The Hindu : The thin edge of the wedge

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 09, 2003

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The thin edge of the wedge

The BJP sees Karnataka as its gateway to the south. Supriya RoyChowdhury on the party's mobilisational strategies in a region where it has never been in power.

IN CONTRAST to northern India, where the BJP has been in power in several States in the last decade, the south has proved to be much more difficult terrain for the party. It has never won a parliamentary or Assembly seat in Kerala.

In Andhra Pradesh, the triumph of the Telugu Desam Party-BJP alliance in the 1999 elections created a positive context for the first time for the BJP in that State. But, the inherent instability of electoral alliances apart, it must be noted that the success of the TDP-BJP combine was based on the forging of a new social coalition that included the upper and middle castes, and an uneasy collaboration between the upper classes (BJP supporters) and the lower classes (who support the TDP).

The BJP's continued rise in this State would then be limited not only by its ability to sustain an understanding with the TDP, but also by the predominantly regional colour of Andhra Pradesh politics. There are also possibilities of a sharpened rise in class-based radical politics which might turn lower caste/class voters away from such a combine.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP made some inroads in recent elections, in combination with the AIADMK and the DMK at different points in time. The instability of this performance is of course given in the nature of purely opportunistic alliances, which have changed frequently. That apart, the strong regional flavour of Tamil Nadu politics remains in place despite the presence of national parties. Thus, the BJP's inroads in this State too may in fact be fragile.

In Karnataka, the alliance with the JD(U) in the 1999 elections brought little advantage to the BJP, and here too the party's future would be crucially dependent on the kind of alliances it is able to build with more entrenched parties.

As far as the south is concerned, unstable alliances and unevenly evolved social coalitions are likely to undermine the BJP's growth.

Post-Gujarat, the question of communalisation of the electorate for electoral gains is one which cannot be easily dismissed. How real is this threat in south India? This question is relevant because the levels at which a communally divisive ideology can be made to work for the gains of a political party are multiple, both crude and subtle.

Perhaps, an important point to bear in mind in this context is the complex dynamics of communal politics in a democracy. This complexity arises from the fact that democracy, while setting broad boundaries to the extents to which communal politics can be pushed, at the same time has provided this politics with significant manoeuvrability.

Consider, first, the BJP's positioning on Hindutva. To all appearances, there is an ongoing struggle between a more aggressive stance towards the minorities and a greater commitment to militant Hindutva, which outfits such as the VHP and the Bajrang Dal might want, on the one hand, and the more moderate tone that the ruling BJP, as part of a coalition must adopt, on the other.

Seen from a different viewpoint, however, it is this framework that in fact allows the politics of Hindutva to provide a varied menu, consisting of a range of positions on fundamentalism, from the crudely reactionary to the moderate and relatively sophisticated.

And arguably it is this range of positions, which provides the BJP with a far more numerous constituency than a single-headed orthodoxy might have done, in a plural polity. Thus it is that the saffron clad, ash-smeared sant and the suave, urbane professional can drink at the same ideological fountain. Then again, consider, the media, and the BJP's handling of it. It was sections of the media which accomplished the commendable task of highlighting the Gujarat Government's active role in the riots, and its neglect of the victims of the riots. By and large, however, the BJP's response to the critical media has been one of calculated indifference, except on occasions as after the Gujarat elections when the media's supposed misinterpretation and the ruling party's vindication of itself were aggressively highlighted. Apart from these occasions, the critical media's sustained indictment of communal politics is invariably ignored by the Parivar. The fruits of this tactic must be obvious to all. Thus, the Government on the one hand merely tolerates the space in which this critique resounds against itself again and again, and on the other, instead of responding to it, goes about its own task of communal mobilisation with an ever stronger focus.

This absence of response demonstrates the Government's complete unwillingness to participate in a democratic dialogue, and thus it sustains itself merely by using the reins of power.

Finally, democratic politics must have something to do not only with ideology but also with actual governance and delivery on development. On this score, it must be noted, that the BJP's task and its political future is made easier by the phenomenal non-performance of other political parties, many of which are in power in various States.

To the extent that politics in Karnataka, compared to the other three southern States, is less shaped by specifically regional variables, the State is regarded by the BJP in many ways as its gateway to the south. The party's strength in the Assembly has grown in the last decade and a half, and in the current Assembly the BJP has 40 sitting MLAs. While the BJP's earlier appeal in Karnataka was mostly confined to rural and semi-rural areas, the party has now crossed the rural divide, according to a spokesperson. Of the 40 MLAs, 29 are from the rural areas, and the rest from urban constituencies. The BJP's future in the State is looked upon confidently by party members on the calculations of the increasing public disenchantment with S. M. Krishna's Government. The Krishna Government began with considerable political capital, after years of Janata Dal misrule, and reinforced by the Chief Minister's image as techno savvy and development oriented.

This image now lies tarnished, not only by indifferent performance on the routine issues of development, but also by the inept handling of the Cauvery water issue, and the Government's obvious neglect of rural hardships caused by last year's drought.

The most stark instance of mis-governance of the Krishna Government was seen in the kidnap and murder of the former Minister, H. Nagappa, by the smuggler Veerappan. In this single instance, the Government's inability to provide basic rights to life and liberty was highlighted in a manner which would be difficult to erase from public memory. One could, then, think of a hypothetical situation wherein the people of Karnataka, weary of the Congress, and wary of the Janata Dal from previous experience, may opt for the BJP in the next election, in a spirit of cynical misadventure. But the BJP is not counting only on the present Government's downward spiralling image.

In the 1999 Assembly elections the most substantial support for the Congress had come from the lower castes and classes, while the BJP's base remained confined to the Lingayats and other upper castes. In view of the lessons learnt from that election, the party has sought to strengthen its lower caste/class profile in the State.

In this the party is aided by the steadily spreading activities of the RSS in such areas as tribal welfare, through the Vanavasi Kalyana Ashram in Uttara Kannada and Kodagu, as well as welfare activities in slums through organisations such as the Hindu Seva Prathisthan. In these spheres, the line, between social welfare and imparting religious consciousness to resist conversions, is indeed blurred.

The dark underside of this politics must also be seen in overt forms of communalisation that are now occurring with increasing unabashedness.

At the Sufi shrine of Guru Dattarya Baba Budan Swamy Dargah in the Baba Budan Giri range of mountains in Karnataka's Chikmagalur district, Hindus and Muslims have offered worship for centuries. From the early 1990s, the Bajrang Dal, supported by the BJP, the RSS and the VHP, has tried to take control of the shrine to make it exclusively a site for Hindu worship. The BJP's lacklustre performance in the 1999 Assembly elections, took the teeth out of this movement, but efforts are now on to renew the struggle for communalising a place of worship which for centuries has stood as a symbol of communal peace.

In this and other instances, the politics of communalism thus would proceed on the basis of whipping up public emotions on the crudest of religious issues, and to achieve an easy cut along the majority-minority line.

For the politics of secularism, then, the challenge is to produce political weapons that can demolish the myth of the communal divide, and this could only be done by evolving a sturdy politics of welfare that cuts across artificial communal divisions.

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