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The people ask, "Is
there still any hope to end the horrible rise of the communal deluge after what
has happened in the Gujarat elections?" The answer is not easy to seek. The
spurt in communalism and the tying up of religion with day-to-day politics and
the State has acquired monstrous proportions. There has never been a time in
Indian political history, except at the time of partition, when the behaviour of
the common man was determined by religious passions aroused to such murderous
heights by the ruling classes. That shameful chapter of our country’s past is
still remembered by the people with chilling details. We were born into the
modern world emaciated and bloodied. Yet we were told that a new dawn had
arrived and there was cause for forgetting the bloodbath enacted and for
celebrating the victory of the people. We were told that there will be peace
thence upon and progress will take care of the agonies of death and destruction,
That new nations are always born in blood and there was nothing unusual in that.
And we believed whatever our rulers said. As new things are always born on the
rubble of the old no one wanted to harp on the bad old days and opted for a "the
tryst with destiny."
But on the contrary,
not only that tryst has eluded the countrymen for fifty-five years; things have
worsened and went into the mire without any scope for retrieval. Now again, the
ruling classes of this country are calling on the people to go through another
similar trauma of birth pangs. A new incarnation is being sought through Hindu
revivalism and in the name of Hinduism. They want this country converted into a
vast den of crime of the type we have seen last year in the State of Gujarat.
The representatives of the ruling classes in the form of the BJP and its gang,
the sangh parivar, along with the so called National Democratic Alliance,
want the country pushed into a repeat of Gujarat on a massive scale. The forces
that have won in the Gujarat elections call in no ambiguous terms to repeat the
Gujarat experiment in the coming elections in five State Assemblies and the
parliamentary elections in 2004.The lab test of the minorities’ bloodbath in
Gujarat has been successful and this has emboldened the Hindutva forces to
further carry their plans.
The forces of
darkness tasted "success" after a long spate of successive defeats in various
state elections. This came as a breather for the victors and a shock to the
so-called forces of democracy and secularism that were subjectively expecting
that the people of Gujarat would reject the politics of religious fanaticism.
But all their pre-poll surveys and analyses proved wrong, their expectations
belied and hopes were shattered. But, for the people of the country this only
means that the forces that have the power of vitiating the whole social
atmosphere of the country with communal frenzy and fascism have been able to win
over the masses in Gujarat to tread on a self destructive path. For them this
dangerous development is a wake up call to sit down to devise means to thwart
the impending misfortune. Unless right conclusions are drawn and a right
approach is adopted to combat the forces of communalism things are bound to
worsen further.
There can be no
denying the fact that these forces have emerged in the name of establishing a
Hindu Rashtra where all other religious minorities and democratic minded people
will be forced to accept the domination of the Hindutva forces. They rode
on a wave of reactionary violence and terror to polarise the society on communal
lines. This has only shown how frail and flimsy is the basis of democratic
values in our backward society where reactionary thoughts are easy to implant
over a wider section of the people. This has especially borne true in times of
intense socio-economic crises that have come to stay. It is an easy way to
distract the people from poverty, unemployment hunger and futurelessness of the
young generation. The rulers of the country have made it an agenda to keep busy
the thoughts of the people on religious matters of mandirs, masjids, gods and a
distorted concept of Indianness. Especially the latter has been misinterpreted
to write away the diversity of the peoples, cultures, nationalities and
religions. They say that to be an Indian is to be a Hindu and Indianness means
Hindutva. The highest court of the land has lent its support to this concept by
declaring that Hinduism is a way of life and not a religion thus rejecting the
existence of diverse cultures of the peoples who don’t have a Hindu way of life.
What is Hinduism if not based on Hindu religious traditions, thoughts and gods?
The very term has not only a connotation pertaining to but also has its basis in
Hindu religion. But the prime minister and his party say that Hindutva is
Indianness and it has nothing to do with Hinduism. This canard is being spread
to hoodwink the people and make it acceptable to the common man who might not be
a supporter of Hindu communalist ideas. Thus we are getting a new definition
about Savarkar’s ideology which suits the present BJP rulers. The PM and his
brand of communalist ideologues want their own version about Hindutva and
Indianness taken as authentic while allowing the kinds of the VHP and the Shiv
Sena to carry on the rabid propaganda and killings without any hindrance. A sort
of division of labour seems to have emerged in the saffron brigade. As the prime
minister of India, Vajpayee wants to be separated from the brigade while at the
same time pushing the larger RSS agenda under the garb of a new ideological
interpretation. In this he cites the interpretation of the Supreme Court.
