The enemy within

It is extremely reassuring to discover that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s obsession with public morality and the ordered society is not of a monomaniacal nature. Apart from dealing with sundry cultural misdemeanours in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Mumbai, it shall also nobly protect the moral fibre of the bureaucracy. The organisation has demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected breadth of vision in looking beyond M.F. Husain’s film, the leading fringe cultural issue of the subcontinent, to secretary-level surveillance. Even the steel frame, the self-regulating wonder that has maintained its integrity through 50 years of change of government and ideology, will now have to conform to the procrustean specifications of national pride. The VHP has also shown amazing perspicacity in institutionalising the initiative. When it vandalised art galleries, it faced much criticism because it had no locus standi. When it moves against bureaucrats, however, it will be through the Bharat Gaurav Sanstha, specifically set up to countersubversive activity in the bureaucracy. Supported by a clear locus standi, the initiatives of this organisation will attract less public censure. It is a common human error to confuse the clarity of a stand with its authenticity — hence the undeserved premium that is placed on transparency in public life today.

There is reason to wonder why the Bharat Gaurav Sanstha is required at all. The government appears to believe that every clause of its national agenda is bound to be backed by a national consensus. It claimed one for the nuclear tests and was in the process of forging another for its proposal for a presidential system of government when Pokharan II put it on the backburner. But it must have been sobered to find that on Gaurav Divas, the day that every good citizen was supposed to turn out and display his fervour under pain of being classed as an anti-national, the response was indifferent even in the cities. It supports the BJP’s suspicion, long before it came to power, that it might stand in needof a nodal agency to maintain good order, in its own interest. And that agency, obviously, would have to be created by another another wing of the sangh parivar, to keep the ruling party free of taint.

The issue, however, is whether such an obsessive-compulsive attitude to order is in the national interest. It might have been of some use in the days of an immature polity and top-down government, in the sense that it would have ensured consistency and continuity at a time when they were crucially important to national growth. But enforced rigidity has no place in contemporary India which, above all things, is trying to break out of the mould of the past. The greatest premium should now be set on flexibility, on the readiness to face up to new realities as they develop. It would be disastrous if the bureaucracy were to start telling the government exactly what it wants to hear. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the establishment of a thought police within the steel frame will guarantee. If asked to bend,it will buckle. Apart from the very questionable ethics of this move, it will result in real, immediate damage, whose effects will be felt by every Indian.