On The spot
Tavleen Singh
When I saw our ‘secularist’ leaders gather together in Delhi last week for a conference to discuss communalism I was gripped with a disorienting sense of deja vue. Not again, I found myself saying with a silent groan, not these same old characters from long ago saying the same old things that they have been saying for such a long time without conviction and without any other motive than to try and form a third front once more as if to deliberately repeat history as farce. Watching the likes of Deve Gowda, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat and A.B. Bardhan stand on that stage and raise their arms up like schoolboys at some inter-school tournament made me conscious of the fact that all that had changed was that these gentlemen had aged since they last gathered together in the nineties to form a government headed by Deve Gowda. It was a shaky arrangement even then that would not have survived a single day without the support of the Congress Party and what these secularists are cooking once more is the same pulao or shall we call it khichdi?
Let me give you some context here. Ever since Narendra Modi started sweeping his way across the country gathering larger and larger crowds wherever he went panic buttons have started to be pressed in Congress Party headquarters. Until Modi’s rallies began the advisors of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi had convinced themselves that he was no more than a media myth that would begin to dissipate into the political wind as soon as he tried to build a base outside Gujarat. So when at that first rally in northern India in Jaipur he gathered vast crowds they comforted themselves with the thought that this was only because Rajasthan was a state in which there was a strong BJP base and Vasundhara Raje had spent eighty days on a yatra that had taken her through every district. Then, a few days later when huge crowds gathered to hear him in Rewari in Haryana the first of the panic buttons got pressed and by the time he got to Kanpur and Patna there were so many panic buttons being pressed in Congress headquarters that it was hard to keep count of them.
It was then that realization began to dawn that something was happening that could force the Congress Party out of power for the next five years and that this must be stopped at all costs. So it was that the ‘secularists’ were encouraged to band together in Delhi and raise the same tired old slogans and reiterate the same tired old political ideas that they have always spouted. The Congress Party has been in power long enough to know how to play every devious political game in the book and so it took them hardly any time at all to work out that if it was not going to be a Congress government in Delhi then it would be best to have a secularist, leftist government because it would be as ineffectual as it was last time and this would make ordinary Indians long to have Congress and the Gandhi family back in power.
The secularists think exactly like Congress does and like most Congress socialists have paid no attention to the failure of their economic ideas in Eastern Europe, China and the former Soviet Union. They behave like people who have remained oblivious to the tearing down of the Berlin wall, the introduction of a free market economy in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is as if the past two decades of history just passed them by unnoticed, as if the time warp they were in has remained secure in its cocoon of ignorance.
So at the communalism conference or the anti-communalism conference as they called it they talked of the rise of communal forces and ‘fascism’ as if the world had not changed at all. As if there was no Internet and Twitter and as if just the advent of Narendra Modi signaled the end of India as we know it, at least as they know it in the Delhi drawing rooms in which they spend most of their time. If that sounds strange to you who may believe that these worthy communists and secularists are humble people who live humbly in their desire to serve the poor then please seek an interview with them in Delhi and notice how they live. They may live in shabby fashion but they live in shabby fashion in bungalows whose market value runs into more than Rs 200 crores. The only private citizens who can afford to live in the bungalows of Lutyens’ Delhi are billionaires. Nothing has disturbed the ‘socialist’ life style of these secular leftists since 1947 and they fear Modi because they think he threatens it.
He brings with him new slogans like ‘India First’ and new economic ideas that appear to have nothing to do with the kind of socialism they espouse so they are rightly terrified that if Modi does somehow make it to Delhi the world as they know it will come to an end. This is why it has become so urgent for them to come together in the name of secularism. This is easily done because their interests and Congress interests coincide where Modi is concerned. So will they succeed in taking us back to those times when the Government of India was led by regional leaders and namby-pamby socialists of the Inder Gujral genre? It does not seem that way but it is dangerous to make definite predictions in politics.
Modi fights a lonely battle because there are vast states like Uttar Pradesh in which the BJP barely exists as a political party any more. Under the aegis of Shri Lal Krishna Advani the BJP has spent the past ten years in opposition turning itself into a bad Xerox of the Congress Party. For Modi to become prime minister he has to rely on a caboodle of so-called leaders who are as venal and ineffectual as those that sit today in the Government of India. Can he create new ideas of governance and a new dream for India with this lot? The secularists think not which is why their cries of fascism and communalism will get louder and louder as the general election draws near.
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