NATIONAL POLITICS
C.P. Bhambhri on Anti-Secular Agenda of the BJP
Swaran Jayanti Yatra of L.K. Advani has proved that the BJP evolves its strategies of political mobilisation by making a clever use of Hindu religious symbols and carefully selected historical events and personalities with a view to consolidate the so-called Hindu Rashtra.
The BJP-led State Government of Rajasthan organised massive celebrations on June 18, 1997 to mark the 421st anniversary of the battle of Haldi Ghati. The BJP appropriates history and deftly uses and misuses it for political purposes, and Maharana Pratap is projected as a great Hindu patriot who opposed the oppressive Muslim rule of Emperor Akbar. Chatrapati Shivaji also occupies a place of pride in the BJP historiography because he also fought against the Muslim invaders of Hindu India.
Cultural symbols and important historical personalities play a significant role in political mobilisation because all social groups have their historical memories and it is essential to sensitise masses in democracy that their leaders are not a distant elite but participants in a common cultural way of life. Yatra in India has special significance and Gandhiji delinked yatra from religious connotations and fully used it for secular mobilisation. The salt satyagraha, Dandi march and a marathon procession undertaken by every newly-elected Congress president or even Gandhi's daily prayer meetings were a mechanism to reach the common man for strengthening the struggle for India's independence.
The BJP Shila Pujan and Ram Janambhoomi yatra mobilised the Hindus to take revenge against the Muslim ruler who had humiliated him by destroying the so-called Ram temple and constructed a mosque.
In spite of serious problems in separating cultural practices from religion in India, the BJP, RSS, VHP and other allied organisations, without any shadow of doubt, are using culture and history of India to promote the concept of a Hindu nation which was a victim of Muslim rulers and their purpose is to consolidate Hinduism around a specific religious ethos selectively chosen by political leaders.
The political agenda of the BJP is fundamentally different from the agenda laid down by the Constitution makers and the BJP is questioning all the pillars of the Indian constitutional, democratic and secular state. The BJP has appropriated the history of 50 years of Indian Independence to show that the country has followed a fundamentally flawed system of secular democracy.
The BJP is a negation of all the basic values of independent India. First, the BJP believes in militarised nationalism and its pronouncements on Pakistan are always articulated in a vocabulary where a message is conveyed to the Muslims in India that Your Muslim Country is a danger to the Indian security. The BJP's opposition to the special status given to Jammu and Kashmir is also based on its interpretation of the Kashmir problem as a Hindu versus Muslim dispute.
Second, the BJP's militarised concept of Hindu Nationalism is also reflected when it champions the nuclearization of Indian security. The possession of nuclear power is equated with assertive Hinduism which suffered defeats in the past because the Hindus did not glorify militarism.
Thirdly, the BJP believes in a strong state which can be effectively led by a President and not by a multi-party parliamentary political executive. The BJP stands for the replacement of parliamentary democracy by strong Presidential form.
Fourthly, Indians will be celebrating 50 years of completing a difficult journey of maintaining a pluralist democratic political system on the basis of respect for diverse socio-cultural groups
The BJP believes that during the last half a century, minorityism has been promoted and the unifying factor of Hindu nationalism has been ignored by the post-independence leadership. Since India's fundamentals have been wrong, the crisis of India cannot be resolved by tinkering with the Constitution.
How can secular India be right when it shows weaknesses towards Muslim Pakistan or Muslims in India or Bangladeshi Muslim migrants in north-east India or Bangladeshi Muslim refugees in Delhi? The BJP hate list of Muslims continues to unify the Hindus against their religious enemy as revealed by Indian history. The BJP will like to rewrite the Constitution for establishing a strong Hindu state. The BJP way of thinking is reflected by projecting Sardar Patel as an "Iron man of modern India" as opposed to the vacillating, ambivalent, pro-Muslim Nehru. The Sangh Parivar has coined historical myths around "great men" who can be projected as militant Hindus in opposition to secular leaders who promoted unity in diversity In Indian politics, the BJP has to be reckoned with as a distinct political formation which is a challenge to all the basic values of a pluralist democratic society. The BJP is not a political party in the ordinary sense of the term. It has a total agenda for rewriting the Constitution, and its mobilizational efforts are not co-terminus with electoral victories or defeats because it is a politico-cultural formation with a strong cadre to propagate Hindu ideology. The BJP will collapse if its ideology ... is successfully challenged by all secular formations.
