Tucked in corners of some
newspapers today was a small news item. ‘Ram Navami not celebrated in Ayodhya’.
The small reports explain that owing to a 19 year Supreme Court order, which
prohibited religious activity in the 67 acres plot adjoining the Ram
Janmabhoomi Temple, the District Administration prohibited observance of the
festivities this occasion. Strange are the ways of our rulers. A court ruling
had supposedly been violated 18 times in the last 18 years, starting from 1994
when the passions over the temple restoration on one hand and belligerent
secularism on the other were still high. Yet, the state administration under
Mulayam Singh Yadav allowed celebration of Ram Navami at Janmabhoomi and the
age old tradition continued without a break.
A moot point to be noted
here is that the celebrations used to be observed in the areas adjoining the
mosque, primarily near the Ram Chabootra and the offerings made at Sita Ki
Rasoi, areas which were not a part of the disputed land and had been in
possession and worship of Hindus for centuries. It was these among the many
properties gradually acquired by the VHP led Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas and later
taken over by the Government. That the then ruling of Supreme Court in clubbing
this land with the core temple for matters of litigation was curious
without doubt, it seems curiouser that an annual event which had been performed
for ages and even after the reclamation of the temple was prohibited all of a
sudden.
This act follows the UP
Government’s stoppage of the longest running Ramlila at Ayodhya by that most
simple of means, simply depriving it of funds. Very certainly, the twin acts,
the first much more serious than the other are neither isolated nor innocuous.
The SP Government, buffeted by a belligerent Muslim community demanding a
greater pound of flesh for their support and accusations of being inept in
handling of communal riots (which incidentally had much more Hindu casualties),
what better way to signal to the bellicose Muslim that it stands with it
shoulder to shoulder in its wars. After all, wasn’t it the SP (then Janata Dal)
which ordered the cold blooded massacre of unarmed Kar Sevaks on two separate
occasions in 1990?
However, this is the SP, an
offshoot of that cabal of former socialists who jettisoned their socialist
legacies to embrace an electorally rewarding but highly toxic philosophy of
blatant minority appeasement. So successful have they been that the original
fountainhead of this philosophy, the Congress (I), with able guidance from its
foreign born supremo was forced to join this race of competitive appeasement of
only one segment of our Nation.
But, what about our
communal parties and lunatic groups aka the BJP and the VHP? The former
hijacked a movement launched by the latter to reap electoral benefits while the
latter lost control of a mass mobilization which could actually have yielded
results. The BJP is known by various monikers - the Indian Ku Ku Klux clan, the
Hindu Supremacist party, the Far Right Party of India and so on. The VHP has
lesser luck and is nowadays simply described a group of lumpen elements, those
Hindu fundamentalists who only engage in moral policing. Hardly has a squeak
been uttered on the new developments by those who had taken up cudgels on behalf of Rama not so long ago, in the process promising to
apply balm to our damaged psyche.
While the label of a Hindu
party has stuck to the BJP, what exactly is Hindu about the BJP? Post the
agenda on Ram Temple liberation, what has the central leadership of the BJP
done in the last two decades which would justify its reputation or notoriety?
The last elections which were fought on the matters revolving around the
Hindutva agenda were the assembly polls of 1993 and to a small extent in the
Maharashtra assembly polls of 1995. The 5 General Elections in between
1996 and 2009 had only one conspicuous aspect on Hindutva – its absence! True,
at the grass-roots, the average BJP worker believes in the agenda which attracted
him/her to the party in the first place and still, hoping against hope, dreams
of a day when the Nation will deal with its people on equal terms. But that is
only the average worker! Since 1995, BJP’s central leadership has steadily
moved away from what they proclaimed and has used every available soap (even
Jinnah Brand) to scrub themselves clean of the stain of past ‘sins’. If they do
manage to come close to power, another soap, proselytizer family scion Jagan
Mohan Reddy, will be used remove some more old stains.
Then we have our flavor of
the season, Narendra Modi – the Hindu Hriday Samrat! One will be excused if he
gets an impression that our mainstream media is desperately short of people who
are discerning, those who can observe and analyse and then report. It is true that Narendra Modi appealed to the Hindu hurt in 2002 elections, which followed the
riots triggered by the ghastly burning of innocent men, women and children by
marauding Muslim mobs at Godhra.
But that was 2002. By 2004,
Narendra Modi had decided that he had no further use of those emotions which
led him to power and not only were the Hindu grass root organizations steadily
squeezed and made defunct Modi sidelined all those who had pronounced Hindutva sympathies; Gujarat is probably the only state where such a
large number of people have been convicted for participation in communal
rights. Strangely, or perhaps not so much, even though the riots had over 30%
Hindu casualty with over 40,000 Hindus taking refuge in relief camps, except
for the Godhra train burning accused, hardly any Muslim rioter figures in the
list of convicts. Does it indicate that only Hindus rioted and that the Hindus dead, either got killed by other Hindus or committed suicide, only to give a
bad name to the hapless Muslims of Gujarat? But, selective justice is a proven
way of endearing oneself to the bully. An appeal for death penalty to Mayaben
Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi is only another step towards that journey of finding
acceptance where he is shunned. Modi’s drive against roadside encroachments
swallowed temples, but stopped when Muslims rioted at Vadodara. Certainly not
an act of a fanatic Hindutvavadi! Why is the media then hell bent to anointing him with honorifics he clearly has not striven for?
What exactly had Narendra
Modi done in the last decade to justify the title of Hindu Hriday Samrat? True,
he has achieved a lot and will at least provide a solid alternate to this
utterly corrupt and inept UPA Leadership. People may or should vote for Modi
(or whosoever the NDA Prime Ministerial Candidate is), if for nothing else,
simply to punish the Congress for what it has gifted us!
But, the point under
discussion – Is the BJP a Hindu party or is Narendra Modi’s moniker of Hindu
Hriday Samrat justified. Sadly or otherwise, the answer is an emphatic no.
These are people who have been working hard to obliterate their old links and
claims to fame (or infamy). So, why credit them with emotions they don’t
possess? It is then, perhaps poetic justice that all their efforts have not yet
succeeded in winning a seat on the high table of secularism (as it is practiced
in India).
