A manipulative mindset

Reluctant as he was, Bakht merely said that one day before the swearing-in of the cabinet, Prime Minister Atal Behari Va-jpayee rang him up and told him that he would be appointed the governor of a state. He said he declined the offer on the phone itself.

This was no reply to my question.Why had he been dropped, I persisted in asking him. Still no response. Instead, he asked me whether he had performed badly as minister of industry, a position he held in the last BJP-led coalition. 8220;I settled the Maruti problem,8221; he observed. There was a dispute between the Japanese firm and New Delhi over the chairmanship of the company8217;s board.

Realising what he said had not satisfied me, he told me he would prefer to keep quiet 8220;for the time being8221;. Disillusionment was writ large on his face. I recalled how the party had to placate him when he had refused to join in the first 13-day Vajpayee government because of the insignificant portfolio allotted to him. He remembered that. Still he did not open his mouth. After my persistent queries, he talked a bit only a bit. He said he had noticed that they8217; had included two Muslim bacchas in the government. 8220;Where is the Muslim?8221; he asked. Indeed, Bakht had stood like a rock when the Muslim community had run him down and called him a quisling.

8220;Iwish I knew why I have been dro-pped,8221; Bakht said. It could not be because he was getting on in years because the age of Home Minister L.K. Advani and Bakht is more or less the same. Did Bakht cross someone8217;s path in the BJP or that of its me-ntor, the RSS? He is not that type of a person. If Jagmohan could be included in the cabinet at the last minute at the RSS8217;s bidding, Bakht could have been accommodated after Vajpayee8217;s no8217;.

The air would have cleared if Bakht had spoken out like Arif Beg from Madhya Pradesh when he was not given a ticket in the recent election. He attacked the BJP directly and openly for its 8220;anti-Muslim bi-as8221; and went over the various incidents of humiliation he had experienced when he was in the party. He left the BJP. Bakht has, however, ma-i ntained a sphinx-like silence and has continued to be in the BJP despite losing face. Vaj-payee had said on the cabinet formation that there was no pressure on him from his party. Could it be from any other quarter? Some persons who haveleft the BJP say that the RSS knows how to use people and then dump them.

The case of Bakht reconfirms the suspicion that Muslims are not in the reckoning of the RSS, however long and loyally they may serve. He was useful at one time when the credentials of the BJP were certainly parochial and known solely as the party of Hindus. Apparently, the climate has chan-ged because the party has acquired so many allies, from Mamata Banerjee to M. Karunanidhi and from George Fernandes to Sharad Yadav, who defend their presence in the BJP-led government by saying that the blunt communal edge of the party has been rounded off. But is that the case?

When I was talking to Bakht, Ramakri-shna Hegde was standing by our side. He quoted Emerson to say that life was replete with betrayals. He did not clarify what he had in mind. He sympathised with Bakht but refused to draw any lesson from his case. He did not blame Vajpayee for his being dropped from the cabinet. Instead, he picked on Fernandes who, he said, did notinclude his name in the list he forwarded to the Pr-ime Minister. Hegde co-nceded that the Lok Sh-akti8217;s alliance with the BJP in Karnataka had not worked. But he put the blame on the BJP which, according to him, did not transfer its votes to the allies.

If this is true the BJP or, for that matter, the RSS, has a long-term po-licy to grow by using so-meone here and someone there. Hegde and Bakht fitted into its scheme of things for a particular period and for a particular purpose. When that was over they were redundant. The fault is theirs for not having assessed the true nature of the organisation, which considers individuals expendable.

Maybe, there is something in what Subramanian Swamy, once part of the inner circle of the BJP-RSS, has said in an article: 8220;The BJP is a political front of the RSS and the RSS is a fascist par excellence. They are far more deceptive, devious and sophisticated than Indian intellectuals give them credit for8230; The nation thus stands at the crossroads of history such asGermany did stand in 1933. The RSS juggernaut is now decisively on the move. Since the secular parties have failed to learn from history, they are condemned to repeat it8230;8221;

I think it is not the country which is at the crossroads but Vajpayee. He represents the liberal element in the party. The nation has come to trust him. Can he rise above the RSS pressure? And can he convert the National Democratic Alliance into a secular front to fight the Hindutva and communal forces which are harming the country8217;s composite culture and te-lling upon India8217;s integrity and democratic structure? How can his party be a member of the same parivar which has the Vishwa HIndu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal as its members? Currently, they are damaging the country8217;s image of pluralistic society by a campaign of calumny against the Christians.

And it is time Vajpayee stopped onslaughts on the basics, for example, education, which is sought to be saffronised. All the appointments at high places in the fields of education andscientific research reflect the intent to move the thinking in a particular direction. Are there no historians or educationists who have remained untainted by one ideology or the other? Rewriting history is a subjective effort at any time. It will be more so now. It will become a point of view, not history.

I sympathised with Jaswant Singh when he said in the Rajya Sabha that they too loved knowledge and did not want to shut it out. He was replying to a short discussion on a circular which said that the teaching of communism had been stopped. It turned out to be a printing mistake. Still he must ask himself why an impression has spread that his party is obscurantist. Why are liberals willing to believe the worst when it comes to the BJP and the RSS? It is because they have acquired an image of communalism and jingoism. Anything done by them creates suspicion because their bona fides are in doubt.