Why Both are Wrong

Why Both are Wrong

The leaders of the two main political formations in the country — Congress and BJP — have already started their campaign for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections accusing each other of divisiveness and endangering the security of the country. The BJP has returned to the Ram temple sloganeering and lambasted the ruling Congress for having failed to spare ‘‘even five minutes’’ for initiating dialogue to resolve the Ram Janmabhoomi issue. BJP president Rajnath Singh has thundered that no one can ‘‘shake’’ the party’s ‘‘faith in Lord Ram and dedication to him’’. But faith in a deity is a strictly private affair. A political party’s mandate in a democracy should be different — modernist and developmentist — while at the same time be to lead a sustained and meaningful campaign against pseudo-secularism. The BJP’s articulation of that theory, therefore, is wrong. No one is asking any of the BJP leaders and members to abandon Lord Ram, but that should be strictly in the private domain as we have said. However, the saffron party has every reason to harangue the Congress brand of secularism and how it has undermined the very foundation of Indian democracy. Yet, the BJP’s argument could have been far more convincing if it had freed itself of emotionalism and worked out a thesis attuned to the needs of the country at this defining moment in history. A temple at the birth place of a deity who millions of Hindus worship, and in a country where Hindus are an overwhelming majority, cannot be a bad idea. But can a political party survive only on that agenda? Can it attract and expand its constituency by invoking religion alone, and by making it the main thrust of its electoral campaign, in a young country like India — and in a country with one of the highest rates of malnutrition, undernourishment, and infant and maternal mortality in the world? Our cities are dirty, urban poverty is on the rise, rural areas face continued neglect, farmers are committing suicide, armed movements stemming from social injustices and discriminations continue unabated, infrastructure development is notoriously tardy, crime against women and children is rampant, female foeticide is commonplace even in the 21st century — the list is endless when it comes to the real face of ‘rising’ India. Are not these issues far more important? As for the Congress, it has a lot of explaining to do for its complete misrule of the country. Party president Sonia Gandhi has said that the BJP-led NDA has done a ‘‘grave damage to our secular polity, society and economy’’ and the BJP’s voice is of ‘‘polarization, division and hatred’’, while the Congress is ‘‘a voice of social justice, communal harmony and inclusiveness’’. Quite a joke, this. Would Mrs Gandhi enlighten the people of the country as to what kind of social justice, communal harmony and inclusiveness she has in mind? Would she tell us whether the victims of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 — following the assassination of her mother-in-law and the pogrom organized by the Congress against the Sikh community in the national capital in one of the worst communal massacres in independent India — have got justice? Or does by ‘‘communal harmony’’ and ‘‘inclusiveness’’ she mean the so-called secular compulsion to make one particular religious minority community the greatest beneficiary of someone else’s secular way of way? Either Mrs Gandhi is very poorly informed or she has evolved like a true Congress leader to hoodwink the gullible voter by means of empty rhetoric and pretence in the name of ‘secularism’. But there is a limit to that too, and the sensible voter can see through that grandstanding. It is another matter if the Congress has nothing new to offer.