Meanwhile, in Saharanpur three Sikhs (officially) have just been butchered by a muslim mob (led by an ex-Congressman) and the predictable Twitter wars have been launched.
………
….
When people are murdered do they really feel better that they are being killed on account of ideology or because of opportunity? How about the claims for justice, in which case are they more (or less) valid? Is it really true that the appointment of Man Mohan Singh as Prime Minister (who then issued a mealy-mouthed apology) is all that is required to wash away the blood-stains?
….
We do not see the difficulty in laying blame equally on opportunity and ideology. And we see considerable virtue in not suppressing the truth and being impartial. Thus when Hindus kill Muslims or Muslims kill Sikhs, such actions should be condemned with equal intensity.
We already know how the bigots will behave. If left-liberals also choose to be economical with the truth, they will lose credibility. People will then feel free to ignore their bleatings the next time the big bad wolf shows up at the door..
……
Even before Indian politicians could cause the Saharanpur riots to
snowball into a secular party versus communal party war, guess who took
their spot? The country’s media. A day after riots in the Western UP
town claimed four lives, Gaurav Sawant, a journalist with English news
channel Headlines Today tweeted questioning the reportage of the riots
by the mainstream media
He asked why the victims in the Saharanpur riots were not identified by their religion.
He also questioned why, while there had been a huge furore over a Shiv
Sena MP shoving a roti into a fasting Muslim worker’s mouth, there had
been no anger over fasting Muslims gathering to pray and leading to a
riot.
His comments kicked off a Twitter storm with people lining up on either side of the debate.
Twitter then saw a series of squabbles over allowing him to carry on
his job as a journalist. Several petitions and counter petitions were
filed in the course of the day, with colleagues and friends tweeting
pictures in support of the journalist.
…….
This is how a Facebook friend responded to the exit polls predicting an
easy victory for Modi:
“One good thing about Modi becoming PM will be
the daily opportunity to dissent.”
He seems to have missed the
daily opportunity to dissent provided by the Manmohan Singh-led United
Progressive Alliance’s second term. UPA-2 did a lot of things people now
fear a Modi government will do.
There was the corruption of the
Commonwealth Games, they blamed the auditor for exposing the telecom
scam, they put Anna Hazare in jail for asking for a Lokpal and even
killed a Baba Ramdev supporter making the same demand. Students came out
to protest against rape and they responded with tear gas.
They passed a
draconian anti-terrorism law and put Muslims in jail for fake terrorism
cases. They hanged Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru to appear strong, weren’t
able to do anything about anti-Muslim violence in Congress-ruled Assam,
let the situation in Kashmir deteriorate, allowed the economy to
tumble, let Maoists get the better of them, slapped sedition cases
against people who didn’t want a nuclear power plant next to their
homes, put people in jail for criticising the government online, and
created a Central Monitoring System to snoop on all phone and internet
communication. Acts like this, if committed by a BJP government, will be
more vehemently opposed in the name of fascism.
To each crisis,
the Congress leadership responded with arrogance, compounding their
mistakes, losing the trust of the judiciary and the media, reviving the
moribund BJP. Had it not been for the self-destructive performance of
UPA-2, Modi would arguably not have chosen this election to make a bid
at the top job. If the independent Left sees Modi as a problem, it
should criticise the factors that encouraged the BJP leader’s rise in
2013-2014: the failure of Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul and her chosen
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Instead, when Modi was sharpening
his knives, Left-leaning intellectuals and activists were attacking the
Anna Hazare-Arvind Kejriwal-led Jan Lokpal movement. They said that the
Lokpal movement was a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh conspiracy to make the
Congress look bad, as if the Congress needed any help with that.
Over
the past three years, I have seen more bile, fear and frustration over
Hazare and Kejriwal on my social media timelines than over Modi. Rants
about how the Lokpal movement was proto-fascist and full of RSS workers
all served to show how the Indian Left is still traumatised by the Babri
demolition.
Perhaps it is only fair that the Hindutva brigade
gets to rule a country whose liberal intelligentsia has shown such great
poverty of political imagination as to trap itself in the Congress-BJP
binary, ceding altogether the once-vibrant space for anti-Congressism to
Hindutva supporters, and thus falling into their trap.
One thing
is clear. The Left still matters. While the party Left – the world’s
first communists to contest democratic elections – have been in
self-destruction mode, the independent Left plays a crucial role in
shaping political discourse. They used that power to the hilt to
discredit the Hazare movement.
They propped up dalit politician Udit Raj
to suggest that dalits are opposed to the Lokpal bill. (Udit Raj has
since joined the BJP.) They said the Lokpal movement was not questioning
corporate corruption but then Kejriwal took on the Ambanis. They said
Kejriwal was not speaking against BJP corruption but then he took on the
BJP president, Nitin Gadkari, accusing him of a scam that forced him to
resign from his post.
