The Modi takeover bid

Published : Dec 20, 2002 00:00 IST

A neo-fascist form of Hindutva has taken the Bharatiya Janata Party into its iron grip in Gujarat. Unless energetically resisted by the secular forces, this will have horrific consequences for national politics.

IF any doubts remained during the candidate-nomination time in Gujarat about who was really in charge of the Bharatiya Janata Party's political strategy and election campaign in the State, then Chief Minister Narendra Modi put them to rest by refusing a ticket to former Minister of State for Revenue Hiren Pandya. Modi repeatedly rejected strong pleas on Pandya's behalf not just from Keshubhai Patel, but also from his own political mentor and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani. It is noteworthy that Advani sent Arun Jaitley, his loyal supporter and Modi's close friend, to plead Pandya's case after his name was excluded from the first list of BJP candidates.

The fact that Modi did not budge makes it amply clear that he alone determines the central thrust, and the tone and tenor, of the party's campaign, as he did with his nasty Gaurav Yatras. The fact that Advani did not protest against Pandya's exclusion and that no other senior BJP functionary commented on the issue once the deed was done clearly shows that the top party leaders have fallen in line behind Modi. Indeed, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Advani have agreed to campaign for Modi's BJP in Gujarat.

Modi's opposition to Pandya goes beyond personal animosity, or his own insecurity as a leader who never contested an election until last year and who has no specific constituency or geographical base worth the name in Gujarat. Pandya's exclusion was meant to show that Modi brooks no dissidence even from a fellow Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh loyalist, or "interference" in his fief from other leaders, however senior they were.

Ever since April, when Vajpayee succumbed to pressure from the BJP's Hate Brigade of young leaders such as M. Venkaiah Naidu and Arun Jaitley and to his own disgrace, launched a hideous anti-Muslim tirade in Goa while strongly backing Modi the "Chhote Sardar" has been in total, unfettered, comprehensive, control of the BJP in Gujarat. His takeover of the party, through key leaders of the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, is now complete.

More important, Modi may soon make a bid for the national organisation of the BJP and the government, which it leads at the Centre. Should the BJP win the election in Gujarat, Modi will try to dislodge leaders such as Vajpayee whom he considers "effete", "decadent" and "useless" because they have done little to advance the muscular, virulent Hindutva agenda to which Modi is committed.

A BJP victory in Gujarat will enable Modi to emerge as the new mascot of this neo-fascist avatar of Hindutva and frontally challenge those who want Hindutva to be mixed with, or "diluted" by, a nominal commitment to the National Democratic Alliance's so-called National Agenda for Governance, which skirts core Hindu-communal issues such as the Ayodhya temple and Article 370.

Modi's takeover of the State unit of the BJP was not sudden. It has involved forging a very special alliance with the most extreme elements in the RSS and the VHP. The VHP now has branches in more than one-half of Gujarat's 18,600 villages. It more or less controls the party at the grassroots level. The second most important Minister in the Modi Cabinet is a VHP office-bearer, Govardhan Zadaphia, who holds the junior Home portfolio. Without the VHP, the BJP's election campaign would be lifeless.

The VHP received a tremendous boost through the post-Godhra wave of communal violence. It now behaves like a movement, a neo-fascist form of mass mobilisation, much in the way the precursors to the Nazis did in Germany, organising pogroms, spreading hatred against the Jews, stoking intensely militarist and national-supremacist ideas, and building up the cult of authority.

It goes without saying that the likely outcome of the coming election in Gujarat is still unclear, and certainly far from foregone. Opinion surveys show contradictory trends, and political assessments by secular activists on the ground vary a good deal. The BJP is doing its cynical utmost to exploit the Godhra carnage politically through its characteristically lurid iconography centred on Coach S-6 of the Sabarmati Express and through the manufactured religious rituals that have become the hallmark of Hindutva.

It is far from clear if even this campaign, on top of Gujarat's already sharp communal polarisation, will help the BJP overcome the combined disadvantages of incumbency, malgovernance, economic downslide and the disgracing of the party in the eyes of the liberal-secular public thanks to the pogrom it carried out with state support and connivance.

Under the BJP's rule, Gujarat's economic growth has slowed down from a high average of 14 per cent in the mid-1990s and 6 to 7 per cent in the late 1990s to only 1.1 per cent this year. The State's fiscal deficit has more than tripled to 7.5 per cent of GDP and its per capita borrowings have spiralled 15-fold. Its public finances are a mess. Things are bound to get worse in the coming months as investment flows dry up thanks to the foul reputation Gujarat has acquired as a result of the pogrom.

