State under siege

The BJP’s detractors would call it poetic justice that the very issue which swept it to power in north India, could turn out to be the one which now threatens to bring down the government it leads at the Centre. The Vajpayee government has been trying to douse the vicious communal fires that swept a part of the country, but can it escape some of the blame for having sparked the conflagration?

The BJP has sought RSS help to bail it out by ordering the VHP to back down on Ayodhya. But how long can this curious menage a trois continue? To give a corporate analogy, while the RSS is the equivalent of Tata Sons, the holding company which has controlling shares in both TISCO and TELCO, the BJP and the VHP are their political parallels. When the RSS is the common share holder, nobody will accept the attempts of the two saffron offshoots to disown each other, particularly as dual membership predominates. In Gujarat, for example, the chief minister is an RSS pracharak and half a dozen state ministers have links with the VHP. This separate but supportive arrangement has in the past worked to the advantage of both the BJP and the VHP. The BJP could reap the benefits of association with a Hindu fundamentalist body without actually crossing the line of acceptable conduct expected of a respectable mainline political party.

But now the objectives of the two RSS subsidiaries are at cross purposes. The VHP cannot string along its followers indefinitely without any real effort to reach its avowed goal. The BJP in government, on the other hand, has per force to behave differently from the BJP in opposition. The day the VHP goes ahead with its construction of the Ram temple, the NDA allies will be obliged to pull the rug from under the prime minister’s feet.

Before the Babri mosque’s savage demolition in December 1992, I did not find totally unreasonable L.K. Advani’s suggestion during his Somnath to Ayodhya rath yatra calling for ‘respectfully relocating’ the existing structure of the Babri masjid. The mosque had not been used as a place of worship for over 50 years. Such emotive issues are based on faith, not historical data. And while travelling in Uttar Pradesh in the early nineties, the populace seemed to be overwhelmingly committed to the Ram temple movement.

Even several Muslims I talked to, frightened by the rising passions of their Hindu neighbours, conceded that they had never heard the name of the obscure mosque before and if their leaders had no objection, they didn’t see why the mosque could not be relocated. At Ayodhya I discovered that once the lock was opened, the 16th century ruin was in any case sheltering a Hindu temple for all practical purposes. There was an idol of the Ram lalla along with pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses and a stream of worshippers. However, when I suggested to my more secularist colleagues that it might be simpler to cool passions by turning de facto into de jure, I was chided for committing heresy. We were a secular country, the constitution wouldn’t permit it, tomorrow it would be Kashi, and so on, they argued.

In my naivete I did not at that time realise that a peaceful solution to what seemed to me a relatively minor problem was not possible. The Ram temple is not really a goal in itself but a symbol of a larger saffron agenda. And there are powerful vested interests on both sides of the religious divide to ensure that there can never be an amicable settlement. It is not about building a temple, but about asserting religious supremacy.

If the Somnath temple could be handed over to Hindus by Sardar Patel with relatively little fuss, why not Ayodhya? If the intentions on both sides are honest, then a settlement is feasible. But if it all boils down to a grudge match and motives are suspect, a compromise is not possible. And solutions to religious disputes are all the more difficult to reach in a country where political parties have cynically exploited religious bigotry for the narrow objective of increasing their vote share.

And this is not an indictment of the BJP alone. There is a school of thought which believes we should travel an extra mile to make the minorities feel secure. Unfortunately this is often interpreted to mean pandering to Muslim fundamentalism, which has vastly harmed the secular cause since it provides Hindus a handle to complain of double standards. In Pakistan General Musharraf can call for a crackdown on madrasas, but when West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya expresses apprehensions about the anti-national activities of some of them and questions their curriculum, his CPI(M) colleagues jump down his throat and he is forced to retract.

A reflection of the same mindset was the reaction of some intellectuals and politicians to the dastardly burning of the karsewaks. Instead of outrage, there was the suggestion that the VHP had brought the catastrophe upon itself. More than half a century after Independence, we are still dragging our feet on framing common civil laws for fear of offending the orthodox members of the Muslim community, although by now many in the Islamic world have modernised their civil laws and abandoned the ancient Shariat text.

The vicious communal virus infecting the country could perhaps have been avoided if the founding fathers of our Republic had put into practice a form of secularism in which there was a clear dividing line between the state and religion. Appeasement of the more bigoted elements in all religions is condoned in the name of secular tolerance.

Those claiming to be religious leaders, very often with dubious backgrounds, are accepted unquestioningly as the spokesmen of all their co-religionists. The views of a community’s progressives and liberals are ignored. The failure to take a firm line and assert the authority of the state means that while the rest of the world moves into the twenty-first century, we present to the international community the ugly face of a society caught in a medieval time warp, displaying unspeakable barbarism in Gujarat. We reinforce old prejudices among our Islamic neighbours that our claims of moral superiority based on our secular faith are misplaced.

Today the BJP faces what looks like a no-win situation and its recent electoral reverses suggest that Ayodhya as a campaign issue has been squeezed dry, except possibly in Gujarat. The BJP may now empathise with the plight of the Congress in UP, where the once-dominant political party has been reduced to a non-entity. The beginning of the party’s downfall in UP can be traced to the advice of the too-clever-by-half Arun Nehru to play the Hindu card by opening the lock of the Babri mosque. The Congress learnt to its cost that he who rides a tiger cannot dismount. It is now the BJP’s turn to learn that bitter truth.

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