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A Sinister gameplan

FROM THE DAY the BJP national executive decided over three months ago (in Goa) to back its Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, to the hilt and gave him the go-ahead for a snap poll, the State Assembly was under the perpetual threat of dissolution. So when the axe finally fell on Friday, cutting short the House's tenure by eight months, it came as no surprise. In fact, if Mr. Modi had his way, the denouement might have come much earlier, anxious as he and the party were to capitalise on the so-called `strong Hindu wave' the Sangh Parivar elements have helped generate across the State in the aftermath of the Godhra carnage. But the BJP leadership apparently found it expedient to wait for the Presidential elections to be over at least for two reasons. One was, of course, that the arithmetic in the electoral college dictated that the party did not risk depriving itself of a chunk of its vote base. The other, possibly, was its acute consciousness that, given the sort of sordid picture high-powered institutions such as the National Human Rights Commission had been painting of the ground situation and the severe indictments that were passed against the Modi administration, there was no way the Election Commission could agree to holding an election.

The Presidential election over, Mr. Modi and his party central leadership lost no time in making the first moves to operationalise their gameplan of exploiting for narrow political gains the sharp and animus-driven communal divide (engineered by the likes of the VHP and the Bajrang Dal post-Godhra) before it lost its `cutting edge'. True, there has been significant improvement on the law and order front, with organised violence having practically ceased. But, qualitatively speaking, normality connotes much more than absence of violence and what obtains now in the State can, by no stretch of imagination, be said to justify any claim of `return to normality' judged especially by the conditions conducive for free and fair polls. Whatever has been attempted by the Modi regime over the past few months, mostly under pressure of independent public opinion and from statutory bodies such as the NHRC, by way of restoring normality is nothing but a cosmetic or make-believe exercise. A glaring example is, of course, the one provided by the coercive and intimidatory ways employed to make the riot victims leave the relief camps so that the number of such camps as well as of those yet to be `resettled' is brought down. There is an element of perversity in the logic behind the claim that the violence-free Jagannath Yatra (on July 12) was in itself a conclusive proof of normality.

Given this context and the brazen display of brute majoritarianism that characterised the riots post-Godhra, no situation can be really conducive for free and fair elections so long as certain key areas of concern for the minority community are not addressed in all seriousness and sincerity. Broadly, this requires that the Government's commitment to the rule of law is demonstrably established, the pervasive sense of insecurity prevailing among the minorities is removed and they are made to feel confident that they can indeed vote freely and without fear. In the absence of credible initiatives on this front, the poll process is bound to be vitiated. Typical of Mr. Modi's — and by extension the BJP's — sinister motivation is that the Assembly's dissolution was effected at a time and in a manner that did not allow much leeway for the Election Commission. But the very fact that a political party in power, after having done everything to traumatise the minority community, could feel exultant over the consolidation of majority vote and seek to exploit it for a fresh mandate — which is tantamount to seeking to legitimatise its black deeds — is an affront to the democratic values cherished by a civil society anchored in a secular and multi-cultural ethos.

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• A Sinister gameplan
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• The qasbah culture — I
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• Out in the open
• What J&K needs
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