Wages of pseudo-deshbhakti

By Harish Khare

MR. MADAN LAL KHURANA is not exactly the kind of politician who would be taken seriously by the `star-dusted' frivolous media. But he is exactly the kind of politician who quintessentially personifies a very large part of the BJP appeal. In the Jan Sangh days, he helped the party grow out of its near-total identification with Delhi's trading community in the walled city. By now he must have attended over a million mundans, weddings, funerals, bhog ceremonies in Delhi; though his social manners were often unrefined, he nonetheless brought the party in sync with the lower middle classes, especially the aspiring Punjabi segments, way before the upper middle classes and the corporate community adopted Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee as their mascot. And Mr. Khurana was certainly there much before the smoothies and the power-brokers established themselves in the inner cordon of the Vajpayee establishment. It is no surprise then that one saffronite anchorman after another has uncharitably traced Mr. Khurana's angst over `national sovereignty' to his Ministerial homelessness. But the Khurana eruption had to happen, sooner or later. The surprise is that it took so long.

The eruption may have been capped, but it would not do to overlook the fact that he was merely giving expression to the dissonance in the nationalist constituency. Every BJP activist must be disconcerted over the unapologetic manner in which the Vajpayee regime is busy signing away on the dotted lines when it comes to dealing with the outside world, especially the Americans. The distinct deshbhakti to which the BJP ideologues laid exclusive and proprietary claims all these years is suddenly being shown to be counterfeit, though entirely homegrown. The BJP activists cannot be faulted for feeling a bit disoriented because the Vajpayee Government is zealously pursuing the very unhidden agenda for which it calumnised its rivals as lacking in deshbhakti.

There are three promises in the BJP's pre-1998 pseudo-deshbakti agenda - sprucing up the cult of militarisation, bashing up the minorities, and facing down the meddlesome foreigner. A combination of these three psychological promises was used to crank up the nationalist fervour and to position the BJP as the only party capable of protecting disinterestedly our national interest. The only crime of the Madan Lal Khuranas, the K. R. Malkanis, the Dattopant Thengdis is that they have internalised the BJP's pseudo-deshbhakti agenda. Unfortunately for them, it has turned sour in the mouth.

First, the promise of the militarisation project. The nuclear bomb, the threat of a pro-active approach in Jammu and Kashmir, the suggestion to roll back the soft state syndrome, and later the Kargil `victory' were all part of the half-hearted attempts at promoting a new machoistic culture; invocation of the cult of `shakti' and glorification of the armed forces did warm the cockles of the middle classes. The deshbhakti index shot up when the Kargil bodybags were given state funerals in the villages; and, the electoral dividends were quickly encashed in the Lok Sabha election.

But then the BJP constituency has not been given that much cause for satisfaction. Every time the deshbhakts wanted to crow, they felt themselves short-changed by the pseudo-deshbhakts who are manning the Indian Government. The joy of Pokhran II was marred by the Pakistani bomb; all the serenading of the armed forces was rudely interrupted by the sacking of Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat; the triumph in Kargil was followed by the surrender at Kandahar. The deshbhakts noted with dismay that even the anointment of Sardar Patel II as the super-czar of internal security has not deterred the militants in Kashmir; if anything, the situation is getting worse before it will presumably get better. And there is bound to be dissonance in the heart of every deshbhakt every time a Bharatpur happens; what aggravates this dissonance is the official attempt, from the Defence Minister downward, to take recourse to the same circumlocution that the previous regimes reflexively adopted to hide their monumental incompetence and negligence. Much to the dismay of the deshbhakt, Mr. George Fernandes is making even a Mulayam Singh Yadav look like an administrative giant.

The second element in the unhidden pseudo-deshbakti agenda was a promise to show the minorities their place. The call for a national debate on `conversion', the burning of the Staines, the elevation of Dara Singh into a cult figure, the incessant chanting of the ISI menace, etc. were all intended to brow-beat the minorities, even while proclaiming to have put the `contentious' issues on the back-burner. Unfortunately this project too got botched up because of a vigilant opposition and a vigilant media, who refused to be taken in by the wonderful jugalbandhi between the hardliner, fundamentalist RSS and the softliner and moderate Mr. Vajpayee. What must have come as a great disappointment to the BJP deshbhakt was that a presumably nationalist dispensation in New Delhi was unwilling to stand up to the foreign investors and foreign Governments who found distasteful all these verbal and physical assaults on the minorities and their autonomous space.

And, the third element was that in a regime of blue-blooded deshbhakts, India would stand up to the outsiders be it in matters economic or strategic. The BJP cadres' came to internalise the contention that non-BJP Governments and leaders suffered from deshbhakti deficiency. And what is the two-year-old record? The Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister are never tired of patting themselves on the back for bringing the country into the Americans' good books; but the BJP cadres cannot be faulted for hearing a minatory tone when Washington talks down to New Delhi. For the first time the Federal Bureau of Investigation has set up shop in India; had a non-BJP regime succumbed to a step of this kind, Mr. L. K. Advani would have gone into overdrive, loudly protesting the `insult' to India's national honour and sovereignty.

Consequences of these corrosive compromises on the strategic front are not immediately visible, but the result of the `selling' of the nation's interests in the economic field are all too apparent; in fact, in black and white, as pointed out by Mr. Khurana. More than the BJP's nationalist cadres, it must be corporate interests who must be feeling most let down by the Vajpayee regime. After all, in document after document the BJP had argued: ``Liberalisation/globalisation is only a means to an end, the end being the establishment of Indian companies and Indian brands in the world market, not simply the establishment of foreign companies and multinationals in India along with their brands, at the cost of our own brands.'' It was this promise of a deshbhakt regime providing protection to the Indian brands that prompted the Rahul Bajajs and the Ratan Tatas to bankroll the `Vajpayee: Man India Awaits' project. And now when Mr. Khurana accuses the Government of giving in to the American pressure in this matter of removing quantitative restrictions(QRs), the pseudo-deshbhakts reply - through the nameless Commerce Ministry - that they are merely carrying out sincerely and faithfully the agreements entered into by the previous Governments.

Mr. Khurana had to be demonstratively muzzled because he was about to cry that the emperor was indeed without his nationalist clothes. Serious students of Government have known all along that slogans of deshbhakti are no substitute for administrative competence, ethical leadership and political imagination. The BJP establishment is naturally uncomfortable at any outbreak of dissonance. What is more, it is taking a leaf out of the Congress book: a soft personality cult, discouragement of any open debate, prime ministerial superiority over the organisational wing, etc. Mr. Khurana may or may not persist in his `dissidence' but the BJP's nationalist constituency cannot be blamed for feeling cheated at the hands of the pseudo-deshbhakts.

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