Can BJP ignore the Sanyasin for long....?

By Uditi Sri

Having treated senior party leaders and also the nation to a fireworks display on the eve of Diwali and later drinking soup and eating dinner with party President L K Advani and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, BJP's firebrand sanyasin leader Uma Bharati left for Kedarnath shrine in the Himalayas on November 11.

Within days of going to the Kedarnath and apparently influenced by the weather there, she appears to be in the process of being the prodigal daughter since she says she considers the two top BJP leaders as "father figures" for her.

Surprisingly, the party too did not throw her out nor fix any timeframe for her suspension keeping the doors open for her return; broad hints are dropped on the latest thinking by Vajpayee himself at his iftar party when he said, "the scope for dialogue is always there".

As if on after thought, in his characteristic style of long pauses, he added: "main nahin keh sakta…kehna muskil hai (I cannot say anything, it is difficult).

Well, it is difficult to say anything that has anything to do with the Sanyasin Bharati.

A year ago, to be precise, on November 10, the sanyasin, as the Indian tabloid media is fond of describing her, she created a tantrum, like the one she has just staged in the party office, at the residence of Vajpayee. He was still the prime minister and senior leaders had assembled at his house to select candidates for assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh.

Uma attended the meeting in her capacity as the helmswoman of the party in Madhya Pradesh. She threw a fit when a local leader proposed for renomination a sitting member, who critical of K N Govindacharya, the ideologue in the dog-house. Govindacharya lost his place in the BJP when he crossed swords with Vajpayee. In fact, he is the author of the soberquiet - mukhota (face mask) - that has stuck to Vajpayee, who loves his liberal image in a hard-line party.

Uma Bharati objected to the 're-nomination' and when her view did not prevail, staged a stormy walk out. She even threatened to stay away from elections if 'that worthy' was given the ticket

As a witness to the high drama I can only say, senior leaders took 40-minutes to cool her down and take her back to the meeting venue. That the person, Babulal Gaur, who faced her ire with his suggestion that day is now her successor in Bhopal as Madhya Pradesh chief minister is a different thing. The point is electoral considerations made the 'Party with a difference' pamper the ego of the mercurial lady because in her they saw a safe bet to take on the redoubtable Digvijay Singh, who is the Congress mascot in the state for over two-decades.

Another factor also went into the BJP calculation, then as of now, and according to an insider, it was the need to limit fight to one platform. "We cannot fight on two fronts - Mayawati (Leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party) and Uma Bharati. Both are temperamental and have the capacity to sway voters. If we rub Uma on the wrong side now, it can cause immense damage (to the party) in the coming Assembly elections in Bihar, Haryana and Jharkhand - where we are virtually fighting with our backs to the wall."

Nevertheless, Wednesday November 10, 2004 would certainly be a day that many a BJP leader would like to forget but would be reminded of it repeatedly thanks to the live telecast of the proceedings of the BJP office bearers meeting with Bharati storming out. What a scene it was with Advani dumb founded, with shock lit large on Vajpayee face and literally everyone including the garrulous Venkaiah Naidu squirming but unable to dare to stand up and be counted as 'people with a difference'.

What a dialogue Uma Bharati delivered and what punches she pulled. Read what she said that day that made everyone awestruck in the party and hang their disciplined heads in shame: "People seated here give off-the-record briefings, which make headlines. To protect our honour, we have to speak on the record. If we are going to talk about indiscipline, let's discuss this as well. There are four or five who do this. They are Rajya Sabha members, and have no work, because they never go to the people. So, they just keep tearing us apart. I am sorry Advaniji, you can take disciplinary action against me."

It was indeed an act of open defiance of the leadership but again it was a matter of time before the sanyasin is again owned up. Frankly, she has her reasons to feel cut off. She believes and her cronies make her believe so that the Tiranga Yatra she had undertaken from Hubli, where she faced criminal charges for hoisting tricolour a decade earlier at a troubled spot, to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, where thousands of unarmed people were killed by the British army during the freedom struggle, did not get the support it should have got from the party. Her grouse was in particular against Pramod Mahajan, general secretary, who she says did not organise her Yatra route properly in his home state of Maharasthra which was in election mode then.

But Mahajan known for his brusque style, rubbed salt on Uma wounds by saying publicly, "the Uma Yatra was unwelcome in Maharasthra". He is understood to have added that her Yatra did not have much of a vote potential

Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia inducted the 45-year-old Sanyasin known for her oratorical skills from an early age into politics. However, she switched over from being a mere religious orator to the field of politics and has been a strong opponent of Congress President Sonia Gandhi especially on the issue of foreign origin and had threatened in May 2004 to resign as Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister if Sonia Gandhi were to become the Prime Minister of India.

