BJP tests the waters

The military junta in Islamabad continues to harbour terrorists. It gives them assistance to cross into India to foment trouble and kill innocents as in Jammu. And it will be ready to offer bases in Pakistan to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. The State Department does not seem to mind the two-faced policy. Nor does it realise how dangerous it is for India. The Hindutva forces are bound to use the Jammu incident to push their agenda. The Jammu tragedy may let them off the hook after what they did in Gujarat.

The BJP and the Sangh Parivar are trying to change the very secular ethos of India. The focus of their debate is not Gujarat but whether the minorities have equal right to grow and develop according to their wishes and genius. The RSS has gone to the extent of saying that the minorities have to win the goodwill of the majority.

Why has the BJP altered its agenda when it is part of the National Democratic Alliance? One, the BJP believes that the NDA constituents, particularly the Samata Party of George Fernandes and the Janata Dal of Sharad Yadav, have lost so much following that they have to depend on the Sangh Parivar to return to Parliament. Two, after covering more than half of the five-year term, the Parivar wants to test the waters 8212; whether the Hindutva card can pay dividends at the next polls or not.

What was once a hidden policy to destroy secularism has now become an open creed of the rulers. The nation is now being sold the concept of theocracy which it had rejected. Anti-secular elements were lying low because their whispering campaign against the minorities did not find enough ears. Now they believe the seeds of hatred they have been sowing over the years are beginning to sprout. The RSS believes that the minorities are lesser people because they are not Hindus. The BJP is no more apologetic to use the word, Hindutva, which the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines as: 8220;a very strong sense of Hindu identity, seeking the creation of a Hindu state.8221; How does this definition square with our national struggle slogan: Hindi hain hum watan hey Hindustan hamara We are Indians and our country is India?

Home Minister L.K. Advani says that preaching Hindutva is not a crime. Legally it is not. Emotionally it is. This betrays the secular ethos, which inspired the independence movement. Freedom did not mean the establishment of a Hindu Raj but a society, which would know no religious division, no economic or social inequality. The Constitution embodied those aspirations. Most people rejected the two-nation theory because they felt that religion never determined nationhood. Religion was a private affair. If a person changed his religion, he did not become a member of a separate nation overnight. To found a Hindu state was far from the thinking of those who fought for our freedom. Had this been the case, the 82 per cent of Hindus would have declared India a Hindu polity after Independence. They did not do so because that was not the ethos of the national struggle.

What the Parivar is trying to do is to destroy this ethos of our freedom struggle. Thousands went to jail, thousands sacrificed everything they had and numberless died unsung and unwept. None had expected to get anything for himself. Nor did many believe that they would see the end of the foreign rule in their lifetime. Their dream was that of a free, secular and democratic country. They honestly believed that the gulf between the Hindus and the Muslims would be bridged when the British left. When I met Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, in Afghanistan after the 1969 riots in Gujarat, he said that they had thought that the Hindu-Muslim problem was a British creation and would disappear the moment they left. This did not happen because there was a force, however small, which believed in the Hindu Rashtra and went on working for it. Others took it for granted that the composite culture was so well established and so assertive that secular belief did not require any fostering. Muslims were left alone and no real effort was made to bring them to the mainstream. Most of them lived in their own world. Primarily, they withdrew because there was hardly any space given to them. A few among them took to violence that could be interpreted as desperation. But it was not the community8217;s defiance.

Hindu communalists picked on instances of Muslim fundamentalism here and there to pursue the agenda of Hindutva. And their pet theme to defend their venom was that the Muslims were being 8220;pampered8221;. The fact is that the Muslims do not get jobs, admission to schools and colleges and not even a house in a decent locality. Given an opportunity in the armed forces, they have proved they are in no way behind the Hindus 8212; from the Kashmir to the Kargil war. There are black sheep among the Muslims. But the party believing in a Hindu state demonises the Muslims to justify their communal line. However, Gujarat has harmed the BJP so much that the Hindus who have been on the periphery have distanced themselves from the party. The majority in the minority community has faith in a pluralistic society.

Fires of communalism, if allowed to burn, may decimate our pluralistic society, without which democracy may not last. Even liberals in the BJP may find that power is going into the hands of hardliners in the party. The concept of Hindutva will strengthen them to the proportion the composite culture weakens.