Home truths

Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani8217;s words in Lok Sabha on Monday are likely to resonate for a long while, and not just inside Parliamen...

Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani8217;s words in Lok Sabha on Monday are likely to resonate for a long while, and not just inside Parliament. His reply to a discussion in Lok Sabha on Gujarat was a crucial and enormously reassuring intervention in a larger debate that the political battle for Gujarat has once again propelled centrestage.

It has been clear that the fight in Gujarat is not simply over the leadership of one state and that it isn8217;t simply the BJP versus the Congress. At stake is the very idea of India, and the more vicious tug of war appears to be taking place within the ranks of the saffron parivar 8212; between those who wield Hindutva to undercut India8217;s secularism and those who believe in a less restrictive, more inclusive definition of Hinduism that is at ease with the secular principle.

Advani8217;s statement in Parliament 8212; in which he clearly enunciated the belief that India never was conceived as a theocratic 8216;Hindu8217; state, and should never be one 8212; does something very important: it separates the fringe from the mainstream. The senior BJP leader has unequivocally distanced his party, and the government it leads, from the divisive and sectarian agenda of the VHP and Bajrang Dal.

The VHP was first off the block and ally Shiv Sena has followed suit. Both have railed at Advani for what they see as his betrayal, in Thackeray8217;s words, of 8216;Hindus, Hindutva, and the nation8217;. There is irony here. The man who led the rath yatra and who is credited with building Hindu nationalism into a winning electoral strategy, now dubbed by his friends and allies as 8216;pseudo secular8217; 8212; an epithet that owes much of its currency to his politics.

But more than the irony, it is the political implications that deserve our attention. Advani8217;s statement impresses upon all those who sloganeer about a Hindu raj in which the minorities have no place, a theocratic state much like Pakistan, the extent of their political isolation. No more can they flaunt their agenda of hate under cover of their kinship with the party in power. His statement extricates both the BJP, and its conception of Hindutva, from their rabid grip.

Advani8217;s intervention reassures all those who believe in the secular way of life that the VHP-Bajrang Dal won8217;t be able to wrest the 8216;Hindu agenda8217; and walk away with it. More importantly, it holds out hope that if militant Hindutvawadis step out of line, the BJP-led government is committed to reining them in, in Gujarat and elsewhere.