(Source: The Hindustan Times, 31 July, 1997)
BJP: Vision in Deep Freeze Arati R. Jerath in the Indian Express, 2 August, 1997
The BJP's inertia on the Laloo issue highlights the passivity of its current politics. Despite being the sole occupant of the opposition space against a motely combination of 14 parties dependent on outside support for survival, it has consistently shied away from going on the offensive against the government. Unlike Indira Gandhi, who shrewdly mixed popular agitations with wily backroom manoeuvrings to break the Janata Party, the BJP seems to have left it to fate and the inherent contradictions in the ruling combine to propel it to power.
Its hopes appear to rest solely on a mid-term poll forced by the pulls and pressures of an unstable coalition and the calculation that it can win because a scattered opposition is no match for its superior organisational network in a low voter turnout situation.
The reluctance of the BJP to plunge into mass action stems from its very nature. As a cadre-based party, which upholds organisational discipline and unquestioning obedience as supreme values, it is distinctly uncomfortable with the freewheeling unpredictability of mass politics. Like the Left parties, it lacks the necessary flexibility to deal with populist demands and needs well- defined structures and ideological order for its sanitised brand of politics. But the BJP's experience of political agitations is virtually non-existent.
Significantly, the only time it went out and mobilised people was on a religious issue. The Ayodhya movement was the party's first real attempt at creating a popular mood in its favour and although the motifs were overtly religious, Advani's rath yatra in 1990 had a clear political underpinning as well, which catapulted the BJP to national centre-stage.
Unfortunately for it, the movement collapsed when Babari Masjid came down. A carefully calibrated exercise to lead the party to power on a popular wave ended in disaster because the followers became the leaders and snatched the momentum from the BJP top brass. The demolition of the Mosque on December 6, 1992 not only deprived the Ayodhya movement of its symbol but exposed the BJP's woeful inadequacies in coping with a mass upsurge.
The inability to lead a political campaign on the streets is largely due to the party's total dependence on the RSS for crowd mobilisation. The Sangh has never made any bones about its distaste for politics and while it readily lends its vast network to the BJP at election time for the limited purpose of helping the party to win, it does not want to be dragged into organising political agitations on behalf of the BJP.
The BJP is looking for allies with mass bases so that it can piggyback to power in the next general elections. By floating the concept of a National Democratic Front, the party hopes to woo the regional parties on whose popular support it can finally achieve its dream of ruling from New Delhi. In its efforts to keep potential regional allies happy, however, it seems to have lost sight of the fact that as a national party, it must push its own agenda and rouse public support for its vision, even at the cost of alienating possible coalition partners. Its strategy may, of course, succeed and the country could have a BJP-led conglomeration in power. But in an electoral democracy, there is no substitute for a positive popular mandate borne out of a movement based on a broad political platform. The BJP will first have to understand the dynamics of people's power before it can hope to replace the Congress as the predominant national party.
(Source: The Indian Express, 2 August, 1997)
The Reluctant Sanyasi Editorial, The Times of India, 18 July, 1997
Rare is the politician who embarks on a mass contact drive except at election time. Bharatiya Janata Party president Lal Krishna Advani, along with former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar, can be said to belong to that vanishing breed of political leaders who believe in the virtues of direct contact.
Mr. Advani ... blazed a 15,000-km trail through virtually the length and breadth of the country. His Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra covered all the four political dhams of India - west, south, east and north. Clearly, the mission had a dual purpose: personal and political. The constituency built on the yatra would serve him well, even when he quits the presidentship of the party. At the same time the yatra was intended as an exercise to highlight the weakness of the United Front government at the centre and to broaden the BJP's vote base, especially in those regions where it is weak. After all, the 1990 Ram Rath yatra had helped boost the party's fortunes a great deal, from 11.5 per cent of the vote in 1989 Lok Sabha elections to around 20 per cent in 1991.
And yet, the Ayodhya card seems to have backfired on the party this time around. If not elsewhere in the country, the Rath's journey through Utter Pradesh was accompanied by shrill incantations of Jai Sri Ram and Mandir Wahin Banayenge, which echoed the passions of the kar sevaks, brutally displayed on December 6, 1992. Thus, it is that the BJP, which made fighting corruption and accommodating minority sentiments its major plank in the western, southern and eastern parts of the country, fell to cries of extreme Hindutva as soon as the campaign headed northwards. The Party should have known better than to revert to hardline Hindutva, because, as the results of the recent elections demonstrate, Ayodhya has all but lost its utility as a vote- catching device with the demolition of the Babari Masjid. A future repeat of the Ayodhya card by the BJP may well end as a whimper. The party has to eschew its militant fundamentalist strategy (to) build fresh alliances, including with regional groups. The BJP leadership should realise that in a democracy like India there is no place for a fundamentalist platform - Hindu or Muslim.
