Politics of intimidation

The Bharatiya Janata Party is trying to browbeat the Election Commission and its critics on the anti-Muslim CD issue.

NO Indian political formation can even remotely match the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when it comes to violating norms of political decency, defying the law, and pursuing an outrageously divisive and sectarian agenda. The latest instance is its release on April 3 of a viciously anti-Muslim compact disc (CD) entitled Bharat ki Pukar (the call of India) as part of its campaign material for the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections.

The BJP has disowned the CD and feigned ignorance of how it got to be commissioned, written, approved and released without sincerely apologising for it. Worse, it has tried to turn the tables on a constitutional authority, the Election Commission, as well as its political opponents. It has also used threats and intimidation to resist reasonable pressure to play by the ground rules of electoral politics.

Even more disgracefully for the Indian political system, the BJP has for all practical purposes got away with its offensive conduct. As this is being written, during the third round of polling in the seven-phase U.P. elections, it seems highly unlikely that the BJP will be made to pay politically for its defiance of the prohibition against using hate speech to win votes, itself a crime against democracy.

The Election Commission issued the BJP a notice asking the party to explain why it should not be punished under the Representation of the People Act, 1951 and its Model Code of Conduct, which was in force when the CD was released. But the BJP, true to type, launched a counter-offensive and tried to divert attention from this central issue by demanding that Naveen Chawla, one of the Election Commissioners, recuse himself from hearing its case. It took this secondary issue to the Supreme Court on April 13, which has deferred its hearing to May 8.

Regrettably, the BJP has thus succeeded in getting any resolution of the issues raised by the CD postponed until it ceases to matter for the all-important election campaign in U.P.

Now, it can hardly be disputed that the CD is flagrantly anti-Muslim. It perversely portrays all Muslims as anti-Hindu and anti-national. They are depicted as duplicitous devils: they trick Hindus into selling them cows by pretending they will look after them, only to butcher them in a gory way. They oppress their own women and turn them into mere reproductive machines - so as to change India's demographic balance.

The CD shows Muslim men abducting innocent Hindu girls and eloping with them - only to convert them forcibly. (The effect of this was reinforced in real life by the systematic hounding of mixed couples from Bhopal and elsewhere, and by orchestrated "protests" against their marriage, including a typical Hindutva-style attack on a Star News studio in Mumbai.)

The CD was clearly calculated to incite hatred against a religious community, divide citizens, and provoke a militant reaction - probably with a view to triggering a Hindu-communal backlash. There is nothing vague or unambiguous of its purpose: it is to win votes in U.P., where the BJP faces a double-or-nothing prospect.

It simply will not do for the BJP to pretend that the CD was unauthorised and produced by a junior-level "worker" without prior approval by the party's top leaders, including Lalji Tandon and State unit president Kesri Nath Tripathi. According to Virendra Singh, director of the Bulandshehr-based Fakira Films, which produced the CD, the State BJP leadership was consulted "at every stage of the writing of the CD" and whenever the script was "modified... and fine-tuned... " This stands to reason. Withdrawing the CD cannot mitigate the original offence because the disc is in circulation and has been viewed by large numbers of people - in excerpts aired on television, as well as original copies.

Prima facie, there is an irrefutable case against the BJP for violating the election law in a depraved manner and for offending Sections of the Indian Penal Code that pertain to spreading hatred against a particular group or using appeals to religious identity and which prohibit and punish the use of inflammatory communal material.

The Election Commission was not only right to issue a notice to the BJP, it was duty-bound to act against it. Logically, such action can take many forms: publicly reprimanding the BJP, imposing a hefty fine, and derecognising it at least so far as the use of the lotus symbol is concerned. The E.C. is not merely meant to disqualify a candidate in retrospect for communal propaganda. Article 324 of the Constitution gives it a broad mandate, which includes preventing, precluding and punishing the use of such propaganda during elections.

The "retrospective" argument just does not stand up to scrutiny. The E.C.'s core job is to do all it can to prohibit effectively the use of unfair electoral practices. That is why it is empowered to requisition police and paramilitary forces, transfer and appoint civil servants, and set rules for the conduct of the electoral process in its minutest details.

Implicit in, and central to, the E.C.'s function as a statutory authority is preventive and pre-emptive action so as to guard the sanctity of elections. To use an analogy, its principal task is not to punish arsonists but to prevent fires, which vitiate the selection of the people's representatives - a process vital and indispensable to democracy. The E.C. would be perfectly within its powers to demand an explicit, binding commitment from any political party that it will not use communal means of canvassing electoral support, a breach of which would automatically entail disqualification and derecognition.

