The Hindu : Rhetoric and reality

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 30, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Rhetoric and reality

AS AN EXPRESSION of sentiment, what the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has had to say at the NDA rally last Friday about the communal riots that rocked Gujarat following the Godhra carnage early this year does reflect the sense of anguish shared universally by all those who have even a modicum of respect for basic human values, even if a sense of outrage might not be as discernible in his remarks. Mr. Vajpayee is absolutely right when he says the Gujarat riots are "not easy to forget" and when he calls for a resolve to see that they do not recur. In fact, the Prime Minister and his deputy, L. K. Advani, have tended to make such deprecatory references about those happenings off and on, whenever the occasion or the venue demanded an articulation of that kind, and this generally has come about on foreign soil. More recently, Mr. Vajpayee during his latest visit to the U.S. was frank enough to say that a situation should not be created at home which "forced us to bow our heads in shame before others (abroad)", and this significantly was in the course of his interaction with a delegation of Indian Muslims who were unhappy with the way the Narendra Modi Government handled the communal conflagration and addressed the relief and rehabilitation concerns of the riot victims, with the minorities among them singled out for a raw deal.

All these pious declarations of disapproval, however, fail to carry any conviction for the simple reason that the ground reality — as reflected in the sort of backing and encouragement Mr. Modi has been getting from the top brass of the BJP, whether at the organisational or the governmental level — shows up how farcical they are. Not only is Mr. Modi, the man widely acknowledged to be the one primarily responsible for the traumatisation of the minority community (as the Hindutva elements ran amuck), backed to the hilt by the BJP and flaunted as the party's new mascot but his so-called success in the communal polarisation between the Hindus and the Muslims — the `fruit' of what Mr. Vajpayee admits, occasionally though, is a "national shame" — is sought to be capitalised upon electorally in a cynical fashion. To ensure that the party is not deprived of the `advantage' of having its own man at the helm during the elections, he is allowed to continue as caretaker Chief Minister even beyond the termination of the (dissolved) Assembly's five-year tenure. The fact that Mr. Modi, who should have been asked to go after the post-Godhra mayhem, remains undisturbed and that even the most outrageous of his remarks against Muslims, which came in torrents as he criss-crossed the State in the name of a `Gaurav Yatra', invites no more than a feigned frown or a muted murmur of dissent speaks volumes, and in a telling manner, about the `earnestness' behind the denunciation or regret the Prime Minister and others in the BJP choose occasionally to articulate in respect of the Gujarat riots.

If all this makes for a shadow boxing of sorts within the BJP, the story is no different where the players are the likes of Ashok Singhal and Praveen Togadia from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad who have embarked on a no-holds-barred hate campaign targeting the minorities and with a sharp focus on the coming Gujarat Assembly polls, determined as the Sangh Parivar is to make a success of the Modi-inspired `Hindutva model'. Another reprehensible and equally worrying aspect of the evolving scenario is the debasement of the political culture these Hindutva protagonists have brought about by their highly derogatory attacks on the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, with reference to her Italian origin. If the quality of the political discourse in the days to come, as Gujarat gets fully into election mode, is not to deteriorate further, Mr. Vajpayee would need to do much more — by way of exercising his official and moral authority — than just making pious calls for "decorum" and "civilised language".

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