Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Time to look back on all these three months plus of Narendra Modi’s “achhe din” and what they foretell. Yes, the traditional 100 – day honeymoon period would have elapsed, almost, by the time you get to read this. Let’s start first by removing the froth, the most visible part of Modi’s steamroller style of governance.
Yes, he continues to be riding the tide of popularity, to go by the new class of sycophants, all saffronites, all of them, unable yet to fathom how easy really it had been for them to wrest power from the discredited Congress Party. Not just taking over power but also to be exercising it and enjoying it as well.
Some like the newly anointed party chief Amit Shah, Modi’s Gujarati alter ego and hatchet man of long standing, revel in mouthing many Modisms, like being Hindu is the other way of saying you are a nationalist. Modi at the height of his poll campaign wasn’t loath to brazenly make those ugly references to his political opponents, mainly the Congress mother-and- son twosome of Sonia and Rahul.
Shah, the quick learner, has obviously discovered – and in quick time too- how important for his survival as the BJP boss it is for him to not only adopt typical Modisms such as name-calling or even abusiveness as his very own; also to ape him on-stage, allowing, seemingly reluctantly, the feet-touching ritual to flourish; or, when the opportunity comes his way, to give his own variations on Modi’s famous line “hamein Congress mukht bharat banana hai”.
The ultimate mantra, to go by the reckless abandon, verging on the vulgar, with which Amit Shah went after the two Kashmir mainstream parties, the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party : “hamein Jammu aur Kashmir ko Abdullah or Mufti mukht karana hai.” Not a thought spared for the people of the State, nor even for the future of the democratic arrangement sold to the State at the time of its accession to the newly born Indian Republic.
Or do we tell them in the words of another BJP leader, a nauseating presence on any subject and on every TV channel that the Constitution of India shall prevail, without mentioning who was subverting it. No time at all to waste on a Constitution framed by the State with the consent of the Union. No time to consider the flood gates of disruption which senseless tinkering with the arrangement governing the relationship between the State and the center would open. Inkling was provided in the State legislature when the government moved that Indian and Pakistan resume their broken dialogue. One cannot but take strong exception to Amit Shah’s reference to what he called the pampered valley and with great anguish claimed that the valley was home to more separatists and traitors than any other part of the country.
Article 370, the bug bear of the BJP’s Kashmir think tanks was mercifully not brought into Shah’s two-day Jammu discourse. Probably there was no need to do so when he was determined to openly question the patriotism of Indian flag-bearers in the State, the valley in particular, namely, the Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, another former Chief Minister and Union Home Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and numerous other political outfits including, of course, the disgraced Congress Party.
Then there was the other discovery which Prime Minister Modi had himself made a few weeks ago that the valley after all wasn’t the entire State of Jammu and Kashmir. That’s another story and I better stick to Mr. Shah as he explains his understanding of the idea of India. The first tenet mentioned in his book is, of course loyalty to Modiji and the RSS,in that order. The second is to ensure a Congress-mukht bharat, which given Mr. Modi’s grand vision, would give us a ‘mahan baharat’; the third element for Mr. Shah is to go all out to decimate who come in the way of the Modi dispensation.
Uttar Pradesh, which he astutely enough put into BJP’s bag in the parliamentary polls only a few months ago, will be taken in hand even more vigorously, along with most other States in the cow belt. His task is cut out. Even small towns and hamlets in U.P., as he would have it, have become nurseries of love jihadis, Muslim youth marrying Hindu girls (through deceit) and forcing them to convert to Islam. This, under the protective umbrella of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, according to the BJP leader.
Perhaps as bad as the successive governments in Jammu and Kashmir, led by the valley Muslims, having all these years pursued anti non-Muslim policies, discriminating against Hindu migrant families from Pakistan occupied Kashmir, not to mention those who had come from across the border with Pakistan at the time of the partitioning of the sub-continent. A people who were barred from voting for the State Assembly even as they could do so in the Lok Sabha poll. And, please, not to mention the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits who had migrated out of the valley nearly 25 years ago .
What does the valley (meaning Muslims there) think of itself? It was but a part of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, the densely populated Jammu region and the sprawling Ladakh region accounting for by far the largest segment, in terms of population and area. A natural corollary : why must Jammu and Kashmir always have a Muslim Chief Minister , a throwback to some six decades ago when the Jana Sangh, now BJP, had led its ek pradhan, ek vidhan, ek nishan agitation, the precursor of the renewed demand for undoing article 370 of the constitution.
Amit Shah’s latest twist to the old war cry is 44 plus (BJP getting 44 plus seats in the upcoming State assembly elections to be able to give Jammu and Kashmir its first nationalist government, a Freudian slip that suggests that all previous governments in the State were puppets picked by new Delhi. Or maybe, as Amit Shah would have us believe, the presence of a Hindu Chief Minister would probably have made the difference between what it is and what it may have been.
And here at last we have Mr. Shah, a knight in shining armour astride his white charger out to undo the historic wrongs committed in Jammu and Kashmir by a soft Indian state led by the Nehru types. Yes, the same Nehru, as the BJP leaders keep reminding us, who rushed with Kashmir to the United Nations even without a cabinet resolution, way back in 1949. Obviously not everything is lost. Mr. Shah the BJP Chief is all set to rewrite the Kashmir story. I only hope he doesn’t end up opening up a valley-sized Pandora’s Box. For starters he has promised us a nationalist government in that troubled State. And I don’t have to spell out what “nationalist” stands for in the saffron lexicon. I do hope though that the BJP leadership, in its saner moments, will spare the time to take a close second look at its stated Kashmir policy.
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