The case for doing so is especially strong because only last December, the BJP officially released a CD similar to the April avatar. This was done during its National Council meeting in Lucknow, where the CD featured as part of the press kit. The BJP fully owns and stands by this CD. It cannot claim innocence about its cousin/derivative.

It has since produced equally obnoxious advertisements questioning the patriotic intentions of Muslims through the caption: Kya inka irada Pak hai? (Are their intentions pure). Several of its top leaders, including its chief ministerial candidate Kalyan Singh, have publicly defended their content as "truthful".

The plain truth is that the BJP has tried to browbeat its opponents - by raising a diversionary issue and by resorting to the melodramatic (but mercifully aborted) tactic of courting arrest and launching a self-righteous protest agitation against the E.C.'s notice. (It is another matter that it also put up a dummy candidate in Tandon's constituency - his own son - in case the U.P. BJP's topmost leader faces punitive action.)

This is not the first time that the BJP has resorted to bluff and bluster, by threatening a "mass agitation", by pretending that any E.C. action against it would amount to an "electoral emergency", and by creating a climate of fear. This is a familiar tactic. It takes recourse to majoritarianism and arouses concern that should a Hindutva force be even brought to book, the consequences in the form of disruption of order would be unacceptable.

The BJP did exactly this after the Babri Masjid was demolished in December 1992, when it prevailed upon the Centre to allow the patently illegal makeshift Ram-Lala temple built on its rubble to remain. Indeed, even before that ghastly episode, our courts were reluctant to take pre-emptive action except of a tokenist variety against it. So was the government, which retreated each time the BJP adopted an aggressive posture.

Here too, the fear of a "majoritarian backlash" trumped all considerations of constitutional propriety, defence of secularism and plain legality. Since December 1992, no government has dared to assert the law of the land. Nor have the demolition's planners and perpetrators been brought to book.

A similar fear gripped the Establishment after the Gujarat pogrom. The Centre failed to dismiss the BJP-ruled State government although it had caused, and continued to preside over, a total breakdown of all constitutional order: even High Court judges and senior police officers had to flee their homes in fear. The Opposition too failed to mount enough pressure on the Centre to impose President's Rule, for which there has never been, and could not have been, a fitter case.

Worse, elections were allowed to be held while a whole community had been terrorised, democratic governance had collapsed, and free and fair canvassing, polling and exercise of rational choices had become impossible given the continuing harassment and intimidation of Muslims, inflamed Hindu-communal sentiments, the BJP-VHP's (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) goonda raj, and the prevalence of a generalised climate of fear.

All that the E.C.'s initial and salutary intervention in Gujarat resulted in was postponement of the elections by a few months - when the obvious remedy was President's Rule, followed by full return to normalcy and systematic prosecution of the pogrom's perpetrators. The Supreme Court's off-the-cuff pronouncements indicating its opposition to deferring elections did not help.

The Establishment, in effect, has repeatedly permitted the BJP to hold and exercise a veto over vital political processes, exercise of police and prosecution powers, and the running of the administration in crisis situations such that it would be suborned by the forces of Hindu communalism.

This does not argue that the Indian government/Establishment has turned actively communal over the years, only that it has made deplorable compromises with Hindu communalists or passively accepted that they deserve to be treated differently from other communalists, as well as secularists. It is both noteworthy and shameful that the worst abuses of freedom and the most ferocious attacks on democracy, secularism and the rule of law in India's recent history have occurred in situations where Hindu communalism was ascendant or rampant.

Similarly, the Establishment has allowed the BJP and its associates virtual veto power on a number of policies, especially those pertaining to religion and politics, to Kashmir, to relations with Pakistan and other neighbours, and to defence and national security. BJP leaders have arrogantly begun to assert such "primacy". Three years ago, L.K. Advani claimed: "The BJP alone can find solutions to our problems with Pakistan because Hindus will never think whatever we have done is a sell-out."

The underlying assumption seems to be that by virtue of being majoritarian or Hindu-communal, the BJP or the Sangh Parivar is a more authentic representative of Indian opinion than other political currents or parties. Nothing could be more false. Looked at historically, the BJP has been a minority current in Indian politics until the 1990s. Even at its peak, it has never commanded more than a quarter of the national vote.

Even more important, the assumption is dangerously misguided and unbecoming of a society and state that aspires to be secular by drawing a line of basic demarcation between religion and politics. It simply cannot accord primacy to a particular religious group by virtue of its large numbers.

This situation must be remedied. That can only happen when progressive political opinion and civil society pressure is mounted on the Establishment so that it stands up to the bullying tactics of the majoritarian communalists. One must hope that the E.C. will set a positive example in the CD case.