Opinion Yashwant Sinha writes: Opposition must not let petty differences divide it – the coming election is too important
The next election will be no ordinary election. It will indeed determine the path the country will take. Opposition must rise to the occasion
India, despite provocations, remained liberal, democratic and secular, because the leadership of that time believed in these values and persuaded people to follow them and imbibe these values. Seventy-five years later, 
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A spectre, with apologies to Karl Marx, is haunting our beloved country: The spectre of communal hatred and violence, a false narrative of muscular nationalism and brazen majoritarianism. The truth is that underlying all this is a deep sense of insecurity in the mind of the Prime Minister and the fear of losing the next Lok Sabha elections. During the recent Parliament session, the PM’s lacklustre reply to the no-confidence motion — in fact, he refused to attend Parliament till he was forced to reply to this — the untruths, half-truths and lies uttered by the ministers, the suspensions of the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and important Rajya Sabha members do not augur well for parliamentary democracy in our country. The PM’s misuse of the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day to make an election speech and assert that he will be back next year is part of the same mindset. It was meant more to reassure himself and his followers than the people of the country.
How and why have we come to this pass? I was 10 years old when India became independent — not old enough to understand the full implications of what was happening then but certainly with the sense to comprehend that the events before Independence were horrible. I recall those nights when my father would take the entire family to the first floor of our house in Patna, bolt the ground floor doors as securely as possible, ask my elder brothers to guard the entrances and hope that the night would pass without any incident. I heard menacing slogans in the stillness of the night raised by both Hindus and Muslims — “Bajrang Bali ki jai” and “Allah hu Akbar”. Riots were taking place in other parts of the city, the province and the country and people were getting killed in large numbers. Thinking of the massacre of Hindus in Noakhali in the then-united Bengal and the revenge killings of Muslims in Masaurhi and other parts of Bihar makes me shiver even today.
These experiences should have left me bitter and full of hatred against the Muslim community but they did not. Perhaps because I did not see the killings myself. Perhaps I was too young for such feelings of hate. Perhaps my elder brothers did nurture such feelings. But my mind was free of all such prejudices and therefore going forward, I embraced Muhammad Anwar as one of my closest friends with the same warmth as I did Murli Sinha. These friendships have stood the test of time. Time, they say, is the best healer and one would have expected that almost eight decades later, people would have largely forgotten those events and the hatred of the earlier days. But perhaps some people do not want to have things that way. Perhaps some people would want those wounds to remain fresh in our memory for their petty political gains. Perhaps some people would like the communal pot to remain boiling in India forever.
What is the remedy? The answer lies in understanding why India did not embrace religious fundamentalism in the late 1940s and why the country is becoming communal now. India was partitioned into two countries on the basis of religion — perhaps the only example in the world of its kind. This was preceded by large-scale violence between the two communities in many parts of the country which made Partition inevitable. Partition led to a massive transfer of population from one country to another — Hindus from Pakistan to India and Muslims from India to Pakistan. The people of the two nations witnessed heart-rending scenes of violence and tragedy in this process. Tempers ran so high that those who wanted the communal frenzy to get worse assassinated even the apostle of peace, non-violence and communal harmony, Mahatma Gandhi. The newly-born Pakistan became an Islamic republic. But India retained its sanity and the wise men and women who sat in the Constituent Assembly of India gave us a liberal, democratic and secular Constitution which has stood the test of time. It is another matter that today the Constitution is under threat and even the “basic features” are not safe. Responsible people are openly talking about a new Constitution. What has changed between then and now? In one word: Leadership.
India, despite provocations, remained liberal, democratic and secular, because the leadership of that time believed in these values and persuaded people to follow them and imbibe these values. Seventy-five years later, in the Amrit Kaal of independence, those values have gone for a toss because the leadership of the day does not believe in them. It has no use for them. On the contrary, it believes in values which the country had discarded 75 years ago. If secularism was state-supported then, communalism is state-sponsored today. We are back to square one.
India is engaged in a battle of values today. The next election will be no ordinary election. It will indeed determine the path the country will take, perhaps not for the next thousand years, as claimed by the prime minister but certainly for the next hundred years. The next general election will determine if India will survive as a secular democracy or become an elected communal authoritarianism.
I hope the parties in Opposition realise this, forget their petty differences and rise to the occasion.
The writer is a former Union external affairs minister and finance minister
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