It was only when Kejriwal demonstrated in
the Delhi assembly elections that he could take on the BJP that secular
intellectuals started showing sympathy for the Aam Aadmi Party. A “No
More” campaign on Facebook has argued for tactical voting to elect the
candidate who can defeat the BJP in every constituency. Leftist
activists from across the country descended upon Varanasi to tell the
people to not vote for Modi.
This is the wrong way to go about
it: simply backing the candidate that can keep the BJP out is not going
to take them anywhere. Keeping the BJP out cannot constitute an entire
political imagination. The Left needs an agenda, an idea, a cadre.
Perhaps the AAP is not that option either, but India does need a
substitute for the Congress.
The Congress will keep making mistakes,
keep showing its elitist arrogance and being blasé about corruption, and
the BJP will keep exploiting its mistakes. This is how the BJP first
came to power, defeating Narasimha Rao after he liberalised the economy
and put it on the right track. And that is repeating itself. The party
that opened the gates of the Babri Masjid cannot be the guardian of
secularism.
……
Party to the argument that Godhra makes Narendra Modi politically
untouchable is “What about 1984?” There are several inadequate comebacks
to that question and the best of them is that no one should use one
pogrom to justify another.
with this response, though, is that it doesn’t answer the questions that
fly in close formation behind the “What about 1984?” question, namely,
“Why is the BJP worse than the Congress?” and, relatedly, “Why is
Narendra Modi any worse than Rajiv Gandhi?” specially given the latter’s
infamous comment, “When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,” which
seemed, retrospectively, to rationalize the systematic killing of Sikhs
in the days that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
important questions regardless of who asks them. The fact that they are
often asked by Narendra Modi’s unlovely supporters isn’t a good reason
for not taking them seriously.
major consequences. First, it radically undermined the Congress’s claim
to being a secular party that respected the political tradition of
pluralism pioneered by its colonial avatar and consolidated by Nehru in
the early years of the republic. The willingness of the Congress under
Indira Gandhi to use sectarian issues for political ends had been
evident before 1984 but the party’s willingness to sell its pluralist
soul for immediate political advantage was most vividly illustrated in
the days and months after her death.
more and more clearly as a party that couldn’t even be accused of not
having the courage of its convictions because it didn’t have any
convictions at all. Pluralism and its traditional opposition to
majoritarianism became labels that the Congress used for brand
management in particular political contexts, not as principles that
shaped its political agenda.
return to our question, namely, “What makes Modi and the BJP worse than
the Congress and its dynasts, given the horror of 1984?” The answer is
simple and unedifying.
a pluralist party that is opportunistically communal while the BJP is
an ideologically communal (or majoritarian) party that is
opportunistically ‘secular’. The difference between the Congress and the
BJP doesn’t lie mainly in the willingness of the former to express
contrition about pogroms it helped organize; it is, perhaps, best
illustrated by the fact that twenty years after the 1984 pogrom, the
Congress assumed office with a Sikh at the helm who served as prime
minister for two terms.
imagine a BJP government headed by a Muslim ten years from now. It
doesn’t work even as a thought experiment. And the reason it doesn’t
work is that the BJP’s ideology is essentially the encrustation of
prejudice around an inconvenient and irreducible fact: the substantial
and undeferential presence of minority communities in the republic,
specially Muslims who, for the sangh parivar, are the unfinished
business of Partition. The idea that the BJP might appoint a Muslim head
of government (as opposed to, say, the nomination of President Kalam to
titular office) is unthinkable.
follow from this that Manmohan Singh’s prime ministership is a sign of
the Congress’s political virtue; it isn’t. It is, if anything, a symptom
of the dynastic dysfunction that has diminished the Congress. But the
reason his prime ministership is possible is that the Congress isn’t
ideologically committed to anti-Sikh bigotry (despite 1984) in the way
that the BJP is committed to Hindu supremacy and the subordination of
Muslims. That’s why Narendra Modi so excites the sangh parivar’s
rank and file: the Gujarat Model is the BJP’s test run for India, and it
isn’t the economics of it that sets the pulses of its cadres racing.
reason the dynastic Congress isn’t as dangerous as Modi’s BJP is
dispiriting but straightforward: while the Congress is capable of
communalism, it isn’t constituted by bigotry. With Modi, even when he’s
talking economics and good governance, we get the “burqa of
secularism” and Muslims as road kill. It’s not his fault; from the time
that Golwalkar sketched out his vision of an India where religious
minorities were docile helots, bigotry has been Hindutva’s calling card.
…..