Silent at the top

It isn’t just that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi unleashed what can be mildly decribed as a particularly tasteless personal diatribe against Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh. It is also, and more, that the BJP’s leading lights at the Centre have remained silent so far on the chief minister’s public display of disrespect for a constitutional authority. With the honourable exception of Union Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi. Though even Joshi has taken care to criticise Modi’s comments without criticising Modi, couching the rebuke in a very large and very general lament about declining moral values, he must be credited with the only attempt from among the BJP top brass to distance itself from the base insults the Gujarat CM hurled at the CEC on Tuesday. Addressing a rally in a village in Baroda district, Modi repeatedly chanted the CEC’s name in full in an unsubtle attempt to draw attention to his religion. Taken along with his insinuations about Lyngdoh’s alleged affinity with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, this latest round of Modispeak, it can safely be said, marks a new low in political discourse.

Given Modi’s track record, does this still shock? It must. It is true that Modi presides over a constitutional breakdown in his own state. True also that he wears his contempt for democratic norms on his sleeve. Yet, it would be dangerous to dismiss the vitriolic campaign he has launched against the CEC ever since the EC’s order ruled out early polls in his state, with I-told-you-so cynicism. For one, Modi only seems to get more brazen, more unscrupulous. More importantly, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is foolish to blame Modi’s rants on Modi alone. His party stands silently behind his hate speech and his outbursts. It noisily rallies to his side when he plots a triumphalist revival of the shelved Gaurav Yatra in his ravaged state.

The BJP high command, and particularly Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, must be held answerable: what has changed on the ground in Gujarat within the last month or so that the yatra, called off at the last minute by the prime minister himself in July, is now given the green signal? The prime minister must answer how a BJP chief minister who shows scant respect to democratic institutions is seen as his party’s new mascot.