Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
There is no stopping the Modi band wagon. The very air we breathe bristles with the idea of change. Good or bad, depends on which side of the fence you are. From the temples where the priests hold forth belching the usual inanities, the temple where the nation’s destiny is supposed to be crafted, to the temples where the Hindus, Christians, Muslims and the rest are supposed to pray to their gods there is strife and turmoil.
Two hundred days already into the office, the Modi Government looks completely in charge, never mind the shenanigans enacted in Parliament by a dispirited Opposition. A hundred “yojanans” or” abhiyans”, some meant to arouse hope in our bosoms, others have already slipped into the official lexicon and many more, the old wine from the UPA years, rechristened and offered in new bottles.
One is asked to share the fuzzy, feel good vision of the leader’s dreams. Surrender one’s judgement, not to see how the Modi Government is shaping up. It is worrying, Ministers and bureaucrats keep looking over their shoulders, lending a sullen air to governance. The Prime Minister’s Office appears to be running the various Ministries directly, building up a perception that Ministers may indeed be mere rubber stamps. Economy may appear to be in marginally better, thanks to the moderating inflation, a rising sensex and falling crude oil price internationally, many fear this is but a temporary respite, a bit of good luck.
Most worrying of all is the harsh reality that communal atmosphere in the country has been vitiated in an unprecedented manner with parties of the Hindutava, led by the RSS and its political arm,the Bharatiya Janata Party — not to mention Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and 40 othe saffronite outfits –openly espousing fractious causes and the Prime Minister choosing to maintain studied silence over the grave threat these pose to our internal stability.
Mass conversions in Agra on December 8 and a bigger one set to be staged in Aligarh on Christmas Day, slum dwellers lured by promises of below poverty line cards by organisations affiliated to the Sangh Parivar point towards a very grim future. One of BJP’s prominemt faces, Yogi Adityanath, a quarrelous priest-turned MP from Gorakhpur, has dared the Uttar Pradesh Government to stop the conversions of 4000 Muslims and Christians (gharwapasi, homecoming) set for Christmas Day.
‘No one can stop it,” the Yogi who is the party’s numero uno in UP says. And Mr Modi, his hand always reaching out to his twitter handle, has yet to upbraid those who have chosen the self destructive path, the so- called keepers of the Hindu faith.
There is no doubt that Modi’s higly individualitic style has sent out the message that he is the Government and Ministers just his pointsmen, if that. It is also no secret that Ministers have been encouraged to interact with the RSS even on basic issues like appointments.
Back to the communal angle. The gharwapsi or homecoming of Christian and Muslim minorities to the Hindu fold is part of an organised and aggressive ‘dharamjagran’ or religious awakening programme to shore up the Hindu count. By promoting a sense of siege in the majority community,and rousing it to aggressive proselytisation, the saffron parivar is crudely trying to stoke communal passions and to cause a sense of fear among the minorities. These fears in the minority communities have already been sharpened by the alternately triumphalist and threatening postrures and statements by senior BJP personalities including by the External Affairs Minister and her colleagues in the Union Cabinet, clearly intended to provoke the minorities.
Such provocations by BJP leaders have indeed become more of a routine all these six months plus the Modi Government has been around. Obviously those who believed that such rhetoric would disappear from public discourse once the Parliamentary elections were done with, were wrong. In fact the Prime Minister’s campaign in Jammu and Kashmir rarely missed out on playing on the communal angle, particularly so in his own rallies outside the valley in the State.
The dissonance between the daily claims of change in the Modi Government and the simmer and eruption of a regressive, minority-hating agenda at the lower rungs of party and the parivar, is only growing more glaring . All this is marked by a noticeably upward creep of irresponsibility, chauvinism. Recall the Union Minister Sadhvi Jyoti’s refrence to “ramzadas” and ‘haramzadas”. Or, some similar stupidities other Ministers and senior party MPs mouth so irresponsibly.
Mr Modi who spent a month of his first six months in office globe-trotting, visiting lands as far as Brazil, Austalia, Japan, USA not to mention the string of foreign VIPs he has already received in India. Mr Modi, with the help of professionals including event managers has even built a bridge with the Indian diaspora worldwide. The US President Barrack Obama is due in Delhi come January 26th. Mr Modi has indeed had a busy time even otherwise; he has been his party’s most effective campaigner in the State Assembly elections. Time,though,for him to take charge of things less attractive and spare time for domestics concerns.
His preoccupation with electoral politics and foreign affairs has obviously left him with hardly any time for distractions such as his role as the leader of the House in the Lok Sabha, the conduct of his errant Ministers etc. Borrowing from cricket parlance Modi, had declared his alter ego and the BJP Chief, Amit Shah as the man of the match played in Uttar Pradesh earlier this year. It was here that maximization of support among a section of the population was used to create a majority during electoral mobilization.
Majoritarainism, as someone has aptly noted, at its basic entails viewing minorities as nothing but second-class citizens, inconveniences which stand in the way of the glorious possibilities that open up before the majority communiy. India, all these years of its freedom, even when sharply criticised on other counts, had always been seen as an example of a successful democracy that sustains, even celebrates pluralism. Mr Modi’s choice of seeing no evil, hearing no evil on the question of minoritiy- baiting leaves room for much ugly speculation. Time for him to stand up and call things to order. That’s if he wants to stop the drift downhill.
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