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Mere facelift won't do

BETWEEN THE LINES

Kuldip Nayar writes from New Delhi
What has happened to the BJP in the first 25 years should be lesson to the party -- if it needs to learn any -- that it cannot come to power with its anti-Muslim image. Twenty-five years should be an adequate period for the party to understand the country's temperament. Secularism may still be weak in the country, but nobody can play around with its ethos. The party can retire Vajpayee or Advani and have a younger person from among the squabbling second and third line leaders. Still, it cannot go far if the party does not change its character.****
IT happens to political parties as to individuals. They become old even when they are young in years. At 25, the BJP looks jaded, sounds outmoded and stuck in the past. The party reminds you of the fable of the horrible old man who clung to the back of Sinbad the Sailor.
The party is celebrating its silver jubilee, but there is everything in ideas and policies to suggest that it is the same Jana Sangh of yore. There is no difference in the attitude, and the party has picked up the thread of parochialism, fundamentalism, and even arrogance from where it left off. Still, when the erstwhile Jana Sangh group parted company with the declining Janata Party in 1979 and gave itself the new name of BJP, it appeared as if a new outburst of ideology -- Hindu nationalism -- had taken over. But it has turned out to be Hindu chauvinism, and it is worsening day by day.
The reading that the Jana Sangh members merged with the post-emergency Janata Party to get respectability of secularism has come true. In 1977, they swore by Gandhian socialism and secularism at the Raj Ghat. Two years later, they took a 180-degree turnabout and refused to break links with the RSS, the preceptor of Hindutva. One had imagined that even the RSS would have realised that communal politics could not strike roots in a country which inhaled the air of tolerance and accommodation for centuries. Apparently, the RSS had joined the Janata to poach into the territory of secular groups. This was proved when the BJP assembled the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
Strangely the RSS, which first constituted the Jana Sangh and then the BJP to serve as its political instrument, never faced the reality: It was counterproductive to argue that Hinduism was in danger in a country where Hindus numbered 80 per cent. Religious parties in Pakistan and Bangladesh are doing the same, appealing to Muslims in the name of Islam and polluting the atmosphere. They too are losing the ground after the initial bout of activity.
After leading the NDA for six years, the BJP should have known that it got support from secular elements because it kept apart its core agenda of building a temple at Ayodhya and of deleting Article 370 that gave a special status to Jammu and Kashmir. Both these emphasised India's ethos: pluralism and diversity. For the BJP to go back to the line that the Jana Sangh took is proving fatal. The cauldron of communalism cannot be put on the fire twice. The BJP has experienced this by vainly reviving the mandir issue.
The success of the party in the past was because of the mistakes that the Congress committed. Rajiv Gandhi amended the constitution to undo the Supreme Court's judgment which gave maintenance to Shah Bano, a Muslim divorcee. The BJP exploited the situation since Hindus felt horrified over a secular party compromising with communalism. Later, when Rajiv Gandhi had the locks at the Babri Masjid opened to placate Hindus the BJP had a field day. But now the atmosphere has changed and the voters have become mature.
Had the BJP become purely NDA, not only by shelving part of its agenda, but by jettisoning it altogether, it might have emerged as an alternative. People, not happy with the Congress, might have begun thinking whether the BJP should be strengthened to cast off its Hindutva clothes. (In the sixties many joined the Congress to change it from within). The biggest fallout would have been a dent in the Muslim vote which makes a difference in some 200 Lok Sabha seats in the 546-member house.
Muslims are not enamoured of the Congress because they have been at the receiving end in the riots during the party's regimes. Still they might have supported the BJP in the Hindi-speaking states at least to find out if the leopard had changed its spots. The leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee did make many Muslims and liberal Hindus tilt towards the BJP which looked fiercely Hindu nationalist, but not anti-Muslim. This was despite the harm done by three people: L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and Narendra Modi. Maybe, they brought to the fore the real face of the BJP. Maybe, they thought that the foundation of a Hindu Rashtra had to be laid when the BJP was in power. Maybe, they imagined that they had changed the Indian people to such an extent that they would give up their traditional spirit of living together in peace, whatever their religion.
Advani of the Rath Yatra fame communalised the administration. He saw to it that the RSS wishes were carried out to the extent of pracharaks serving as governors and ministers in the BJP ruled states or members in the Rajya Sabha. Joshi was the Education Minister who changed India's history to spread the RSS line that Hindus were a suppressed lot, even by the best of Muslim rulers. He tried to spoil the minds of children, similar to what the books in Pakistan have been doing since the country's birth. Strange, the Confidence Building Measures between the two countries have not a single committee to look into the books taught in the two countries.
In fact, it is Modi who has delivered a fatal blow to the BJP. The planned killing of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat has alienated minorities and liberals for decades to come. He may have exposed the real agenda of the BJP and in doing so he took the mask off from people like Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh, who were considered the liberal faces of the party. Their lack of action against Modi, when the BJP was ruling at the centre, ended the illusion of some liberal Hindus who hoped against hope that the BJP could be reformed. The BJP does not admit that Gujarat cost it the Lok Sabha elections. But its poll ally Telugu Desam has openly admitted it. In fact, Telugu Desam leader Chandrababu Naidu is so disillusioned that he has begun the exercise of assembling a non-BJP and non-Congress alternative at the centre. The Left on which the Congress depends for its survival is helping him.
What has happened to the BJP in the first 25 years should be lesson to the party -- if it needs to learn any -- that it cannot come to power with its anti-Muslim image. Twenty-five years should be an adequate period for the party to understand the country's temperament. Secularism may still be weak in the country, but nobody can play around with its ethos. The party can retire Vajpayee or Advani and have a younger person from among the squabbling second and third line leaders. Still, it cannot go far if the party does not change its character.
Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.