Gujarat: Lessons For Secular Forces

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

THE BJP’s victory in Gujarat has come at a time when it was getting increasingly isolated from the mass of the people because of its retrograde economic policies, its pro-US foreign policy, its strident communal drive, and its incessant efforts to saffronise the whole state apparatus as well as educational institutions. The series of defeats the people have inflicted upon the party and its allies in the last four and a half years has been reflective of this very isolation.

It was, for example, not very long ago when the people inflicted crushing defeats upon the party and its allies in UP, Uttaranchal, Punjab and Manipur. Nor could the DMK, a constituent of the NDA, put up any creditable performance in Pondicherry and Tamilnadu. The BJP also suffered a serious rout in Jammu & Kashmir where it lost all its sitting seats, winning just one seat elsewhere.

Nay, this isolation of the party was even reaching such a pitch as to give rise to fissures in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

SHRILL CLAIMS

IN such a situation, the victory has indeed helped revive the sagging morale of the Sangh Parivar and BJP leadership. VHP leaders like Praveen Togadia even went to the extent of bragging that India will have a Hindu Rashtra “within two years,” and even asked the minorities to accept that India is indeed a Hindu Rashtra. Some BJP leaders also said they would replicate the Gujarat experiment in other states, notably in Delhi and Rajasthan. It will be noted that as many as 11 states are to go to assembly polls next year.

How far their shrill claims are justified, only time will tell. There is no doubt that, in the short run, the BJP will make some gain out of its victory in Gujarat. Fissures within the NDA are likely to get glossed over for the time being. Dissidence in UP BJP has subsided though it is because of some other reasons too, including the open misuse of repressive machinery against dissident leaders. Outfits of the Sangh Parivar will redouble their efforts. 

Yet, despite whatever claims the BJP leaders or VHP stalwarts may make, it will be too much to believe that what they call “the Gujarat experiment” may be replicated in the whole of this country. This is certainly not to minimise the threats the Sangh Parivar poses to our national unity and secular way of life. But at the same time one must not give in to the Parivar’s propaganda either, as that may lead to underestimating the potential the people of our country have about defeating whatever threats to our syncretic culture may arise.

Here, one must also not forget that Gujarat is the only major state among the BJP-ruled states. This was the reason that, in view of the high stake involved in the state, outfits of the Sangh Parivar went all out to save the BJP from a defeat here. At the same time, Gujarat is a state where the BJP (earlier the Jan Sangh) has been concentrating for at least three decades and a half, and the state has seen the highest number of riots since independence. Yet, there are weighty factors the party will have to contend with in the country as a whole. The way the party formed a government in Goa by resorting to manipulations, and the unscrupulous methods it used to sneak its way into the government in UP, have already given a severe jolt to its image all over the country.

MAIN REASON FOR VICTORY

AS for Gujarat itself, the results need to be analysed with a degree of caution, as the outcome is not as flawless as the BJP may like to make the people believe. A region-wise analysis will indeed help in bringing out the truth behind the shrill claims being made today, and this is what most of the newspapers have sought to do. In fact, it was Central Gujarat where the BJP made most of its gains. Here the Sangh Parivar’s strident communal drive, leading to the massacre of Muslims for no less than four months, did pay the party a dividend and the BJP increased its seats in this region by encashing the consequent communal polarisation. The party made the biggest gain in districts like Panchmahal (wherein Godhra is located), Dahod and Vadodara --- places where the post-Godhra violence continued unabated for months. The BJP won as many as 26 seats from these three districts alone. It also made some gains in parts of South Gujarat, mainly in Dang district, where the Parivar has earned notoriety for its virulent attacks on tribal Christians. 

But the party failed to put up the same kind of performance in other regions of the state. In Saurashtra region, for instance, the BJP had cornered 45 out of 52 seats last time, but its seat tally here came down to 37 in the recent elections. And the reason? As an editorial in The Hindu (December 17) put it, “This is a region where Godhra had no impact at all.” It is another matter that the Congress failed to benefit from the anti-incumbency factor that was at work here even before the elections, and its seat tally remained restricted to just 14.

