Narendra Modi’s astute polemics

Modi’s political shrewdness to club Lohia, Upadhyay is polemic offensive against Lohiaites like Samajwadi Party chief.

If urban and semi-urban areas are a decisive factor in the sixteenth parliamentary polls next year, the next federal government in India will be one of the National Democratic Alliance, led by the ‘Hindu comprador right’, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as characterised by the Senegalese political economist Samir Amin. And Narendra Modi, now chief minister of Gujarat, will move into the shoes of Dr Manmohan Singh as prime minister. And he has the constitutional and democratic right to be enthroned.

Nonetheless, going by past experience, the trump card lies with the rural voters, as 70 per cent of the 725-million-large electorate is rural. Psephologists, some large media houses and some market research companies will dish out projections about the outcome in the 2014 polls and make money, even though all is set to end up in a damp squib.

My interest lies elsewhere, namely, Modi’s ideological ostentation. Speaking at a rally in Hyderabad, he listed three greatest men of the 20^th century — Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia and Deendayal Upadhyay — responsible for rebuilding India. India’s first minister for home affairs Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, in a letter on August 18, 1948, addressed to Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Hindu Mahasabha president at the time of assassination of Gandhi, wrote: “There is no doubt in my mind the extreme section of the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in this conspiracy. The activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) constituted a clear threat to the existence of the government and the state.” He also stated therein, “our reports do confirm that as a result of the activities of these two bodies, particularly the former, an atmosphere was created in the country in which such a ghastly tragedy became possible”. Interestingly, Modi-backers extol him as chhote Sardar — a smaller version of Patel, ‘iron man’. The RSS and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, later mutated into the BJP, contested the accusation arguing that on January 30, 1948, the Mahatma-killer, Nathuram Godse, was no more in the RSS, the mother body of the BJP and all saffron set-ups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal , storm-troopers of which made the Gujarat mega-riot successful.

But why does Modi take the name of Gandhi? In 1980, the first president of the BJP, Atal Behari Vajpayee, floated the idea of ‘Gandhian Socialism’, obviously to pit it against everything Nehruvian, particularly his concept of ‘socialistic pattern’. But the RSS and its subordinate outfits such as the VHP never uttered Gandhian Socialism. Modi rakes it up to create confusion among the masses supporting the president of the Indian National Congress and chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance.

For a student of political theory, the more interesting references are to Dr RM Lohia, eminent social thinker of the Gandhi-Nehru era and the ideological mentor socialists who comprised the think tank of Jaya Prakash Narain and his battle for ousting Indira Gandhi before and during the Emergency (1975-77). Lohia had built the basis for ending the Nehruvian political economy and polity through an opportunist slogan of anti-Congressism after the demise of Nehru in 1964 to bring the socialists and the BJS together. Modi’s political shrewdness to club Lohia and Upadhyay is a polemical offensive against Lohiaites like the Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav whose party has a strong influence in UP and will elect 80-odd MPs to the 542-member lower house of parliament and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose success stories include challenging the urban-corporate hoopla of the BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate. The saffron nominee’s oratory is full of such verbiage that confuses the masses following his adversaries. But he knows well that ideas of Gandhi or Lohia are not in his agenda.

The Gujarat riot in 2002 under Modi’s hegemony was a rehearsal of ‘theo-fascist terror’ . The oratorical skill mesmerises the footloose ‘intermediate strata’, especially the ‘salaried bourgeoisie’. The extravagant campaign for Modi, unprecedented in India, fits into the ‘politico-bureaucrat-tycoon combine’ with ‘saffro-Nazis’ as foot soldiers.

India is in a quagmire of a sanguinary uncertainty.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2013.

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