KG Suresh
A section of the country’s intelligentsia, including the media, is back to its old game of pitting the BJP Government against the Sangh parivar, projecting the latter as a fringe element out to sabotage the development agenda of the Government and the Prime Minister and impose its Hindutva ideology on the country.
This is an encore of what was witnessed during the National Democratic Alliance Government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee, a dyed-in-the-wool Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh man, much like Modi, was projected as the ‘right man in the wrong party’; the secularist who was besieged by communal forces, the vikas purush whose development agenda was under attack from the Saffron fraternity. It would not be an exaggeration to state that indeed, some BJP leaders, particularly those who did not come from a parivar background, fell prey to this propaganda and reacted, much to the glee of the party’s political and ideological opponents and rivals.
After failing in their attempts to stall the Modi juggernaut in the Lok Sabha election, these drawing room intellectuals, including some ‘well-meaning friends and sympathisers of the BJP’, have now chosen to project Modi as the development man, whose path is being obstructed by the ‘loony fringe’.In the process, these intellectuals, who have over the past decades learned to survive under all regimes by running with the hare and hunting with the hound, have exhibited their total ignorance not only of both Modi and the Sangh parivar but also for the mandate of the 2014 election.
They don’t seem to realise or are just feigning ignorance, that the landslide verdict was not for development alone. It was as much for the ideology of Modi and what the BJP stood for. If development alone could deliver, then why did the BJP fail to make a comeback in 2004 despite its stellar performance, prompting L. K Advani to state that development alone does not deliver? It was because the Vajpayee-led regime, for whatever reasons including coalition compulsions, was seen by the majority of its supporters as having deviated from the ideological path.
The BJP’s landslide victory in the Lok Sabha poll, therefore, was as much a reflection of the wide acceptance of Modi as a pro-development national leader, as much as it was a rejection of the prevailing discourse on secularism, hitherto considered ‘politically correct’. While the preservation of the country’s composite heritage is close to every Indian’s heart, what is beyond comprehension is the manner in which successive Congress Governments went out of the way to woo the minorities, only with an eye on their vote bank. Had these Congress Governments been sincere in their approach towards the Muslims, the Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee would not have painted such a grim picture of the plight of the community, with the worst sufferers residing in the Congress and the communist-ruled States.
Instead, the ruling party then concentrated on gimmicks and gestures, which had little to do with the mass of the community: Subsidy for Haj (which went against the tenets of Islam), Iftar parties, tokenist appointments in government etc. The most pernicious of them was the suggestion for communal reservations, which in the first place had sown the seeds of the country’s partition decades back. Perhaps, in no democracy elsewhere in the world, the majority community was so ignored to the extent that the Prime Minister had the audacity to tell the country that the minorities had the first right over the nation’s resources.
The Congress was pursuing these policies under the misconception that the Hindus would always remain a deeply divided society on caste and linguistic lines, and nothing could unite them. Hence, Hindus were seen as Brahmins, Kshatriyas, OBCs, Vaishyas and Dalits, who could be managed through quotas and sops.
But the majority of the Hindus were slowly realising how secularism had turned into a hollow political slogan. It became a tool to prevent the BJP from coming to power. Anyone who aligned with the BJP, became communal, but even if a former RSS man like Shankersinh Vaghela or former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, whose Government was dismissed for the demolition of the disputed structure at Ayodhya, broke ranks with the BJP, he became secular.
The definition of secularism, thus, became very flexible and a synonym for opportunism. Lok Janshakti Party chief Ram Vilas Paswan’s return to the NDA fold after exiting from it post-Gujarat violence, and Nitish Kumar’s exit from the NDA owing to personal ambitious after remaining loyal to the alliance for 11 years after the 2002 violence, only reinforced the hollowness of the highly abused political term.
In Modi, the majority community saw a man who did not divide communities but spoke for all Indians. He did not address any particular community. He did not sport the religious symbols of any particular community just to please others. He appeared to believe in substance than symbolism. Thus, the 2014 mandate was an outright rejection of the concept of secularism advocated by the Left and the Left-of-Centre political parties.
Whether it is drawing curtains on the capital’s Iftar circuit or calling for the enactment of an anti-conversion law, the Modi Government has shown that it is as committed to the party’s core ideology as it is to development. Some tokenism on the part of the BJP Government could have won it a couple of seats in Kashmir, but it was ideology alone which got it mass support in Jammu and catapulted it into a position of either becoming the king or the kingmaker. In its latest discourse, the aforementioned section of the intelligentsia is seeking to project aberrations as ideology and development as divorced from political philosophy.
The Sangh parivar has been there when neither the BJP nor its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, existed. It has been advocating its ideology, doing its work across a wide spectrum and expanding its reach all through these years, irrespective of the party in power. It is ridiculous that just because a BJP Government is in power, the parivar is expected to bring to a halt all its activities, which in the first place facilitated the growth and success of an ideologically driven party. Politics is only a small part of the larger Sangh vision and mission to motivate an unorganised society to overcome its selfishness and work unitedly for the larger good of the country and the world.