Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Four months in office is hardly time enough to judge how well or badly has a government, newly in office, performed. Particularly, a government that rode into power with a massive popular mandate. Then, a government led by a party that had convinced a nation of 1.25 billion plus that its predecessor in office, the lackluster Manmohan Singh government, had been a disaster, a pack of non-doers, which avoided taking decisions as others would to avoid the plague. Freshly minted slogans, catchy one-liners had done the rest causing the crusader Narendrabhai Damodardas Modi to take over as the brand new helmsman who, the unlettered, unknowing masses were told had the cure-all mantra. And Modi, like the rest of us, took himself seriously and coined half a dozen or more other magic mantras which would redeem our land. The Modi bandwagon hasn’t paused, not even for a breather, all these weeks with the newly anointed leader flooding us with firmans, the new one always more promising and alluring than the earlier one. In the meantime his handpicked party chief Amitbhai Shah, a fellow Gujarati, has decided to play his Brahmastra, the ultimate weapon, Hindu Rashtra, to make us, the people, fall in line. He had tested it more than a decade ago at Modiji’s Gujarat test lab. He recalled the weapon, as they did in the Mahabharta, to try it out in Uttar Pradesh, Hindustan’s largest province which sends eighty plus MPs to the Lok Sabha, the Maha Panchayat of India that’s Bharat, that in reality is Hindustan or the land of the Hindus. Amitbhai’s wand having done the unprecedented, the saffronite parivar, the RSS and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party,has obviously decided to adopt the Amit version of the weapon, as its answer to weapons usable in future wars.To test the infallibility of his latest acquisition Amit gave it another shot with Hindutva and the Hindu India campaign forming the van of his bigoted army of sewaks in the by- elections that fell due in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka etc. The effort wasn’t even a pale shadow of the parliamentary election three months earlier but Amitbhai was unfazed as must have been his boss, Mr. Modi.
The big one came this month when by-elections took place in some other States. Amit Shah,once again, marshalled his mahants, sewaks et al to declare an all out war, as it were, on non-Hindu minorities, the Muslims singled out in particular; it seemed the most attractive thing to do with nine assembly by-elections in Uttar Pradesh were due and the Hindu card had served Amit Shah well in the state in the Parliamentary poll earlier this year. Sadhu or sant, Amit Shah picked up the firebrand Hindu activist, Mahant Adityanath, the Gorakhpur M.P. as the campaign boss in U.P and others of his ilk were deputed in Rajasthan, West Bengal, Assam and Gujarat. Another saffron sadhu Sakshi Maharaj, an MP with charges of murder and rioting pending against him was named to assist in the battle, all communal guns blazing against Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party and his State Government accusing Mulayam of appeasing Muslims; another party MP, a hate-monger, if there ever was one, chose to up the ante: anyone living in India is a Hindu, was the Brahma walk from this tainted man, with Love jihad, whatever that means, as his principal weapon. Sadly though the results were a virtual disaster. The BJP lost eight of the nine seats to Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party. In Gujarat the Congress managed to grab a few seats much to the embarrassment of the highpriests of the parivar. The only silver lining came along in West Bengal where the BJP picked up a seat. The 50 odd by-elections held during the last month or so have shown up BJP in very poor light. Nothing much to be sorry about it, though.
Its Lok Sabha phalanx is impregnable. Only Mr. Modi will have to decide whether anti-Muslim majoritarianism will continue to be his party’s lodestar. It is not the BJP’s staying power or the lack of it that causes worry. It’s how it proposes to retain it beyond its five-year span. The saffronites wouldn’t waste a second to dismiss such thoughts with plain contempt. They are so sure about their party having chosen the right path. And while doing so they do, at the drop of a hat, cite the Supreme Court’s view that Hindutva is a way of life. That was said many moons ago and in a different context.
Unfortunately they insist on interpreting this as an endorsement, however indirectly, of a Hindu Rashtra. The BJP did for some years try to keep this part of its narrative away from the spotlight of open debate but has in its present incarnation, as the single largest party with a majority of its own in the Lok Sabha, brought the issue centre stage, with party men, top leaders included, unconcerned as they are about the consequences of taking to the highly charged communal path, the path of polarization.
Look at the Home Minister of the country in charge of the intelligence apparatus of the State, arguing that he is not aware of the phenomenon of love jihad, practiced with great zeal by saffronites in UP and some other States to stop inter-community marriages. A Muslim alleged to have married a Hindu girl legally, is branded as a brigand and therefore is to be hounded out. Mr. Rajnath Singh, the first time he referred to the recent deluge in Jammu and Kashmir -the valley still reeling under the impact of standing flood waters in larger areas of the capital, Srinagar – made it his business to ask the State government to allot land for the resettlement of the Kashmir Pandits who migrated en mass from the valley in 1990. On the face of it was a thoughtless idea to be seen pressurizing an already enfeebled Government but the Home Minister decided to convey the suggestion as part of his relief package, because his party is committed to 44 plus (getting these many MLAs elected to the State assembly in the elections due later this year, to have a majority of its own. The stated objective: to give the State its first Hindu Chief Minister. In other words to outmanoeuvre the Muslim majority State. I feel sorry for my kinsmen, the Kashmiri pandits, for having this distraction to arise at a time when the need was for exclusive attention to the alleviation of human suffering in the valley. Sadly, not one of the many Pandit migrant bodies in Jammu and elsewhere raised its voice against the ill-timed demand from Rajnath Singh for their otherwise legitimate hopes. The floods that that ravaged the state, the summer capital Srinagar more than any other part, have wrought unprecedented misery, including huge losses of business and property, with the threat of epidemics looming large, which will need a Herculean effort to undo it. Many heads will have to roll for having been collaborators in the virtual slow poisoning of the capital city. For one, the city planners, if any, will have to do a lot of explaining. How exactly was the city mindlessly allowing major residential colonies to come up on land refills which were part of the lake. Another major city lake Anchar has been ruthlessly violated. All that remains of it is a few marshes.
Given that the city for the most part has grown on either side of the Jhelum, there is no way to ensure proper drainage. To make a bad situation worse the fight against the present floods in the city was marked by a total breakdown of the administration for four days after the waters submerged the greater part of the city. The government, the Chief Minister has told us, was non-existent for almost a week, Minister and minion, engineers of the flood control agencies – all stranded wherever they were. The only noticeable activity was that of the armed forces and the air force. The separatists had done their bit by citing the Geneva Convention (Ali Shah Geelani) making it incumbent on the occupying country (India) to handle the situation. Mercifully he did not accuse the occupying nation(India) of having manipulated the floods. Another separatist leader, with a permanent sulk, had taken the easy way to martyrdom of sorts: he intercepted most relief operations in his backyard grabbing the food, and water and other goodies. He was accompanied by his band of goons and virtually managed to grab the relief material from the official agencies to distribute it later as his own. Yaseen Malik has always reveled in his belief that he is the first soldier in the war for Kashmir’s azadi and a stretch of road in Maisuma, near Lal Chowk, is his Gaza strip and he never tires of seeing himself in the image of a Yasser Arafat. Only he now professes to be a non-violent pacifist. It’s another matter that he had now chosen to steal relief material from the army volunteers to call it his own. And the man has no sense of shame. “Look here, I have been coming here for six days with relief where were you then”. Another smirk by Yaseen and that was it.
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