But the ruling party suffered its worst in Kutch district and adjoining region. The Congress won four out of six seats in Kutch district alone; here even a BJP stalwart like former chief minister Suresh Mehta suffered a defeat. The region, that suffered a terrible earthquake on January 26 last year, has been seething with anti-BJP discontent because of the party’s dismal failure on the relief and rehabilitation front. It is not that the state government was facing a resource crunch in this regard. The fact is that, apart from what it got from a friendly government in Delhi, the state government also got a lot of cash, relief materials and other resources from non-government sources in the country and from abroad. The fact is that the state government got more than the estimated requirement of Rs 25,000 crore for relief and rehabilitation work. Therefore, if the BJP suffered a setback in the region, it was because of its sheer mismanagement of the resources. Not to talk of how the Sangh Parivar outfits practised discrimination on religious grounds after taking control of the relief and rehabilitation measures, they even indulged in large scale corruption for petty gains, as the newspaper reports in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake would tell you.

The lesson is obvious. That there was a degree of resentment against the BJP in the state, is evident from the fact that at least ten former ministers as well as the speaker and deputy speaker of the dissolved assembly have been routed. In this situation, if the BJP not only won the polls but even increased its seat tally and vote figure, it was because of the extreme polarisation on communal grounds that it engineered, mainly in the Central Gujarat region.

THREATS FOR FUTURE

THIS brings into sharp relief the divisive potential of rabid communalism and the threats it poses to our body politic. The example of Gujarat shows that if ever the people get divided on communal lines, all weighty issues and burning problems facing them get relegated to the background. Moreover, this is what an anti-people party like the BJP badly needs and tries for, in order to divert the people’s attention from its own follies in the economic and other fields and to divert their discontent into fratricidal channels.  

If BJP leaders are today talking of replicating “the Gujarat experiment” in other states, the logic can be understood in the light of their above-mentioned need as well. This gives one a ground to be apprehensive that the saffron brigade may intensify its communal drive in the days to come.

The apprehension gets strengthened from the statements made by the prime minister, deputy prime minister and party president at a meeting of the BJP parliamentary party on December 17. While they claimed that not Hindutva but development will be their poll plank in the coming days, a closer look at what they said in this meeting does not leave anyone in doubt that all their talk of “development, speedy development and balanced development” is nothing but meant for public consumption. 

As for the prime minister, he is reported to have said at the meeting, “A number of elections are coming up. It is being asked whether we will replicate the Gujarat formula in other states. We ask them whether they will adopt the Godhra formula again.” But this glib talk, and our prime minister is known for glib talk, only shows that even this so-called moderate has no remorse over what took place after the heinous Godhra incident. For, what is this “Gujarat formula” if not a pogrom to exterminate the minorities!

On the same day, however, leaders of the VHP again issued a threat (sic!) that the BJP must either stick to the Hindutva agenda or be prepared to lose the VHP’s support. Togadia even declared that “Our commitment is not to the NDA but only to Hindutva and there is no compromise on this.” To the BJP, he said, “We cannot side with those who are not for Hindutva. Now they have to decide where they are going to be.”

Here, the main point is not whether the VHP will ever be able to go against the BJP. For, both the VHP and BJP are nothing but wings of the RSS, and the VHP cannot dare go against the BJP till the RSS does not desert it, which is a far-fetched assumption. The main point to grasp is how the Parivar continues to speak so many things at one and the same time. In the Gujarat polls too, going by their own statements, Godhra was an issue and Godhra was not an issue. In parliament, Advani assured the nation that India would never become a theocratic state and, the very next day, the VHP contradicted him, even lambasted him, of course with the tacit support of the RSS. Yet, while pontificating on secularism in parliament, the way Advani sought to denigrate others by accusing them of “pseudo-secularism” left one in no doubt as to what he aimed at. And now, while one outfit of the RSS glibly talks of development, another outfit of the same brigade says: Hindutva and nothing but Hindutva! This is the way the brigade, in a truly fascistic style, has been trying to mislead the masses and continues to try doing the same.

