POLITICS-INDIA: Hindu Fundamentalism in Retreat

• by Ranjit Devraj (new delhi)
• Wednesday, June 17, 2009
• Inter Press Service

That the BJP is on a downslide is clear from the fact that it lost seven percent of its vote-share from its peak of 25.6 percent in 1998 when it stormed into parliament - leading a coalition of regional parties called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

As the 2009 election campaign picked up it became clear that the BJP had no agenda to offer the voters beyond negativism and cheap rabble-rousing that directly targeted India’s large Muslim minority.

Highly visible in the campaign was Narendra Modi, chief minister of western Gujarat and known best for the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom he presided over in his state. The pogrom resulted in over 1,000 deaths and the displacement of 150,000 people.

Modi was even projected as the next prime minister by sections of the BJP, much to the annoyance of the party’s regional allies in the NDA.

Even more perniciously the BJP leadership was seen standing by venomous campaign speeches made by Varun Gandhi - BJP candidate for the Pilibhit seat in northern Uttar Pradesh state and member of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty - that were serious enough to warrant his arrest.

The Election Commission of India told the BJP that if it fielded Varun Gandhi as a candidate it should be prepared to take responsibility for his speeches. But BJP managers turned him into a star campaigner - and paid a heavy penalty in terms of lost Hindu votes.

Brajesh Mishra, aide to BJP leader and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became the first high-profile figure associated with the party to pinpoint Varun Gandhi’s speeches as a major cause for the BJP’s defeat in an interview given to Shekhar Gupta, editor of the Indian Express newspaper.

Mishra said, during the interview, that the BJP had made a grave error in failing to censure Varun Gandhi and his 'repugnant' statements.

'I want the BJP to survive and thrive,' the former career diplomat said. 'This country needs the BJP. It needs two national parties. Otherwise if the BJP were to, God forbid, disappear, then within four to five years, regional forces will once again come to the fore and we will again be faced with a very, very unstable situation.'

But the BJP, faced as it is with several crises, including one over leadership following the retirement of the aging Vajpayee, seems ill-prepared to match the Congress party which took care to nurture its image as a secular party that stands for all people regardless of caste, religion or ethnicity.

'If things continue in this way it could well mean the demise of the BJP,' said Qamar Agha, a well-known academic and political commentator who is currently attached to the Jamia Millia Islamia University in the national capital.

Agha said much of the BJP’s success in forging the NDA coalition was due to the all-round respect Vajpayee commanded and his readiness to compromise with allies on such contentious issues as the building of a temple dedicated to the deity Rama on the site where Hindu zealots had demolished the 17th century Babri Masjid.

Agha told IPS that while the campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid had caught the imagination of the Hindu middle classes during the 1980s and 1990s, a new, forward-looking generation had grown up in the intervening period that had no interest in righting the wrongs of history.

'Varun Gandhi’s rabble rousing had the effect of driving away Hindu voters who were more interested in the potential they see in an economically burgeoning country led by the Congress party. As for the Muslims they would never have voted for the BJP anyway,' Agha said.

India's 150 million-strong Muslim population - second in size only to that of Indonesia - has the ability to influence the outcome of any election by voting as a bloc. In the just concluded elections the Congress party was able to attract significant sections of Muslim voters in the biggest states of northern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Agha said the BJP is now caught in a bind. 'If it reverts to fundamentalism it will lose more of its regional allies, and if it abandons it altogether it will risk losing the support of the Sangh Parivar [family of pro-Hindu groups, especially the militant Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh which provides the party muscle and ideology].'

Nothing is more illustrative of the bind that the BJP is caught in than the spectacular manner in which its leaders and ideologues have begun blaming each other for losing two elections in a row to its archrival, the Congress party.

Sudheendra Kulkarni, a close aide of Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP’s shadow prime minister, has accused the Sangh Parivar groups, in an open letter, of hobbling the campaign by projecting Modi as a possible alternative.

'The mentality of the large section of the party [BJP] is so dogmatic that any idea of promoting the welfare and development of Indian Muslims is quickly brushed aside as appeasement. In the five long years since 2004, the BJP did not come up with a single worthwhile initiative that Muslims could welcome,' Kulkarni wrote in his now controversial letter.

Kulkarni said in his letter that although Advani was officially projected as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate the fact that he was compelled by the Sangh Parivar to resign as the party’s president in 2005 for describing Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, as ‘secular’ had hurt his image.

Advani, who continues to be the leader of the opposition in parliament, has disassociated himself from Kulkarni’s opinions, but many believe that he was behind the open letter.

Concerned by the flurry of negative letters and critical interviews given to the press by top BJP functionaries such as Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha (both served as cabinet ministers under Vajpayee), the party’s president Rajnath Singh issued a ‘gag order’ last week.

'We are shying away from pinpointing our weaknesses and fixing responsibility,' said Yahwant Sinha who on Saturday announced his resignation as vice-president of the party. 'Those who were responsible for the management of the campaign have already made their views public through interviews and articles in the media, drawn their conclusions, apportioned blame, and given themselves a clean chit,' Sinha lamented.

Sinha has called for the resignation of all office bearers of the party and the posts filled up through the 'process of election laid down by our constitution.'

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service