EDITORIAL

Corporate Glitz & Communalism – A Recipe

For Disaster

FOR a party that issued a personal photo album of Atal Behari Vajpayee in lieu of a manifesto seeking votes from the people, the BJP has come a long way to decry personality-based politics!  It is abundantly clear that BJP is only compounding its confusion in trying to understand the reasons behind the drubbing it received at the hustings. Vajpayee had earlier blamed Narendra Modi and Gujarat for the BJP’s electoral debacle.  The BJP president, on the other hand, thundered at the recent national executive that, “unlike most parties in the Indian political system, the BJP is not a personality based party”.  Even in retracing their steps, the BJP does not seem to have either the grace or humility.  Its entire poll campaign was conducted by building a larger than life image of Atal Behari Vajpayee.  The BJP drum-beaters even went to the extent of hailing him as a statesman taller than Jawaharlal Nehru!  Even national dailies claiming secular credentials bent over backwards to display such nauseating sycophancy. 

Unable to convince anybody, leave alone themselves, that the results of elections 2004 were not against the BJP but an `aggregate of state level alliances’, the BJP is yet to emerge with any coherent leave alone convincing explanation.  They are refusing to see the writing on the wall that is staring at them as plainly as ever possible. The Indian people rose to the occasion in these elections to celebrate the diversity that is India, rejecting the BJP and the RSS communal octopus which had been seeking to foist a communal sectarian  uniformity upon India’s vast diversity.  Amongst other things, it was this RSS/BJP game plan that the Indian people rejected in these elections.

The refusal to accept this reality means passing the buck.  Prominent BJP allies like the TDP blamed the BJP for its defeat.  The BJP, in turn, blamed the allies for its defeat. And so goes on the musical chairs. 

It is, therefore, neither unnatural nor surprising that the BJP should fall back on its core ideology.  For once, the BJP president was candid when he admitted that there is no question of returning to Hindutva, “because we never left it nor will we ever leave it”. 

The BJP functions as the political arm of the RSS.  The raison-d-etre of the RSS is to seek the transformation of the secular democratic republican character of India into a rabidly communal fascistic `Hindu Rashtra’.  The BJP has, therefore, reiterated that Hindutva, Bharatiyata and Indianness are synonymous.  This is nothing but the paraphrasing of the RSS dictum that Hindus alone are nationalists.  The patriotic credentials of all others are suspect.  It is, therefore, not surprising that Narendra Modi stays on and that Gujarat continues to remain the Hindutva laboratory to be emulated as experiments elsewhere. 

Herein lies the danger to India as we know of it today.  In their effort to reclaim some of their lost support base, the RSS/BJP may well raise the communal temperatures.  These dangers cannot be underestimated. The fact that they had chosen to hold their meeting at the most expensive seven-star hotel in Mumbai also reveals their mindset to cling on to a grandeur that is alien to the vast majority of Indians. The corporate glitz combined with communal fundamentalism is a lethal recipe for disaster.  The Indian people, therefore, cannot be complacent and rest on the laurels of this electoral victory. The communal virus that has infected our body politic must be exorcised.  This is a continuous battle.