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Punjab: Driving Mrs Gandhi

Punjab: Driving Mrs Gandhi

Author: Balbir K Punj
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 22, 2002

To repeat an old adage, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The Congress, which had played a rabid communal card in Punjab in the Eigh-ties with disastrous results for the country, is busy playing the same game again. However, in the process, it has dropped the fig leaf of secularism and bared its communal fangs, with the professional secularists looking the other way.

This time Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh displayed the bravado- arresting some 1,200 Akali activists, preventing Mr Parkash Singh Badal from entering Amritsar and encouraging Mr Badal's rival, Mr Gurcharan Singh Tohra, to emerge as an alternate centre of power within the Akali establishment, all the while pretending that he was only enforcing law and order and not interfering. Whether or not the police really defied the sanctity of the temple, it was sent in to meddle with what was a religious meeting of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee to elect its own executives. Several national newspapers described the episode as the worst instance of Government interference in the SGPC elections in the last 75 years.

There is no doubt that Mr Tohra, a known extremist in Sikh politics, was adopted as the Congress's mascot in its bid to subvert Akali politics. The party President's last minute, well-publicised directive to her Chief Minister not to put his foot in the Akali door notwithstanding, the Captain is now nursing his injured toe. Since Ms Sonia Gandhi's word is law in Congress politics, the elaborate battle plan to interfere in the SGPC elections could no longer be covered up.

The directive itself was the fig leaf; the battle plan needed time to prepare and the Chief Minister would not have been as stupid as to conceal this intention from the party President. The Sonia directive only served to keep her unsullied by the fallout of the plan; that too was part of the plan itself.

No one who is aware of the history of Congress actions in Punjab for the last several decades, can be fooled by such directives from the party President to its Chief Minister while the latter goes ahead with his well-laid siege of the Sikh temple elections. Speaking of history, it was a repeat performance of the devious plan of Indira Gandhi earlier to control Sikh politics through discrediting the Akali leadership and setting up rivals.

The strong stand that the Akali Dal took against the Emergency had convinced Indira Gandhi in the late Seventies that she should break Sikh unity and plant her own puppet in the SGPC. Soon after she returned to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi consciously promoted a rabid, and till then unknown, 'Sant' Bhindranwale against Sant Longowal and Mr Parkash Singh Badal. JS Bhindranwale even dared to enter Delhi with his band of armed followers and the Centre did nothing to stop him. In fact, Indira Gandhi's Home Minister Giani Zail Singh went so far as to prostrate himself before the Sant. Bhindranwale did the job for which he was sponsored and supported-breaking Akali unity. But he was nobody's fool.

Indira Gandhi soon learnt that she was feeding a Frankenstein's monster. The Sant became a law unto himself and, to dislodge him, Indira Gandhi had to order Operation Blue Star, which killed over 300 innocent pilgrims. In the last chapter of that drama, she herself died a victim of her own excesses. Her eagerness to crush the Akali Dal was survived by the virulent Sikh militancy in Punjab that took thousands of innocent lives.

Paradoxically, not only was Indira Gandhi hailed as the epitome of secularism but even eulogised by the secular-liberal establishment. She declared India had a big enough Muslim population to be represented at Islamic forums and sent her representative to attend the Islamic countries' summit at Rabat in 1974. That did not seem to anger the secular establishment. That the Organisation of Islamic Conference did not accept India's application to be admitted is another matter. The then Prime Minister could achieve her domestic agenda of projecting herself as the champion of the minorities.

The last 40 years' history of the Congress is full of instances of its communal approach, followed by a quiet silence on the part of the secular-liberals who target the BJP specifically for anything and everything. Rajiv Gandhi's infamous response to the Supreme Court order imposing the obligation of maintenance on Muslim husbands vis-a-vis their divorced wives, is by now part of history. At least some Muslim leaders like Arif Mohammad Khan protested against the throwback to Islamic orthodoxy.

But, in the end, Rajiv Gandhi-supposedly with his technocrat's outlook-let the liberal opinion within Islam die down. Without losing time, he also sought to balance it with his great solicitude for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and the whole drama of the Government-sponsored shilanyas is too deeply etched in our memory to be forgotten. His aim was to gain a toehold in the rising Ram Mandir movement as well as in Muslim orthodoxy. However, he did not succeed.

Throughout the Nineties, the then Congress Prime Minister PV Narasim-ha Rao, through his hatchet man Chandraswami, sought to set up a rival organisation of Hindu Sants to divide the Ayodhya movement. He also sought to float an organisation of Imams. This downright communal agenda did not click. But the secular-liberal establishment had no word of condemnation for the Government dabbling with essentially religious organisations and trying to buy support among them by using public funds.

The experience with the interference in Punjab clearly brought home one aspect of such meddling; it only leads to competitive militancy among rival religious bodies. But the recent interference in the SGPC elections shows that the Congress has, like the Bourbons, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.

When it comes to social reforms, the Congress has been, from the days of the Khilafat movement, on the side of orthodoxy for Muslims and forcible reforms for the Hindus. Jawaharlal Nehru was insistent on Hindu code reform; he did not lift a finger when it came to implementing the constitutional directive for a single civil law of marriage and inheritance, lest some communities were affronted.

That communal distinction in applying the same principles of liberalism and humanism persists to this day. The culture is spread over the entire secular-liberal establishment. For instance, State Governments have taken over and managed Hindu temples and institutions. That is done in the name of proper management of their revenues and properties, including the upkeep of the historic value of these temples. But just suggest that similar takeovers should be imposed with regard to the properties of mosques and churches, and you will have the secular-liberal establishment barking at you and political parties staging dharnas and calling for bandhs. Yet it is public knowledge that wakfs are generally mismanaged and their property alienated.

Many people shed tears over the conditions in the refugee camps of Ahmedabad recently; no one was available to even write about the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, displaced from their homes, deprived of their properties and now living as refugees in their own country. None of these numerous secular-liberal establishments or their academics in universities sheds a tear over the displaced Pandits.

In our country, there is a law against communalism and against promoting communal hatred. Yet against the spirit of the Constitution, intellectual ghetto-dwellers say that these laws apply selectively. Some can get away with any wrong so long as their political label and communal identity are of the right type; some cannot if their label and identity happen to be Hindu. If this is not hypocrisy, then what is?
 


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