When Parliament House was assaulted by terrorists some 15 years ago and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was trapped inside, the first call he received — enquiring with urgency if he was all right — was from Congress leader Sonia Gandhi.
Mr Vajpayee revealed this in a stirring speech in the Lok Sabha shortly afterward. And he made it a point to emphasise that democracy was safe in a land in which the Leader of the Opposition was full of concern for the leader of the government.
Alas, we have slipped so comprehensively from that era. And it is unlikely to be anyone’s case that the situation is retrievable — at least not until the present lot stick around. And if
Mr Vajpayee’s assertion about democracy holds water, then it is plain that our system is being shaken to its roots by those in authority. Democracy is being administered electric shocks. Nothing lasts forever, of course, but that is another matter.
The record of the past two years suggest that this government’s principal purposes are not related to governing. Its well-crafted failure to reach working consensus in Parliament to get important measures through, and the near abrogation of its responsibility to deal with the drought gripping 40 per cent of the country, testify to its indifference to the cause of governance. Examples can be multiplied.
Instead, it seems the first object of the Modi government to hound the Opposition and go for its jugular, and have its leading lights thrown into prison if possible — starting with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. Perhaps the calculation is that if the Gandhis can be put out of business, then the Congress Party would be put out of business. That is Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (and Bharatiya Janata Party’s, of course) final frontier, its most cherished dream. As a matter of record, no past non-Congress ruling arrangement at the Centre has sought to target top Congress leaders for early retirement through jailing.
The present ruling faction sees the Congress and the ideas it has represented over the decades as the principal obstacle to the gaining of political hegemony across mainland India that would be sustainable for some time.
Organisationally, the Congress is a weakened and a weak force now. Ordinarily, that should have given the Hindu Right latitude to leave the party alone. But clearly even a weak Congress is perceived to be a serious long-term threat. The worry for the RSS-BJP is the basic conception of India the Congress has proffered from its inception, even if it has spectacularly failed to live up to that conception and the ideals it has propagated.
But several other parties are also BJP’s bugbears, and will doubtless be pursued — first the Left formations, although the Left is not a leading parliamentary presence, and the Bahujan Samaj Party, from which the RSS-BJP is desperate to wrench the dalit vote in order to assiduously construct the vision of India of it has propagated. The likes of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Arvind Kejriwal and Akhilesh Yadav are also more than likely to follow.
It is one thing to try and deliver on election promises, fail in the attempt, and then launch diversionary tactics to keep the country preoccupied with silly drama (and extraneous matters) in an effort to insulate the rulers from blame. For democracies, that is old hat. But the Modi dispensation is different.
It is radical from the far Right perspective. It seeks to crush its opponents and use any ruse to do so. Governance can wait. Under this strategy, doing just enough to have something of propaganda value to say at the next election would suffice. When the key opponents are out of the way, the barest minimum of governance would suffice. At least that seems to be the thinking.
The government’s marquee agenda was to drive out the Nehru-Gandhis and the Congress, and bring about a “Congress-mukt Bharat”, an India from which the political genus called the Congress has been drained out. This was its primary political aim in the overall ideological backdrop of selling the strident Hindutva version of Hinduism to Hindus, which they have flatly refused to take seriously although the RSS has been at it since 1925.
A dictatorship or a quasi-dictatorship does not like to brook any Opposition. Take China. It goes to ends of the earth to eradicate the Falun Gong, whose following gives the ruling party or the country’s ruling cliques a fright. The fear is of a challenge being mounted in the future, even if this does not appear realistic at this stage. India, of course, is not China. It has a developed civil society and a fairly embedded constitutional system. The task of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah, and RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat is not likely to be easy. But that doesn’t inhibit them from trying.
The BJP government has messed it up. Employment, prices and other key economic indicators are not satisfactory, and in the area of foreign policy, the country is having to suffer humiliation after humiliation. Indeed, India is being sought to be run on slogans — “love jihad”, beef-eating, calling questioners anti-national and urging the country to “Stand Up”, and the like. New empty slogans are being coined all the time and rung like heavy gongs.
As Mr Modi and his cohorts ready themselves to celebrate their two years in office later this month, the newspapers are full of the dismissal of two Congress-run state governments through the misuse of state authority and by manipulating provisions of law and the Constitution. Students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad University, Jadavpur University, and in Lucknow and Allahabad are being called “anti-national” and “casteist”. A year ago leading organisations of the voluntary sector were under attack for being “anti-national”. This has become a tiresome refrain.
It is not just the Congress, the Left, the BJP’s other political opponents, and the social liberals, which believe that the present government is launched on an authoritarian — even semi-dictatorial — path. Such fears are being expressed within BJP circles, where the primary apprehension being expressed is that a clique is running away with the game. Nevertheless, Mr Modi and the BJP chief still seem to be sitting pretty. And this is because the people have not risen up.
