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Disturbing Trend

 
The stupendous victory for Narendra Modi and for Bharatiya Janatha Party in the recent Gujarat elections is highly disturbing to the secular minds. What is even more disturbing is the silence of BJP partners in NDA government who claim themselves to be secular parties. Especially, the opportunistic action of DMK and TDP is dangerous to the country than BJP as such. Jayalalithaa earned the good will of BJP by passing the anti-conversion law and moving closer to BJP day by day. The mammoth victory for BJP in Gujarat has shaken even the fundamental commitment to secularism that Congress has. One can sense this from the lukewarm commitment Congress demonstrated in the Gujarat electioneering. Right from the beginning Congress was not very convinced of its own election strategy. Finally they yielded to BJP's strategy and fell into their wide spread net. At the end of the day, Congress went soft on secularism fearing that they would lose the majority votes. They also tried to identify themselves with majority Hindus. In a very calculated way, BJP has been projecting the concept of secularism as the support to minorities.

 
In the past one year, Congress and the other secular parties allowed BJP to succeed in its mischievous attempt to taint secularism as anti-Hindus. Thus, from the position of attacking religious divide that BJP has been propagating, Congress and the other secular parties have been pushed to the defensive position where they had to defend their commitment to secularism. When Congress was caught on this unexpected pitch, it simply surrendered itself. That is what had happened in the recent Gujarat election. Otherwise Modi and BJP could not have withstood the strong anti-incumbency factor that is fueled by the poor handling of the earthquake relief measures, water scarcity across the State especially in Kutch and Saurashtra, the retardation in industrial development, declining foreign investment, the raising communal hatred (recall the Godhra incident), and the break in law and order and growing terrorism (recall the terrorist attack in the worshiping place).

 
People simply got swayed by the emotions. Whenever the subjects fall prey to emotions, they can not get a good governance. Politicians have understood the trick of the trade as how to play with the emotions of the people. I have seen youngsters who do not even pray at home or go to temple are now identifying themselves as the guardians of Hindu religion and the agents of Hindutva force. It is said that a bad politician or a party gets to power not because misguided and ignorant people vote for them but because the well-informed and knowledgeable people do not go to polling booths.

 
One may say that this country is a Hindu country right from the beginning and there is nothing wrong in pushing Hindutva agenda. This is not a valid argument and the simple fact is that majority of Indians were Hindus for many many centuries but India was never a theocratic State. She has an amazing potential to imbibe and absorb different cultures and thereby gain strength. That is what the history shows. As is always the case with any destructionist activity, seeding the communal hatred in the nation and dividing the country along the communal lines is turning out to be an easy task. But it does not mean that it a constructive or a justifiable task.

 
The human temptation is to side with the successful events or support an activity that is easy to succeed so that one can feel warmth about his existence. The momentary pleasures and successes always sway the human mind.

 
Only the toughminds which is toughened by strong convictions withstand such an emotional assault or teasing. It is time for these secular minded people to consolidate their actions and oppose this disturbing trend with the doubled effort. On one hand the Prime Minister Vajpayee reiterates that Hindutva would not be used as the political card in the forthcoming elections whereas with the same vigour BJP President Venkaiah Naidu repeatedly proclaims that Hindutva card would be used in the ensuing elections also. He very smartly uses the term "Gujarat experiment" in place of Hindutva and anybody who has an advanced brain than the amoeba would know what Mr. Venkaiah Naidu is talking about. He has recently said that "the BJP is not going to be apologetic or ashamed of its agenda and the Gujarat experiment shall be replicated in all the States before the next elections to reach the target of 300 seats". The only thing in his statement that deserves support is the attack on "minoritism". The concept of "minoritism" nurtured in a calculated way by Congress all these years for cheap political gains is proving to be a big assault on our secularism.

 
In the recent election what has happened is that the Congress was made to swallow its own bad deeds of the past (read support to "minoritism") and if anyone interprets it as the support to "majoritism", they are grossly wrong. If minoritism has taken such a beating at the husting, the defeat for majoritism would even more be pathetic. But it is a costly experiment to pursue majoritism to see its fate as by then it would have caused irreparable damage to the fabric of our nation. The majoritism or Hindutva is projected as "cultural nationalism". They explain that India would never be turned into a "Hindu Rashtra" and whatever is happening is only to infuse cultural nationalism. If one carefully analyses the strategy pursued by the Hindu fundamentalists in the last two decades, it does not require any extra brain power to decode these explanations and get to the bottom of these explanations. The only way that these divisive actions can be tackled is not by fighting only at the political ground but they have to be resisted and countered at the social and cultural level. As the editorial of "The Hindu" advised, "all the political parties and people who have committed to preserve our secular democracy should take on the divisive Hindutva campaign at all levels - political, social, and cultural spheres".

 
As a first step in the political fight, the least that is expected of Congress is to prove its blemishless commitment to secularism in all possible ways before the next set of assembly elections. Commitment to secularism does not mean that one should go to the extent of discussing our internal matters in a foreign land and criticize the way the nation conducts itself in the recent past (as Ms Sonia Gandhi did recently). In a way, this action of Sonia has angered the secular Hindus also and made them to vote against Congress. The least that the so called secular allies of BJP in NDA should do is to extract an unequivocal commitment to secularism from the Prime Minister and his party colleagues in the government failing which they should not be part of NDA even for a minute. Is DMK President Mr. Karunanidhi listening? He should stop doing lip service to secularism by just criticizing Sankaracharya and the Hindu religion as a whole. This will only be viewed as his pastime hobby and at the most an act of appeasing the minorities.

 
For Sangh Parivar and BJP - One can fool few people all the time, some people for sometime, but not all the people all the time. As long as some people carry the conviction for secular India that much your job is difficult. There the arithmetic does not mean anything. Remember Saint Ramanujam brought social revolution not in modern democratic India but in medieval India when there were strong religious and castiest forces countered him.

 
Although the 'Modi brand' of Hindutva is not merely unfortunate but extremely ominous for the country's future and hence a matter of grave concern for the millions of people who are committed to the liberal democratic values enshrined in the Constitution, let us not ignore the fact that the strength carried by the constructive forces is many orders of magnitude higher than the destructive elements.

 
Such is the strength of the constructive forces! To realize the full potential of the constructive forces, all that has to happen is "consolidation". Let us start this ensuing New Year with this optimism!

Best wishes to all the readers of this column and to their families and friends. .


 

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