How the brigade misled the masses in Gujarat is also clear from how it misconstrued an appeal, issued from the Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad, as a fatwa, regardless of what a fatwa actually means and the fact that no one except an all-India board has the authority to issue a fatwa. The minorities too have to learn from this episode and desist from dragging religion into politics, so as not to give the BJP any handle. However, one will appreciate that it was a protest delegation from Muslims themselves that told the Imam of the said mosque that “it was not his place to say who should be elected in a secular democracy” (The Times of India, editorial, December 17).  

LESSONS FOR OTHERS

THE Gujarat polls have a lesson for other forces as well. For months, we were trying to impress upon the Congress, NCP, Samajwadi Party and others the paramount importance of coming together, so as to give the BJP a one to one fight in the state. But, unfortunately, neither the Congress nor others thought it necessary to do so. The day Kamal Nath landed in Ahmedabad, he said the Congress did not need anyone’s support to win. Others too failed to draw lessons from Goa’s experience where a division of votes only helped the BJP, and staked unrealistic claims. Moreover, it was not a question of winning a few seats in Gujarat. The basic need was to tell the people in practice that all the secular forces were one in taking the threats to our national unity head on. Sadly, this very message did not go to the masses.

Needless to say, the Congress will have to accept its responsibility for the Gujarat debacle as the major party against the BJP. Not only that, the Congress party took the line of soft Hindutva that made it unable to properly demarcate itself from the BJP and Sangh Parivar. As The Indian Express editorial on December 17 asked, “Will it (Congress --- HSS), at long last, recognise what an abysmal failure its policy of soft Hindutva has been? That the lamb does not survive by donning the coat of the wolf?” It said, “The party, in the process, failed to protect the idea of a united India. It is an idea that the Congress has long claimed for itself but has also long neglected.”

On the same day, The Asian Age editorial recalled the instances in which the Congress capitulated before the communal and fundamentalist forces, like the Shah Bano case, the permission given for shilanyas near the disputed site, Rajiv Gandhi’s initiation of his 1989 poll campaign from Ayodhya on the slogan of ushering into a Ramrajya, and the way the Congress government looked on when the Babri Masjid was being brought down in Ayodhya. Then it says, “The party has still not recovered its base in Uttar Pradesh…. Instead of learning from the Uttar Pradesh experiment, the Congress repeated it in Gujarat with the result speaking for itself in the state. Soft Hindutva will not work for the party that will have to revive the spirit and the ideology that won freedom for India over 50 years ago.”    

In fact, as the CPI(M) Polit Bureau has pointed out, instead of taking the communal forces head on, the Congress underplayed the communal agenda and thereby only helped the communal forces legitimise their disruptive campaign. It is thus certain that if the Congress repeats this line in the coming assembly elections, it will have nothing but sheer humiliation in store for it. Some of its state governments, like that in Rajasthan, are already facing mass discontent because of their LPG policies and, if this course is not reversed, only the communal forces will exploit this discontent. In this regard, the party will do well to ponder why the BJP won all the three seats in the by-elections in Rajasthan. The party’s alliance with pro-extremist INPT in Tripura has also put a big question mark before its credentials as a nationalist, secular party.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the coming year is going to be crucial for the country and also for the secular and democratic forces, as the threat to our national unity is bound to multiply several-fold. If these forces think of resorting to short cuts, and if they fail to put up a united fight against the communal threat, it will be only at their own cost. There is no alternative but to confront the communal forces with determination and unitedly foil their game of misleading the masses on the issue of “secularism versus pseudo-secularism.” The people have to be told that secularism means complete separation of religion from politics, and not what the BJP wants us to believe. Further, the privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation policies of the BJP-led central government are already causing discontent among the masses, and if the non-BJP forces come forward to channelise this discontent, they will not only defeat the BJP but also pave the way for the country’s regeneration.