BJP’s fight to throw brand Nehru out
The one original thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi can claim to have done in his first 100 days, the traditional marker to gauge if a government has wind in its sails, is the demolition of the Planning Commission.
But there is little to suggest that the lone new step of the government has been thought through.
Suddenly online suggestions are being called from the general public about what to do with the planning set- up. Its former members have been invited for brain- storming. It seems there is poverty of thought that precedes action; ironically, a poverty of planning.
The announcement to dismantle the plan body set up by Jawaharlal Nehru was made from the Red Fort on Independence Day by the Prime Minister of India. This was no small moment. It was a moment of harrumphing by the country’s first all- saffron Prime Minister who had proudly proclaimed he was a “Hindu nationalist”. Mr Modi wore the badge of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh tribe on his sleeve in a manner Atal Behari Vajpayee could not as he had to depend on other parties for survival. ( Besides, as the country’s elected leader, he may not have been quite the “Hindu nationalist” of the Modi variety.)
Mr Modi’s first Independence Day speech was self- consciously a brand- building exercise. For this to be successfully executed, brand Nehru had to be scuttled; Nehruvian thought had to be officially excised. A day had to be worked for when Nehru’s humanism — to further which existed the Planning Commission, and instruments such as the IITs and the era- specific leading public enterprises would begin to be seen as an anachronism.
It had ruled way too long, across non- Congress regimes as well, for instance, even when Mr Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, even if only in small measure. Ergo, it was a cancer. Its very memory was repugnant to the notion of Hindutva. There was no cleverer way to bring about an India “liberated from the Congress” that Mr Modi had anxiously spoken of in the election campaign than to strike at Nehru, and at the dead man’s thoughts.
Gandhi was gone. Patel was gone. Subhas was gone much earlier. And Maulana Azad did not last too long into Independent India. It was Nehru alone who carried forward — through contestation, argument, and with his great will and from his great height — the ideas that were seeded in the country’s freedom movement that stirred every Indian and moved the world. But it had not stirred the RSS that had hidden itself away from it lest the bug of freedom catch its members off guard.
The Congress or any party cannot be finished by jailing, humiliating, ridiculing or executing its leaders, though all these methods have been foolishly tried in all climes. It is their thought that has to be attacked for long- term effect, the idea extinguished. Mr Modi has set about trying to do just that.
Indeed, that is the way to appease the spirit of “Guruji” Golwalkar, the remarkable RSS leader of the early years whose books the Bharatiya Janata Party and other RSS- linked bodies now like to hide out of sheer embarrassment in our democratic age, but which continue to be the demonic inspiration for every unit of the RSS, ground upward.
The “pujya Guruji” of the Hindutva pantheon was an open admirer of Adolf Hitler. His precepts would permit Muslims and Christians to live in India if they accepted second- class citizenship; if not, the same precepts would permit their quartering. Just hear the speeches of Mahant Adityanath. He was fielded as BJP’s lead speaker in the recent Lok Sabha debate on communalism, held in the shadow of shaming violence against Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar and Moradabad. Just hear BJP’s big- wigs hold forth on “love jihad”.
Mr Modi is quiet, as he usually is when terrible things happen. If he did speak, the Constitution would oblige him to put an immediate end to communal violence and punish the perpetrators. Clearly, that is not an option. But sermonising from Red Fort about a 10year moratorium on communal violence is safe.
After all, the appeal is not to end communal violence for good. It is all right for the poison to spread slowly, deliciously, and one day for the incandescent flames to rise and touch the sky. And isn’t it just okay to give the Z- plus security cover to a key accused of the Uttar Pradesh communal riots while accusing the state government of appeasing troublemakers. It’s a truly “ulta- pulta” or topsy- turvy world.
It is instructive that the Lohia Socialists and the Communists, the other principal streams of politics in India other than the RSS ( of which the BJP is mere- ly the political front) that seek to systemically challenge the Congress, have polemically attacked individual Congress leaders, especially Nehru’s descendants. They have, with effect, brought the charge of dynasty against the Congress ( though that sticks less and less these days, with other parties emulating with delirious joy). But they have never attacked instruments that Nehru created to attack poverty, the Planning Commission among them, although they have sometimes argued that these are for show and don’t go far enough.
The RSS and its affiliates are dangerously different. For them, the basic unit of politics is the violently aroused religious sentiment of a Hindu. That’s what their edifice is built on. Their strategy is tailor- made for chaos even in the short term, not growth and stability. The country would learn this before long when the price of bad faith begins to be extracted. The Hindus need not despair, though. Saving Hinduism, or revitalising the great faith, is not among RSS’ or Vishva Hindu Parishad’s concerns, just as preserving Islam’s spirituality is no part of the mandate Lahore’s Lashkar- e- Tayyaba or Jamaat- ud- Dawa has given itself.
Ah, what of the hundred days? Tomato goes at the price of petrol. Pakistan was the recipient of “mummy diplomacy” from the PM. It now says with venomous certainty that the Kashmir “dispute” must be resolved through the United Nations, not bilaterally, based on the Simla accord or the Lahore Declaration that India would like. And, there is blood on the carpet as Mr Modi and his home minister move their fight out of the shadows.