Fooling the Hindu votebank

The BJP told us the Congress only fools Muslims. As a Hindu, I think that is how I feel about the BJP today.

There are the obvious ways to read the friction between Lal Krishna Advani and Narendra Damodardas Modi in the Bharatiya Janata Party. One is to say that this is a tussle between a young turk and an old man who still aspires to be prime minister. The other is to say that this is a tussle between extremists and moderates — the funny thing is to see Advani as the champion of the moderates. But for Sushma Swaraj, he is alone in that camp. It seems that the hardliners want to project Modi as a symbol of return to the BJP’s Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) agenda, whereas Advani thinks the Vajpayee-like strategy of keeping Hindutva low would pay better electoral dividends.

In 1980, Advani gave an interview to Panchjanya, an organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In this interview he said, “... in India, a party based on ideology can at the most come to power in a small area. It cannot win the confidence of the entire country ... The appeal (of the party) increased to the extent the ideology got diluted. Wherever the ideology was strong, its appeal got diminished.”

In other words, the moderate-extremist tensions in the BJP is play acting. They are trying to confuse us by playing good cop and bad cop. How conscious this strategy is, is explained by how well thought out it is in Advani’s mind — and that is how the original hardliner can become a moderate!

Not that Narendra Modi is not alive to the power of being a chameleon. In an interview some weeks ago, he was asked if he was a Hindu nationalist. He replied that he was a Hindu and a nationalist and thus he saw nothing wrong in calling himself a Hindu nationalist. How very smart! In one sentence, Narendra bhai told us that he had two identities and they forged into one in his being. If you simply say nationalism, it is deemed that you are talking about Indian nationalism. If you say Hindu nationalism, it is deemed you are talking about making India a Hindu state. If you complained about Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism, his supporters could turn around and say that all he said was that he is a Hindu and a nationalist. They would add that your problem with that is that he is not ‘ashamed’ of calling himself a Hindu, unlike ‘you bloody secularists’! Thus, even while championing Hindu nationalism, they can pretend to be victims of a secularist, supposedly an anti-Hindu ideology.

Questioning the Congress party’s secularism is how Advani made the BJP mainstream. Growing up in the ’90s one constantly heard about the Congress party’s appeasement of the Muslim vote bank. Why did they ban Satanic Verses to appease the mullahs? What about freedom of speech? Why are they nullifying a court verdict granting a Muslim woman alimony? If they are secular, why do they spend taxpayers’ money subsidising Hajj for Muslims? Why can’t Hindus get their Ram Mandir ’back’?

For these reasons, Advani said the Congress brand of secularism was pseudo secularism. So I thought the BJP was the real secular party — the party of righteous truth. But then I saw how the BJP junked the Ram Mandir agenda to form a coalition government. It has only used the north Indian Hindu upper-caste vote bank to come to power. I saw how Modi looked the other way in 2002, then used the pogrom against Muslims to become electorally strong and politically unassailable. I saw how the Muslims say they don’t want the Hajj subsidy and how none of the non-pseudo secularists never complain about the government spending hundreds of crores of rupees in organising the Kumbh Mela. I saw how the BJP made the hanging of Afzal Guru an election issue but the Narendra Modi government is not asking the courts to give the death sentence to his former minister Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, convicted of the Naroda Patiya massacre in Gujarat in 2002.

The BJP told us the Congress only fools Muslims, it doesn’t mean them well. As a Hindu, I think that is how I feel about the BJP today.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2013.

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