Around then, another front ranking women leader of BJP Sushma Swaraj also hit the headlines by threatening to undo the electoral verdict. Conceding that the Congress victory in the Lok Sabha elections was because of that party's star campaigner, Sushma had threatened to tonsure her head and sleep on the floor eating only gram if Sonia Gandhi were to accept the mantle of the government.

That there is a sort of one-up manship between Uma and Sushma is an open secret in BJP. When Uma was on her "Tiranga Yatra" driving through the dusty lanes of the country, Sushma flew into Port Blair along with several BJP parliamentarians to 'revive' the memories of freedom struggle. And she exploited to the hilt an unelegant act of Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar. The carer diplomat turned first time minister got removed a plaque in memory of Savarkar, a hero for Maharasthra, who was incarcerated at the Cellular jail at the height of freedom movement.

As if by accident or coincidence, Sushma is now the BJP spokesperson under Advani. She is suave and appeals to middle class and upmarket constituencies. Uma on the other hand is down to earth, with every word dipped in native wisdom and her appeals matters where the real vote banks are. So, can BJP afford to ignore her and for how long…? (Syndicate Features)

Iconography of secular culture conflates with hindutva

By Arup De

At a recent paper-reading by, and discussion with, Perry Anderson at the Seagull Resource Centre, the subjects attended to were multiculturalism; its relationship with religion; the role of the Left; and multiculturalism in three relatively "new" nations – India, Israel, and Ireland – all three having been carved out on the basis of religion. There was an involved debate, for quite some time, on religion and secularism, in India. Anderson wanted to know, for instance, why Marxism had taken root in West Bengal and Kerala, and not elsewhere; was it because Islam and Christianity tempered the thrust of the mainstream religion, Hinduism, here?

To me, what was missing from a lively debate on the nature of the "secular", with politics and religion occupying the two poles of reference, was a notion of the role of culture. It took me back to the fact that, in our country, the debate around the secular is largely constructed around the discourses of politics and religion; that, if culture is introduced into the debate, it’s done so in its guise as political and religious culture, and rarely as "culture" in the secular and modern sense. "Sociological rigour" or not, this leaves a very large gap, or silence.

The history of the secularisation of the West can’t be written without taking into account the separation, at a certain point in history, of religion and culture, so that they came to occupy two distinct, umbilically related, but oppositional space; and the emergence of the secular is concomitant with the rise of the notion of culture as a space separate from religion. Something similar happened in India in the 19th century, but let me stay with Europe for a moment.

The discussants had distinguished between religion in the sphere of politics and community, and religion as a "spiritual" practice; but, in the West, a second site of the "spiritual", outside religion, came into existence with secularisation; that site was culture. The forms of culture in secular Western society that embodied and interrogated the "spiritual" were, of course, the arts: music, painting, literature. These were activities that existed in the secular domain, that were sceptical of orthodox religiosity, but had a deep investment in the sense of the sacred, the transformative. I’m using the word "culture" here, of course, not as an anthropologist might, to denote the sum-total of the life-practices of a community, but in the problematic but influential Arnoldian sense; and the Arnoldian sense of culture, as a non-religious but nobly creative domain, permeated the construction of the secular not only in post-industrial England, but also, surely, in Bengal in the time of colonialism, more deeply perhaps than we can acknowledge and understand. It was Matthew Arnold who became chief propagandist for the idea of culture, specifically literature, as a space both transcendental and secular; who argued for poetry as a "substitute" for religion in an age in which faith had become a "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar", who argued for the to be read not as "dogma", but as "literature". Some of these extraordinary inversions of values and meanings will be familiar to us from the unfolding of the narrative of the secular and the modern in India and Bengal.

The most influential poet-critic in English after Arnold, T. S. Eliot, was particularly impatient with the grand claims Arnold made on behalf of poetry. At first reading, Eliot’s wry but outraged objection to Arnold’s substitution of religion with poetry seems to suggest that he’s arguing for a view of poetry at once more complex and pragmatic than the one Arnold had. But one must remember that Eliot was an orthodox believer who finally "came out"; that perhaps he’s pleading not so much on behalf of poetry as of religion; nothing, for Eliot, is a substitute for religion. For all that, it’s worth recalling that we don’t read the poems Eliot wrote long after it was public knowledge he’d become Anglo-Catholic – for instance, as if they were expressions of religious faith; we read them, and they ask to be read, according to the conventions of a secular "work of art": belongs, that is, not to the domain of religion, but to the domain of culture. This paradox itself redirects us to the ways in which, in the West, we inhabit the secular space of culture, and that space inhabits us.

