The Hindu : The lessons of Gujarat

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Wednesday, Dec 18, 2002

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The lessons of Gujarat

By Neera Chandhoke

If the Congress has to take on the BJP in the coming days, it has to once again transform itself into a mass movement.

INDIANS COMMITTED to democracy in and for the country are naturally numbed by the election results in Gujarat. That the BJP would win was expected, that it would reap a bitter harvest out of the politics of hate that it had systematically sowed in the State had also been foreseen. It is the scale of the victory that has confounded right-thinking Indians, who had hoped that sanity would prevail over communal passions. What is more worrying is that some leaders are proclaiming with great glee that the Gujarat experiment will be extended to the rest of the country in the days to come. What we see is the promise of a generalisation of a crisis.

Yet moments of crisis are not necessarily bad things, not if the hard lessons that they signify are read and learnt by those who care about the country and about its people. What are these lessons? If we ponder there is only one lesson that we need to learn: a party's ascent to power is almost always based on sustained political mobilisation among the people.

Whether this mobilisation is for a good cause or bad is a question that gains importance in itself, but political mobilisation there must be. Therefore, logically, when a political party loses touch with the grassroots, when the organisation of the party lapses into inertia and paralysis, when that party stops mobilising the masses, the fate of the party becomes chancy as well as contingent.

Consider this, the Congress came to power in independent India riding on the back as it were of the freedom movement, which it had led and guided during much of the history of our anti-colonial struggle. However, by the 1980s both the movement and the party had atrophied, simply because its leaders lost touch with popular opinion and busied themselves solely with the politics of rank populism. Ironically, at the same time another movement loomed on the horizon of Indian politics, the movement for Hindutva. And by the end of the 1990s, the BJP had come to power at the Centre albeit in alliance with other parties.

Political commentators were of the opinion that the BJP would be tamed simply because the exigencies of holding a ramshackle coalition together would necessarily force it to comply with the moderate stream of Indian politics. But as we found early this year, the Hindutva agenda had certainly not been tamed in States where the BJP ruled, notably Gujarat.

For, the stage for the post-Godhra communal riots had been set some time ago. The people of the State after all found it possible to participate in a sustained pogrom of the minorities without any compunction, without indeed a furrow showing on their collective brow.

There was nothing spontaneous about this popular participation in the pogrom.

For, if there is one thing that the cadres of the Sangh Parivar had done by the time Godhra happened, it was to reach out to every man and woman, every class, every tribe and every caste, in order to disseminate the message of Hindutva. People in large parts of India had been mobilised once again, but not for the noble cause of struggling against oppression. Now they were mobilised for the purpose of making the country majoritarian and fascist.

This mobilisation took three forms. One, as reports tell us, Ministers of the Narendra Modi Government carefully studied the strategy of the CPI (M) in West Bengal to learn how that party had managed to stay consistently in power for a lengthy period of time. The Sangh Parivar hijacked the strategy of the CPI (M) without of course the progressive politics of the latter, and applied it to Gujarat.

The second strategy of the Sangh Parivar was to learn from the way Christian missionaries had managed to establish themselves in tribal areas. In a systematic manner, the Sangh Parivar proceeded to set up institutions that were parallel to the ones the missionaries had set up — in education, health and in organisations that extend economic aid to the tribals in times of need. And when people who are otherwise disadvantaged are offered basic facilities they require for the management of their everyday lives, it is not surprising that they embrace the politics that comes along with these advantages.

Third, we would do well to remember that the members of the Sangh Parivar notably the cadres of the RSS happen to be committed social activists. In times of natural or man-made disasters members of the Parivar are the first to reach the spot, offering help to the victims and looking after the injured or the homeless. The members of the RSS simply generate what has been called social capital even as they construct solidarity networks in times in crisis. And thus the Sangh Parivar expands its constituency continuously through the extension of those very bonds that mark the joint family: caring, helping and nurturing. Investment in social capital reaps rich dividends, for the Sangh Parivar can always count on the people to vote for its candidates during elections, or even when it wants to storm cinema houses which show what the Parivar considers anti-patriotic films.

That all this is done for narrow xenophobic ends is more than obvious, and the flip side is that it is the same members of the Sangh Parivar who disseminate hate messages and encourage people to participate in the harassment of the minorities. Their politics certainly is neither desirable nor worthy of emulation. But we have to acknowledge that in contrast to other parties, notably the Congress, the members of the Parivar are entangled with the lives of ordinary people. Whether we like it or not they are simply seen as people with a mission.

On the other hand, the Congress is popularly perceived as a party which is enmeshed in the politics of the durbar. The days when the Congress was a mass movement are long over. Today it relies on either local leaders who are reported to possess some mantra for winning elections, or on the charisma of the national leader. It is not as if the Congress has not won elections, it is after all ruling in something like 15 States. However, the scale of the victory of the BJP in terms of both numbers as well as the voting percentages has something to teach the Congress.

The lesson is simply this: if it has to take on the BJP in the coming days, it has to once again transform itself into a mass movement. For this the party has to do three things, one, re-activate its members and mobilise them along a cause, two, pay immediate attention to the party's organisation, and three, effect a paradigm shift in Indian politics.

The third is most important, for it is not difficult to see that for many Congressmen the way to victory may lie in a soft Hindutva. But along that way lies ruin and devastation. Therefore, the Congress has once again to think through the specificities of the situation and decide on how to transfer people's attention from the politics of identities to the politics of ideas.

One good move may be to launch a movement for primary education, or health, or for something that would give a purpose to the party members as well as put them in touch with the grassroots. But the party must be seen as doing something for the people; it must be seen as relevant to their lives. The Congress has to stop being complacent.

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