In a way we are
seeing the present day high institutions of state, education and culture harping
on the same Hinduist theme, which is meant to create a Hindu Rashtra in this
land. Never has the hypocrisy of the rulers been so glaring. The poet prime
minister muses like a devil when he extols Modi and Gujarat in the spirit of
Hindutva resurgence. The likes of him, who swear by the RSS ideology, cannot do
otherwise while they try to push themselves as sensitive minds. It is a great
tragedy for the people of India that such forces are thrown up by the
intermittent so-called democratic exercises that are held every now and then in
this land. While all this happens the so-called civil society cries hoarse as if
the PM and his cohorts do not belong to the civil society. In fact, the majority
of the so-called civil society is trying to distance the prime minister from the
rest of the saffron ilk. Now, Advani too is being pushed as a soft liner in the
ruling coterie. Whatever may be the differences between various outfits of the
saffron brigade these in no way make the Vajpayees and Advanis any less
reactionary. The latter have to push themselves as the leaders of the whole
country being at the helm of the government. After all, you cannot expect the
Vajpayees and Advanis to say, ‘bravo, carry on the murder spree.’ That
would be unbecoming for a prime minister. Instead, they maintain a public face
of representing the whole "nation" and tell the people that India is reverting
back to its great cultural roots of Hindutva.
This stance of the
Hindutva rulers is only brutalising the people, polarising them on communal
lines and making them see enemies among themselves and not the real ones. Big
business is happy that when poverty, unemployment, starvation, corruption and
political gangsterism is on an unprecedented rise, when foreign and Indian big
capital is eating into the very means of subsistence of the vast masses the
various communities of the people are pitted against each other. The great
fanfare with which the coronation of Modi was held after the Gujarat elections
is unprecedented in modern India. From businesses, represented by the likes of
Ambanis to the so-called anti-manuvadi chief ministers like Mayavatis to film
stars, and not the least, the prime minister himself, went to Gandhinagar to put
the crown on the head of a killer chief minister. This only highlights the
point that the whole lot of the ruling circles are elated at the successful
conclusion of operation democracy and want to repeat it in other states and on a
countrywide scale in the coming times. They want to repeat Gujarat everywhere.
The VHP says that the terror experiment of the Gujarat lab will be repeated
throughout India while Vajpayee and Advani say Gujarat leads the way to a
"nationwide" victory of Hindutva forces. The crux is the same. While one openly
states that carnages will be repeated in other states the prime minister and
deputy prime minister declare that the Gujarat elections have silenced the
critics who cried that the BJP was anti-people. They argue that if the BJP is
anti-people and communal how come the people are with the BJP and have returned
it again to power. They vindicate the performance of Modi and the BJP. The BJP
victory in Gujarat has come after a chain of defeats at other places.
Some faces in civil
society have said that the majority is not always right. The point however is,
the bourgeois election process in itself does not presage that the people will
behave democratically in all kinds of societies. This requires strong
democratic traditions and values, which are only begotten through a
thoroughgoing revolutionary process where people learn to respect the rights of
the religious minorities, nationalities, women, dalits and other sections of the
people, especially those who are prone to threats and intimidation. Ours is
a country where no thoroughgoing democratic transformations has been enacted
with the participation of the people. Here it is easy to mislead them in
contrast with the societies that have gone through democratic revolutions.
Everything that suits the ruling classes is easily manipulated through the
so-called democratic exercises that only call the people to vote after five
years while the rest of the time the people don’t have any say, nor are they
allowed to govern themselves at the grass root levels. Unless a society has
these traditions we can expect the worst kind of manipulations from the rulers.
Those who deserve to be hanged can get elected here and carry the baton.
Mere raising of hands
of a majority does not ensure that the decision being taken is also really
democratic. But we are told that democracy is the will of the majority of the
people even if it means denying rights to the minority nationalities, religions,
and other sections of the people even snatching away their right to life. When
such a thing happens it is only a caricature of democracy.
And the times that
are coming are fraught with dangers having in store more horrible things than
Gujarat. What Togadia speaks is the real material in the BJP’s arsenal. A part
of big business has condoned the BJP strategy to complete the wedge between
various communities of the working class and the middle class people of the
country. The Goa conclave of the BJP has chalked out a programme to win
elections in other states on the Gujarat pattern. The Gujarat pattern means
creating a complete polarisation on communal lines by whatever means possible.