Much of the secular "imaginary" of Western art and literature derives from, as we well know, an aspect of religion that Anderson didn’t mention in his talk: mythology. To many of the great Romantics and Modernists in the post-industrial West, and to those on the cusp of Romanticism and Modernism, like Rilike, mythology became a great secular cultural inheritance. Protestant Christianity had no mythology to speak of; the icons of antique religions – from Greece, Rome, and even India – became apart of the creative hoard of the Western secular imagination.

I’ve revisited all this because something comparable happens in India, in Bengal, in the 19th century, at a certain point of time, religion and culture come to occupy related but oppositional spaces; the composition of the might be said to constitute an important moment, a moment when a poem with an overtly religious subject was transplanted from the domain of religion into the domain of culture; in looking back at the space in which that poem was written and read, we become witness to the outline of a secular, modern space that is also "spiritual" and mythopoeic. But there’s a difference between this and what had happened earlier, and would continue to happen, in Europe; Hindu mythology, unlike the Greek, was a living continuum; in what way, then, was it "recovered"? I think the moment of Orientalist scholarship is significant here; it was William Jones, among others, who transferred Indian mythology and religion to the domain of "culture" in the modern, secular, Arnoldian sense. Others, more gifted than he, brought to that domain, in various Indian languages, a spiritual, existential and artistic richness and complexity.

The legacy of those transactions, the complex experience of that richness, are fundamental to the Indian secular they return to us, for instance, when we listen to a song by Tagore, and the act of listening becomes not a religious but a cultural act. Similarly, the Tagore which belongs not to the temple but to the drawing room: the latter, then, becomes the secular, Arnoldian space in which art accommodates spirituality, but not religious belief. The traditional classical and devotional arts were also reconstituted in the time of modernity; that’s why I can listen to a Meera bhajan sung by Paluskar and admire its artistry, and also be moved by its spiritual immediacy, without necessarily believing in the existence of Krishna; the Paluskar bhajan for me, exists in the domain of Arnoldian "culture" rather than religion.

The secular, in India, is identified as a national space in which multiple religions are tolerated; in this political sense, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam and many others have pointed out, "secularism" is an Indian word that has no exact Western equivalent, a post-Independence, constitutional construct. But the "secular’, in modern India, has also surely, especially in its incarnation as culture, been an alternative site, as it is in the West, for the spiritual, the existential, the experiential; in its aspect of "culture", the "secular" in India shares with Europe the complex spiritual inheritance of modernity. This inheritance has been exhaustively investigated in the West, but very little in comparison in India. Where the discussion of the "secular" (to the cost of our understanding, I think) remains an exclusively political one. The trajectory of culture I’ve been speaking of is certainly not equally valid for everyone, and in every place, in the modern world. On Brooklyn Bridge, I recall a Sudanese taxi driver playing a haunting tape of a with a particularly lovely and melodious voice. "This music is beautiful," I said. He corrected me angrily: "This is not music. This is the Quarn "But it is beautiful," I insisted.

The iconography of secular culture in India is predominantly, even hegemonically, Hindu, but we should pause before we rush to conflate it with Hindutv, as many commentators do these days. Firstly, we shouldn’t confuse a cultural hegemony with a religious one; the pre-dominance of Hindu imagery in the construction of the secular Indian imagination also declined those images from their original parameters to all moderns, both Hindus and non Hindus, just as the cultural hegemony of secular Europe made itself available even to those on its margins, like Joyce in Dublin and Dutt in Kolkata; Christianity itself, for the colonised middle class, could never achieve the unexpected multiplicity of register, and the reach, of European modernity.

The construction of secular universals is a double-edged sword; it both injures and empowers. Thus, the universal "human" in Europe was covertly European, but it didn’t remain the property of Europe alone; similarly, the secular "Indian" is secretly Hindu, but is every Indian’s property: so, Husain can paint Saraswati and Qurratulain Hyder write about Sita – the domain of culture, unlike the domain of religion, belongs to the modern in a way that doesn’t presume or demand allegiance or belief. Surely the principal project of Hindutva is to destroy this domain of culture that was created in modernity, to subsume it under an all encompassing interpretation of religion; to command Husain to abjure the modern painter’s, rather than a believer’s, adoration of Saraswati. INAV