Scarred by Kargil

Intimidated, terrorised. Still, they are refusing to withdraw. Intellectually tyrannised, nationally questioned. Still, they are refusing...

Intimidated, terrorised. Still, they are refusing to withdraw. Intellectually tyrannised, nationally questioned. Still, they are refusing to be silenced. Welcome to the Kargil War II, waged by the Congress Party, which is all set to cross the Line of Containment, unilaterally drawn by the BJP government. Fighting from the vanguard, CWC member Rajesh Pilot is taking his party into the hidden deceptions of the Kargil War. He wants to break the stonewall of Kargil evasions, he wants to know the cause for creating 400 war heroes, he wants to question the BJP8217;s paranoia about questions, he wants to know when-why-how. As the premier opposition party, the Congress has the right to know, it is the party8217;s right to get engaged in a healthy post-Kargil strategic dissection. It cannot afford to be distant from the national cause, it is, after all, the Indian National Congress. But, says Rajesh Pilot, the party cannot do its national duty because the ruling party is claiming absolute copyright over everything that isnational. Pilot and his fellow Congressmen are not allowed to dissent, the most honourable responsibility of the national opposition, because the political atmosphere is vitiated by monopoly nationalism. Intellectuals like Rajesh Pilot are terrorissed by a nationalist version of McCarthyism.

O really? Intellectual. Dissent. Terror. Has Pilot created his own private Soviet Union? Is he having nightmares about an impending Gulag? Is he expecting post-press conference midnight knocks? Are there thought police in saffron lurking outside the Congress headquarters? If war is an exaggeration of national assertion, warspeak as practised by the Congress and its spokesmen is an exaggeration of not intellectual tyranny but intellectual poverty. To give Pilot the benefit of the doubt, what is the intellectual or national status of the Congress dissent, the Congress questions? The party felt the need to make some noises, for the other party, the ruling nationalist party, was getting good grades from within and withoutthe country, that too without trying so nationalistically hard. It said the soldiers were wonderfully heroic and the government was pathetically inept. How original, as if the soldiers were mercenaries from Mesopotamia. It made an installation of bad taste out of an upside-down Lahore bus and called it the cadaver of the Lahore process. It wanted a good slice of the nationalist cake the leader was in need of more nationalist nutrition on election eve, but it refused to endorse the nationalist government as the war leader. The dilemma of the national opposition.

Perhaps the time has come for Pilot8217;s party to get real, to get even a bit intellectual, and stop whining. Sadly, the brain cells of the Congress party ceased to be active long, long ago. Kargil was not a test of nationalism. And the so-called war government was not hawking the hardware of nationalism in the flea markets of low politics. Certainly L.K. Advani didn8217;t resemble Saddam Hussain, despite the moustache. The Congress problem is that it hastaken its opposition role quite literally. Opposition in a democracy doesn8217;t mean oppose and be damned. Certainly not during a war-like situation. Dissent is not negativism, Pilot and his party leadership know. Their intellectual dissent somehow failed to make that distinction. They scored low in Kargil because they were too political. They refused to be creatively oppositional. India8217;s GOP should be intellectually agile enough to withstand any form of intellectual terror.