India's Far
Right Drops Its Mask
By J. Sri Raman
04 November, 2004
t r u t h
o u t
What
does the far right do, when the people reject it in an election? The
question may be of current interest to curious - and optimistic - Americans.
Very distant and vastly different, India may still suggest an answer.
The larger answer
from India is that the far right takes from its trouncing exactly the
opposite of the lesson the people sought to teach it. It becomes more
assertive and aggressive. It opts to assert its unmasked identity. It
does so on the assumption that this will pave the way for its return
to power.
The answer, of
course, has taken an Indian form. No one ever considered George W. Bush
a mask that concealed the US establishment's megalomania and militarism.
The Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), the political front of the far-right 'family' (or 'parivar'),
on the other hand, has dropped its 'mask' by dumping former Prime Minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee as its decorative head. Former party ideologue
N. Govindacharya, in a moment of clarity and candor, once called Vajpayee
'our mask,' and the label has stuck. Former Deputy Prime Minister Lal
Krishna Advani is the face - real, revealing and reassuring, according
to the party - that has replaced the 'mask.'
Vajpayee has served
as the mask the party puts on, in power or in proximity to it. He has
played to near-perfection the pretended role of a consensus-seeking
politician in a coalition regime or a broad alliance bidding for power.
Ever a loyal member of the parivar, he has still acquired a liberal
image thanks to persistent efforts by powerful interests. The efforts
have aimed at deceiving India into believing that, with him at the helm,
the BJP and the motley combine it headed presented a safe bet for the
country, including its minorities.
They have continued
to call him 'the right man in the wrong party,' though he has been fully
at home in it for four decades now. As Prime Minister, he proclaimed
India a nuclear-weapon state, but they have continued to praise him
as an apostle of peace. He presided over the parivar offensives against
Muslim and Christian minorities. He watched on benignly as Gujarat chief
minister Narendra Modi waded through blood to the State-level throne.
And still they hail Vajpayee as the voice of sanity and even secularism
in the BJP.
The media came
to believe in his plaster-saint image, one largely of its own making.
It succeeded in selling the image to a section of the middle class.
The masses as a whole, however, have preferred to judge Vajpayee by
his deeds rather than by his verbal jugglery.
Advani, in contrast,
has for two decades been assigned the function of the party's true face,
to be revealed whenever the 'mask' is needed no more. Whenever, indeed,
as now, the party feels the need to doff the 'mask.' He acquired his
image as the spearhead of the Ayodhya agitation, which culminated in
the crumbling of the Babri Mosque in 1992, and its bloody aftermath.
The revanchist campaign yielded the party rich political returns, making
it the main opposition in India's parliament.
Advani was declared
the BJP president, for the third time in his political career, on October
19. The event has raised expectations in the party of a repetition of
the post-Ayodhya reversal of the BJP's fortunes. In almost all other
quarters, it has also raised apprehensions of more Ayodhyas, in the
sense of socially divisive and destructive agitations.
Advani may have
led the rabble-to-rubble Ayodhya agitation, but he enjoys the backing
of BJP intellectuals, including editors and journalists of dubious eminence.
While venting scorn at vandal campaigns of the kind, they have always
voiced unabashed admiration for the master tactician who can thus mobilize
mass support for militarism along with 'market reforms.' The same opinion-makers
can be counted on to lend a similar legitimacy to the coming Advani
campaigns.
Advani has announced
no campaign so far. He is, however, trying to rake up the Ayodhya issue
again, promising a Hindu temple in the place of the razed mosque if
the BJP returns to power. It may take a while for the party to revive
the issue. A more immediate threat, meanwhile, is an incendiary campaign
against 'demographic invasion' from neighboring Bangladesh (coupled
with a 'jihad' against Indian Muslims allegedly conspiring to outgrow
the Hindu population!).
Sections of the
populace do see the need to counter such campaigns, but they lack political
support. If the Congress Party, heading the coalition government in
New Delhi, feels any concern over the coming far-right offensive, it
is a closely guarded secret.
It is not only
the BJP that would seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from the election
results. The Congress has also, apparently, drawn the conclusion that
it fended off the far right only by avoiding an ideological fight. It
will be for the people to drive home the lesson that both the parties
are anxious to disregard.
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A freelance journalist and a peace activist of India, J. Sri Raman is
the author of Flashpoint (Common Courage Press, USA).
© : t r u t h
o u t 2004