venture that was the NDA ...

.. The very basic tenet of democratic and of coalition politics in particular is that of negotiating among  conflicting interests in the framework of pluralistic competitive party politics. The BJP has been able to demonstrate this spirit in abundance in dealing with parties which have very little in common with it ... The party has adopted a no-holds-barred approach in acquiring allies and thus has been able to create a facade of openness in dealing with them, whereas the Congress and the communists could not agree upon a minimum programme to counter the BJP. At another level, the BJP has been successful over the years in alluring the majority religious community to think as a majority vis-a-vis the religious minorities. The Congress and the left have failed to tell the majority why there are always good democratic (not altruistic) reasons not to allow the BJP to exploit their majority identity; that majoritarianism is essentially an instrument of authoritarian rule. (Source: The Hindu, 22 October, 1999)

Harsh Sethi On BJP & Religio-Cultural Intolerance

Co-terminus with the growth of the BJP as a political force, we have witnessed a steady and dangerous tide of intolerance, more so when the issue in question can be given a religio-cultural twist .. the controvers/ over Husain; Mehta's earlier film, Fire ... or the slapping of criminal charges against the editor and publisher of the India Magazine for reproducing on its cover a miniature of Radha and Krishna making love - all these incidents and many others, have resulted in a fierce battle over not just "limits to representation" but who enjoys the right (not just the power) to play cultural and moral censor.

(At no) stage of our history as a people, culture and civilisation, there has ever been a unanimity over cultural representation ... Equally we (have never) accorded legitimacy to a dispensation where only designated persons/institutions were permitted to define what is true ... Tragically, the situation is a little more complex than one of Hindu nationalists/saffronites seeking to acquire and exercise hegemony over cultural representation ... Interpretations of religious, social, cultural, even political events and personalities will always be contested. This is as it should be. Arguments about ostensible hurt should not be permitted to become impediments in the way of evolving procedures and conventions to resolve differences. It is here that we, both as a state and a society, seem to be failing.

B.G. Deshmukh On Coalition Strategies

In 1999, Maharashtra has bluntly brought to the notice of the Congress high command that if the party is to survive at all, it has to give up its ... position that it alone can form a stable government at the Centre ... It is hoped that the Congress high command would now seriously reconsider its views on coalition government at the Centre also. The Congress high command should be realistic. There is no way that the Congress can get more than 250 seats in the Lok Sabha. If, therefore, it has to form a government, it has to have a coalition strategy to get the remaining at least 130 seats ..

.As things stand at present, their coalition partners can be only the Leftists, AIADMK and one section of the Janata Dal (JD). The Leftists are hard bargainers and have a penchant for exercising power without responsibility. They would, therefore, opt not to join the government and instead support it from the outside in order to extract the maximum price from the Congress. We have all seen the AIADMK in action during the last BJP-led government and to imagine that it will have changed drastically would be foolish. The JD or the third force just does not exist.

The prospects before the Cong. are thus not very bright. Maharashtra is going to be a test case for the Congress. Everybody is going to watch as to whether the Congress has really changed its mindset and is now willing to accept that the only viable proposition is that of coalition politics ... The coalition government in Maharashtra is, therefore, going to be uncomfortable unless the Congress comes out and clearly states that it would not admit any NCP MLA into the Congress. The NCP would always be on its guard in this regard because of the previous reputation of the Congress. The NCP should, therefore, make it very clear that it would come out of the government if even one of its MLAs is admitted by the Congress into its party ... There is no alternative before it at the Centre and in many states if it is to survive at all as a major political party. (Source: The Times of India, 10 November, 1999)