Much column space has been consumed commenting on the contents of the BJP’s CD in Uttar Pradesh — which the party has disowned. And yet, only when one reads the transcript, does one get the feeling that the adjectives used to describe its contents such as, ‘devious’, ‘mischievous’, ‘communal’, ‘offensive’, etc do not actually name the crime. They fall far short of the work that an adjective, in such a case, is supposed to do. Perhaps because the CD was produced by a major political party of India, that runs governments in several states, and that has sworn allegiance to the ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution, that one subconsciously feels that extreme adjectives such as ‘perverted’, ‘depraved’, ‘wicked’, etc., should not be used. The assumption here is that political parties do not act immorally as some individuals are prone to do. They act responsibly. They have built-in checks. Since they rule over a plural people, such parties tend towards moderation.

The fact that the BJP is a major party of a major democracy produces a filter which makes us see the episode as a lapse, as an error of judgment, and not as the evil that it actually is. But this is a wrong reading. Quite honestly, when I read the transcript, I was overcome with the same sense of stomach churning disgust I experienced when I read the news item on the Nithari killings. I asked myself what sort of a mind could think up such a strategy of political mobilisation? What group of national leaders consider this as fair competition? What kind of organisation allows such a CD to pass its internal ‘checks’? Reading the transcript I knew that what I was confronting was a social pathology. I was reminded of the work of the neo-Freudian Erich Fromm who, analysing another social pathology that had traumatised Europe in the decades of the thirties and forties, warned us of the processes that led to the destruction of ‘the sane society’.

... contd.