A stilted conversation

The National Integration Council wasted the chance to deliberate on a serious and growing challenge.

The National Integration Council wasted the chance to deliberate on a serious and growing challenge.

It may have come as little surprise how swiftly the meeting of the National Integration Council became a staging ground for partisan politics,glib sloganeering and facile framing of problems. Chief ministers of states like Gujarat,Orissa,West Bengal and Tamil Nadu kept away. Chandrababu Naidu used the occasion to insinuate his political agenda,and walk out over the decision to grant statehood to Telangana. In a free-for-all episode of name-calling,others,from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav,did little more to contextualise the problem of communalism and ethnic clashes than dwell on the use of social media to spread rumours and incite violence. When Parliament is proving itself to be so ineffective in forging a bipartisan conversation on issues of national interest,can there really be an expectation that party lines may blur in other institutions and forums?

There should be,or our polity will be emptied of its democratic content. The NIC was born of a meeting convened by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 to find strategies to combat communalism,casteism and fissures along other indices of identity. That subsequent meetings have not exploited the opportunity to crowd-source opinion and interventions across party lines,that too in an interface between national and state-level leaderships,must in no way excuse the shambles of this weeks instalment. What excuse could there validly be for Narendra Modi to give the meet a miss? He is not only the chief minister of a state still grappling with court cases related to the communal violence a decade ago,in one of which a former minister has been convicted. He is also the BJPs prime ministerial candidate,and by that presumptive profile,expected to be that much more responsible in his conduct regarding national institutions and conventions. Skipping the meet may have allowed him to evade taking a stand,but it sends firm signals on his priorities. As does Yadavs distracting search for scapegoats. The NIC meet comes against the backdrop of the violence in Muzaffarnagar,whose flames spread in part because of the UP administrations failure to assert its authority. Yadavs charges against the Sangh Parivar which certainly need to be debated in full measure cannot be a substitute for an account of his governments response.

It is clear that most participants and absentees were using the occasion to position themselves along political battlelines for the elections ahead. In the end,they just made a case for an NIC as it had originally been intended,as opposed to what it has become.