Author: Editorial
Publication: The Times of India
Date: November 19, 2002
URL: http://test.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=28691181&sType=1
It should have been billed a farce
pretold. The puja, the speeches, the exaggerated drama around the arrest
and release of leaders, not one item on the VHP's pad-padshahi roadshow
lived up to the hype that preceded the event.
But then the play only ran according
to the script; for evidence we need only look at the track record of the
loony fringe comprising the VHP,
Bajrang Dal etc. Like typical bullies, the Togadias and Dharmendras will
shout, but only to backtrack when the whip is cracked. In other words,
it is political connivance that keeps communal tensions on the boil. There
is not one thing religious about the Gujarat shenanigans, starting with
the timing of the VHP's yatra which conveniently coincided with the announcement
of elections. If anything, the VHP, which styles itself as a religio-cultural
organisation, has made so bold as to openly canvass votes for Narendra
Modi. Its rabble-rousing general secretary, Praveen Togadia, has asked
for the gift of a 'Hindu Rashtra' party - presumably the BJP - from the
electorate. Mr Togadia evidently calculates that the recent disturbances
in Gujarat have left a large constituency for Hindu Rashtra. He might be
surprised. The electoral history of this country shows that extremism doesn't
pay in the end.
Divisiveness of any kind has a certain
immediate allure, but that spends itself out in the long run. This is true
even in situations where a communal
conflict has left the polity deeply polarised. Obviously, there comes a
point when people begin to see prolonged sectarian strife as counter-productive
- it is ruinous for business and peace of mind. We saw this in the aftermath
of the Ram rath yatra and the dismissal of four BJP-run state governments.
The results betrayed expectations that the BJP would ride home on a Hindu
wave. In Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP had a spectacular initial run, the
party now stands pushed to the third spot, behind the Bahujan Samaj Party:
Recycled Hindutva simply did not have the appeal of the original. More
recently, we saw the parivar trounced in Hindu Jammu despite a campaign
aimed at consolidating the majority community. To be sure, election forecasts
have predicted a clear win for Mr Modi. In the past, such polls have proved
to be hugely unreliable. But assuming the prognosis to be true, it would
still be erroneous to conclude that politics of the Gujarat kind would
succeed elsewhere in the country. Had that been the case, we would have
been a Hindu Rashtra in 1947 - when Pakistan gave us ample reason to be
its mirror image.