While Gujarati NRIs financed the carnage in Gujarat the recent NRI world
conclave held in New Delhi has been, in part, an exercise for roping in the
NRI’s within the BJP agenda on a national scale. The PM and the deputy PM tried
to win over the non-resident Indians in the name of India and Indianness by
grotesquely explaining Bhartiyata, the other name of Hindutva. While Advani
tried to explain the Gujarat carnage as an aberration, no right thinking NRI
could believed him. Modi even kept mum even when pushed to utter a word of
apology on Gujarat. His killer conscience did not allow him even a farce of an
apology. The fanfare with which the Delhi NRI conclave was held tried to paint
the PM and the BJP as the real inheritors of the great Indian culture. No doubt,
the killers are having a field day.
The saffron brigade
has declared that after the assembly elections in four or five states the real
Mahabharat will be fought in Delhi. The victory in Gujarat has emboldened them
to convert India into a Hindu State. Vajpayee and Advani say that India shall
never become a Hindu Rashtra. It is just a fraud. They don’t have to declare
Gujarat a Hindu state officially while in reality they are carrying on the same
where Muslims and Christians have been reduced to third class citizens. Even the
Chief Election Commissioner Lyngdoh had to tell the people of Himachal
digressively to not allow Gujarat be repeated in their State. He fears that the
‘democratic exercise’ everywhere may lead to the domination of the Hindutva
forces. He has already been accused by Mody and others of the saffron ilk of
being a Congressman. The CEC is seen as a Congress brand secularist who wants
the BJP defeated. The BJP terms the Congress as pseudo secularist and says that
this secularism favoured the minority over the majority. It wants to put an end
to "minorityism." While it may is a debatable question whether the
Congress party has favoured the Muslim community or just used them for its
nefarious power games, one thing is clear is that the Muslim community as a
whole has only suffered the worst. The ‘secularism’ of the Congress has always
utilised the card of religion never separating the State from religion. In fact
the very birth of the country in 1947 was based on the communal divide. That
wrong has never led to good results. It cannot. The new rulers in the person of
the BJP want the pseudo secularism of the Congress done away with and want to
carry the 1947 wrong to its logical conclusion, whether it comes in the form of
a declared Hindu rashtra or the PM’s interpretation of Bhartiyata.
In the wake of the
Gujarat carnage and the BJP victory there is a part of the intelligentsia that
has called for strengthening the Congress as an alternative. They even
criticised it for using Hindutva in its own way declaring it as a force of soft
Hindutva or soft secularism. But the Congress is no democratic force vis-ŕ-vis
the BJP. The so-called democratic alternative of the ruling class parties to the
BJP is an illusion. Leave alone the Naidus and Mamtas, or Mayawatis or Paswans
even the Congress chief ministers like Gehlots and Digvijays see no harm in
using the majority religious sentiments. The Congress campaign in the Gujarat
elections is a pointer to the fact even if we don’t go into the Congress’s past
practice. And as far as the so-called communist left of the CPI and CPM brand is
concerned they only seek alliances with arch opportunists like the Naidus and
Jayas, in close collaboration with the reactionary Congress under whose 45 years
rule the country reached a dead end, to confront the onslaught of Hindu Fascism.
They are only concerned in using the diplomatic trash in the corridors of
Parliament
Is there any hope
then? This question hovers around each and every right thinking person. There
is. The Hindutva subterfuge cannot fool the people for long as their worsening
conditions of life will inevitably push them against the very system that breeds
it. Besides, the hoax of it being an ideology for the entire Hindus will itself
collapse due to its elitist, upper caste, brahminical content — alienating the
bulk of the oppressed castes within the Hindu fold. Its farcical ‘swadeshi’ is,
to a large extent, already exposed by its blatant servility to MNCs, the US
bosses, multilateral agencies like WTO, IMF, NRIs, etc.
Besides, to really
fight the Hindu fascists requires a powerful force — both broad and militant; a
force that has deep roots in the masses, and not confined to a handful of
liberal intellectuals. It must comprise the broadest sections of the masses
affected by these fascists, inclusive of the minorities, dalits and other
oppressed castes, women and all other anti-fascist forces.
Finally, the fascists cannot be
fought by the Congress(I) formula of soft Hindutva, nor that of the policy of
appeasement by the CPI/CPM-type revisionists. Such apologetic approaches only
whets the appetite of the fascists to be even more aggressive. Such forces, with
their hoodlum and lumpen attacks on sections of the people, can only be
effectively countered by increased militancy and a thorough-going secular and
democratic standpoint; standing unequivocally on the side of the communities
under attack.
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