Ordinary people in Gujarat are deeply shocked by the Modi government's systematic undermining and suborning of the machinery of the state, by the lawlessness and constitutional breakdown that attended the butchery of Muslims, and by the practice of cruelty and sadism by prominent BJP-VHP leaders.

Popular revulsion will be a significant factor in electoral choices. The report of the Concerned Citizens' Tribunal, headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, amply documents the disgusting role played by the Sangh Parivar in organising and conducting the violence. It names names. The witnesses it met have indicted as many as 90 policemen and bureaucrats, 755 politicians and others, including six Ministers. Their names are listed in over 14 pages in the report.

There are other, more conventional, factors too at work in the election, including caste. The patidar Patels have deeply ambivalent, and in some cases hostile, feelings about the BJP, unlike in 1998, when they solidly backed the party, then led by their own Keshubhai Patel. Today, Keshubhai is a bitter man, unreconciled to Modi's takeover and wholesale transformation of the party. He has maintained a distance from the Modi campaign.

The Patels form about one-fourth of Gujarat's population. Economically and socially, they are very upwardly mobile, indeed dominant. Their influence extends into religious institutions too. The entire Swaminarayan cult which has built the world's reportedly largest Hindu temple, in England, and also owns the opulent Akshardham temple, where terrorists struck in September is very much a Patel phenomenon. There are reports that some of the Advasis and Dalits whom the VHP-BJP had lured into participating in the pogrom in areas such as Ahmedabad, Baroda and Panchmahals, now feel disillusioned and bitter. As the police and poverty catch up with them, they find themselves isolated. If a significant number of these disaffected votes go against the BJP, and most of the votes of Shankarsinh Vaghela's Rashtriya Janata Party get transferred to the Congress(I), which he now leads, the BJP will lose the election after raising the stakes sky high.

AN electoral defeat in Gujarat will be the rudest shock of the BJP's political life after the 1999 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh. It will accelerate its downturn nationally. It bears recalling that the party has lost every single State, municipal and panchayat election in the past four years (barring, with qualifications, Goa, where too it failed to win a clear majority). This will prove to the Indian public that the party is unfit to rule, that it is utterly bankrupt on policy, organisational qualities and governance, that it does not deserve another chance.

Following a defeat in Gujarat, the BJP's strength in the next Lok Sabha will probably shrink to under 100 seats. However, if it wins in Gujarat not entirely on the Hindutva identity platform, but also because of its relatively large social base and the State's long history of communal and caste polarisation it will declare this as the triumph of its hate-based politics at the core of which lies the original programme of the RSS's most important ideologue, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar. The Golwalkar Programme consists in systematically assaulting modern-liberal ideas, weakening and undermining all democratic institutions, and using coercion to disenfranchise politically the religious minorities so as to turn them into second-class citizens without any rights. This is precisely what the sarsanghachalak had outlined in so many words in We or Our Nationhood Defined, in 1938.

Vajpayee and Advani have implemented the first "parliamentary" or "mainstream" part of the Golwalkar Programme over the past four years. Now, through the Gujarat pogrom, Modi has given a live demonstration of how the second component can be put into effect. The NDA government has made a mockery of parliamentary conventions. It has communalised education and messed with the judiciary. And Modi has achieved what no other Hindutva leader did: send four lakh voters scurrying out of his State and perhaps effectively silenced millions of others at the hustings simply because they belong to a religious minority.

The two components of the Golwalkar Programme are complementary; they mutually reinforce each other. Vajpayee and Modi belong to the same political current despite differences in their political style. So it would not be entirely illogical or out of order if Modi were to displace Vajpayee after getting the Gujarat voter's mandate.

The Vajpayee leadership through a series of pusillanimous capitulations has prepared the ground on which Modi's neo-fascist Hindutva could be built. Already dispirited and compromised, it could collapse under Modi's Extreme-Right onslaught, yielding to a new, aggressively communal, adventurist and ultra-sectarian dispensation a kind of Hindu Taliban, which will push India back towards the Middle Ages. This will be a social and political nightmare for a billion people.

However, India stands at a fateful crossroads, when the exact opposite could also happen. The BJP could well lose in Gujarat. If that happens, its government at the Centre is unlikely to last long. In fact, it could collapse like a house of cards. In that event, a mid-term election is likely to throw up a secular government and help the nation return to long-neglected social and economic agendas and to bread-and-butter issues. The public must devoutly hope for the second outcome in the interests of secularism, democracy, political decency and social sanity.

But India's secular political leaders must do more. They should all go to Gujarat with a collective jana yatra and campaign against the BJP, exposing its vile communal character and isolating it politically. The secular intelligentsia too must intervene to mobilise public opinion against the neo-fascist movement unfolding before us. The Gujarat election is crucial, indeed of seminal, importance. The fight must be joined in right earnest.

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