The Hindu : Politics of rage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 31, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Politics of rage

By Rajmohan Gandhi

One great difference between post-Babri and post-Godhra was that while the Uttar Pradesh Ministry was dismissed after the Masjid's demolition, the Gujarat Ministry was maintained in power and India's leaders praised it.

ESPECIALLY WHEN the pendulum seeks to mesmerise the observer with its swings, India's politics has to be looked at in a wider context and viewed with clear eyes. Angry politics received a worldwide boost following the 9/11 attack and the American reaction to it. The BJP profited from this boost, and subsequent terrorist attacks on Indian soil gave legitimacy to "toughness" in government and politics. Likewise, Pakistan's alliance of Islamic extremists, the MMA, drew encouragement from this global trend. A month before the BJP's triumph in Gujarat, Islamic fundamentalists had captured control over the NWFP, a large chunk of power in Baluchistan, and around 60 seats in Pakistan's National Assembly.

The MMA benefited also from the rise in India of hard Hindutva, even as the latter has profited from fundamentalism across the border. This symbiotic alliance is an old and continuing story. Well before 1940, when the Muslim League articulated its Pakistan demand, the Hindu Mahasabha had declared that India's Hindus and Muslims constituted two nations. Statements to that effect from Hindu nationalists were cited by the League in justification of the Pakistan demand. In turn, Hindu nationalists cited the Pakistan demand as proof of Muslim disloyalty.

Feeding on each other, Muslim nationalism and Hindu nationalism (aided by well-timed interventions from a retreating imperialism) achieved the subcontinent's polarisation in the 1940s and the 1947 Partition, developments that Indian nationalism failed, despite some valiant efforts, to avert. In the Punjab, religious nationalism (Muslim, Hindu and Sikh) as well as communal journalism (also three-sided), created the climate for the massacres of March, August and September 1947 in that great province.

The present-day killers of women and children in Jammu and Kashmir practise a grateful if unspoken alliance with the killers of women and children in Gujarat, and the attackers of temples in Jammu and Kashmir and in Gujarat quietly thank God for the destroyers of mosques and mazhars in Gujarat.

In the spring of 2002, the BJP had finished a poor third in Uttar Pradesh, was found by pollsters to be losing in Gujarat, and could not, in all of India, count more than four State Governments under its direct control, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Jharkhand. Between then and the party's present euphoria lay the Gujarat corpses.

If corpses win elections, why don't power-hungry politicians arrange for more of them? The answer, I suppose, is two-fold. For one thing, many politicians have weak stomachs. They would rather lose an election than climb to office on corpses. Second, corpses do not always win elections. Disrupting daily life, destroying livelihoods and ruining businesses, the politics of corpses may at times send voters running to polling booths to vote for a restoration of calm. This is what seemed to happen after the Babri Masjid demolition. Great excitement had greeted the demolition, but within months the BJP was soundly defeated in Uttar Pradesh.

Ten years down the road, however, destruction seems to have been amply rewarded. Why? Because Gujaratis have harder stomachs? Because liberals and secularists offended Gujaratis with intrusive visits and implied slights? Because Kalyan Singh was incapable of appealing to Hindu gaurav and U.P. pride? Not at all. One great difference between post-Babri and post-Godhra was that while the Uttar Pradesh Ministry was dismissed after the Masjid's demolition, and cases were instituted against the demolitioners, the Gujarat Ministry was maintained in power and India's leaders praised it and its chief.

Bolstered by the prestige of the New Delhi Government and armed with state power in Gujarat, the Narendra Modi Ministry successfully deflected the charge of dereliction of duty and worse. It also, of course, demonised Pakistan, an exercise that some in Pakistan seem determined to make easy for Indians, and sought by implication to demonise Gujarat's Muslims, too, as well as anyone else seeking justice for them.

And it rubbed its hands in delight as some non-Congress secular parties put up their own candidates, which meant a division of the non-Hindutva vote. With these advantages, strategies and good fortune, the BJP won close to 50 per cent of the vote. As against the Congress' tally of around 40 per cent, this was surely an impressive figure, especially considering the down-drag, in most Indian elections, of incumbency. Yet, it still meant, even if we place all Muslim votes in the Congress column, that at least 30 per cent of Hindus voters opted for the Congress.

Despite its intimidatory command over state power, despite the prestige that Messrs. Vajpayee and Advani lent to the Gujarat Ministry, and despite the campaign that a vote for the Congress was in effect a vote for Pervez Musharraf, the leader of an "enemy" country allegedly sponsoring terrorism against India in general and Gujarat in particular, a substantial percentage of Gujarat's Hindus voted against the BJP.

Observers say that in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh incumbency will injure the Congress; the canopy of the New Delhi Government will cover every BJP candidate; and surely the Congress and the other secular parties will want to repeat history by dividing the non-BJP vote. Finally, there can always be the politics of corpses. Remember, I have been told, Doda is next-door to Himachal Pradesh.

But, given the symbiosis we have noted, the politics of corpses will also aid radicalism and terrorism elsewhere on the subcontinent, including in sections of India's Muslims. In turn this could give a further fillip to Hindu militancy, and the subcontinent could see a larger-scale replication of the frightening Hamas/Sharon symbiosis of the Middle East.

Given such a tempting (and threatening) possibility, it will be interesting to see how Messrs Vajpayee and Advani react to the politics of corpses. Searing verses regarding it have flowed from the pen of Atal Behari the poet, but plain unmistakable prose in rebuke of the politics of corpses is yet to emerge from the lips of the Prime Minister.

Meanwhile we should remind ourselves of the contradictions in both Hindutva and Islamism. To seek to Islamise the politics of a Muslim-majority nation is an unfailing way of dividing that nation, for visions of an Islamic polity conflict with one another with murderous sharpness, and the MMA is a house of war under a truce for the time being. As for the Hindutva notion that a true Indian is one to whom India is both homeland and holy land, it forces every NRI Hindu in America to choose between being anti-American by treating India as his or her holy land, or being anti-Hindu by not doing so.

Other contradictions are nearer at hand. What happens to the significant Muslim share of the vote that gave Mayawati's BSP its large number of Uttar Pradesh MLAs? And what will happen to the BJP's game-plan of enlisting Christian support in the Northeastern States if, as is being predicted, it pursues in Chhattisgarh the strategy, evidently helpful in Gujarat, of fomenting anti-Christian tribal anger?

Which brings us to the hazards of the politics of rage. Since a central strategy of Hindutva in Gujarat was to fuel anti-Muslim passions in tribals, Dalits and OBCs, thereby also protecting the Hindu high castes from the anger of these groups, we should be ready for the consequences of implementing such a strategy nationwide.

Messrs Vajpayee and Advani and, across the border, Gen. Musharraf and the political leadership headed by Jamali, not to mention the Mufti in Srinagar or the Congress' Sonia Gandhi, and, above all, the people of the subcontinent face quite a challenge.

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