BJP's real agenda

SOME commentators have deplored the award of Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, on Hindu Mahasabha founder Madan Mohan Malaviya. But many have welcomed its award to the Sangh Parivar's first Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. They include even Amartya Sen, also a Bharat Ratna and Nobel Laureate, who called Vajpayee a “great statesman”.

The first group is emphatically right—not so much because Malaviya was honoured 69 years after he died, but because the Mahasabha has for a century propagated virulent Hindu-communalism. It now wants to erect statues of Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse.

Malaviya advocated “reconversion” of Muslims and Christians, would accept food and water only from Brahmins, and was devoted to protecting “the sacred thread (janeu) …the Vedas, Puranas, [and] cows”!

Malaviya is regarded as the founder of Banaras Hindu University. But new research shows he was at best a “fringe player”.

The government honoured Malaviya mainly because his grandson Giridhar nominated Modi as Varanasi's Lok Sabha candidate. The idea is also to promote sectarian-Hindutva icons.

What of Vajpayee? He's less extreme. But his intimate relationship with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement led to the Babri mosque's demolition and terrible riots in which thousands perished. Vajpayee was responsible for India's 1998 nuclear tests. This fulfilled a long-term Sangh obsession, but created a dangerous security environment in South Asia.

Communalism legitimised under Vajpayee found its bloodiest expression in the Muslim butchery in Gujarat-2002. Vajpayee criticised Modi for violating “Rajdharma”, but made a U-turn within weeks.

Had Vajpayee himself followed “Rajdharma”, specifically the Constitution, he would have dismissed Modi. Failure to do so paved the way for national-level communal polarisation, which eventually brought Modi to power.

True, after Pokharan, Vajpayee made half-hearted attempts at peace with Pakistan, like the Lahore-Delhi bus. But he allowed the Agra summit to be sabotaged. He also ordered a scary, costly 10-month-long military standoff with Pakistan in 2001-2, which achieved nothing.

Vajpayee failed to free the BJP of the RSS's influence and put it on a moderate path. On every critical occasion, he proved too timid to do the right thing. On balance, he didn't prove a responsible, even if conservative, leader—leave alone a statesman.

The Parivar's functionaries have indulged in hate-speech contrasting ramzadas and haramzadas and in provocative acts including ghar wapsi (“reconversion”). RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat says the minorities are “maal” (goods), stolen by “outsiders”, which Hindus must “recover”.

In this climate, even foreign minister Sushma Swaraj, with a Socialist past, demands the Bhagwad Gita be declared India's “national scripture”. This is incompatible with India's secular Constitution.

At work is the Parivar's concerted campaign to redefine the Indian state as Hindu, and citizenship as something based on religion and culture, not equality within a plural, diverse community.

Modi made a few token, ineffectual noises about restraining Parivar-style hate speech, but his actions suggest the opposite. He refused the opposition's reasonable demand for a statement in Parliament on hate speech—and held up Bills on insurance, land acquisition, etc.

By pushing these measures through ordinances, the government is denigrating Parliament and making democracy dysfunctional.

Hindutva's excesses are drawing protests from businessmen and chambers of commerce. They have been joined by self-styled liberals, many of whom have gone soft on Modi. They contrast the BJP's “economic Right” to its “cultural Right”, and back the first against the second.

They all regard the Parivar's anti-minority campaign as an “aberration” from the “development” agenda (read, pro-business policies), and as a BJP “self-goal”.

They are profoundly mistaken. Contrary to propaganda, Modi wasn't elected on a “development” plank. This was mere sugar-coating on its Hindutva agenda, meant to broaden its appeal to the as-yet-non-communalised middle class. The BJP didn't even claim, as it did earlier, to have distanced itself from the core-agenda.

That agenda was implemented through systematic incitement to communal violence, with 247 recorded incidents in 2013 in Uttar Pradesh alone—from Pratapgarh and Faizabad in the East to Allahabad, Bareilly, Bijnore, Mathura and Bulandshahr, and worst of all, Muzaffarnagar Westwards.

The RSS was drafted into the BJP election campaign with greater intensity and numbers than ever before, backed by the electronic and social media, and bankrolled by Big Money, of the same order as the sums spent in US presidential campaigns.

Hindutva motifs were carefully deployed, as also slogans like “Pink Revolution” (beef exports) to chide Muslims. As journalist Harish Khare puts it in his perceptive new book How Modi Won It, he “succeeded in instigating another Hindu uprising to become Prime Minister”.  

For the Parivar, as for Modi, the top priority isn't economics, but politics—how to deepen and widen Hindutva's influence and ensure its long-term dominance, if necessary by coercion.

If there's a clash between growth (or even the giveaways promised to Big Business) and the Sangh agenda, the Sangh must take precedence—always.

This poses a new challenge to secular-democratic forces, which cannot be mounted solely through rational argument and Parliamentary debate, important as these are. The challenge demands grassroots mobilisation on issues that concern the core-rights of the people threatened by the Hindutva-dominated neoliberal order.

The writer is an eminent Indian Columnist.