Shifting the terrain rightwards

When it comes to sheer hypocrisy, it’s hard to beat India’s Sangh Parivar. It strenuously claimed the legacy of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a principal author of India’s constitution, and a Dalit, on his 124th birth anniversary. Its motive lies in the coming election in Bihar, where a Dalit (former chief minister Manzhi) has emerged as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s potential ally against Laloo Prasad and Nitish Kumar.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh tried to usurp Ambedkar by likening him to its own founder KB Hedgewar, a brazen casteist who opposed the values of equality that Ambedkar fought for!
True to type, the RSS added a communal twist to this when it asked why India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, was conferred on Ambedkar 10 years after it was given to Mother Teresa – in keeping with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s tendentious charge that she used charitable activities as a cover for religious conversion.
The Indian government had no choice but to give Teresa the Bharat Ratna after she was awarded the Nobel Prize. But there was stiff resistance to honouring Ambedkar from the Hindu Right (which is the Parivar), and the Maratha lobby (which the BJP-Shiv Sena is desperately cultivating).
Strangely, the BJP made no fuss when the Bharat Ratna was bestowed on its real icon, Vallabhbhai Patel, even later than on Ambedkar!
The Parivar’s ideology and politics was and remains the very opposite of what Ambedkar stood for. He had total contempt for Hindutva, with its narrow faith-based definition of nationhood, as opposed to his broad, expansive idea based on equal rights and citizenship cutting across ethnic-religious identities. He said “Hindu Raj” would be “the greatest calamity for this country”.
Ambedkar regarded scripturally sanctioned and actually practised Hinduism as inseparable from rank casteism, and incapable of reform within Gandhi’s framework, which patronisingly yet piously saw Dalits as Harijans (God’s children). It’s no accident that Ambedkar burned the Manu Smriti. He converted to Buddhism after declaring: “I was born a Hindu, I had no choice. But I will not die a Hindu because I do have a choice.”
Ambedkar wanted a separate electorate for Dalits, but was blackmailed by Gandhi’s fast-unto-death into dropping the demand via the 1932 Poona Pact. The separate electorate idea remains a sacrilege for the Parivar, which hypocritically champions the myth of ‘Hindu unity’ as the backbone of the Indian nation, denying its diversity.
The BJP and its sister Hindu-supremacist organisations reject secularism (or basic separation of religion from politics), which was pivotal to Ambedkar’s thought. They regard secularism as a false doctrine. Hence the Parivar’s dangerously misleading slogan of ‘pseudo-secularism’!
Rejection of secularism and display of aggressive majoritarianism now manifests itself in increasingly virulent ways: banning the slaughter of bulls and old buffaloes and cows, and making the sale or consumption of beef a punishable crime (Maharashtra); attacks on Christian churches (Delhi, Haryana and West Bengal); and hounding Muslims out of ‘Hindu’ areas through intimidation and violence (as VHP’s Pravin Togadia did in Bhavnagar in Gujarat).
Hate speech is fast becoming the new normal. It’s bad enough that BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj makes hysterical statements about Muslims having “40 children from four wives”. It’s even worse when Sanjay Raut, the editor of the Shiv Sena organ ‘Saamna’, demands that Muslims be deprived of the right to vote because they are used as “vote banks”.
This is a flagrant attack on the constitution and its fundamental guarantee of universal franchise. Raut is a Rajya Sabha MP who made a pledge to defend the constitution. It’s simply not open to him to make such obnoxious statements. He must be reprimanded by the Rajya Sabha chairman and asked to apologise, failing which he must be punished.
India has been far too indulgent towards communal excesses by important functionaries. It took the election commission as many as 13 years to declare the late Bal Thackeray guilty of seeking votes in the name of religion during a 1986 election. Eventually, he was barred from contesting elections or voting for six years.
During the last Lok Sabha election, Narendra Modi repeatedly invoked Lord Ram in his campaign speech at Faizabad in May. A model of the BJP-proposed Ram Mandir formed the backdrop of the stage from which he addressed the meeting. Former chief election commissioner SY Qureshi, no less, asked why the election commission had not initiated action against the rally organiser or Modi himself.
No such action was taken. No wonder a culture of impunity has come to prevail among politicians, the police and sections of the judiciary, who know they can get away with the worst kinds of anti-minority atrocities.
That’s the message from the Hashimpura case verdict delivered late last month. This was a gruesome killing of 42 Muslims in May 1987 near Meerut city in Uttar Pradesh by Provincial Armed Constabulary personnel.
All of them were acquitted. As former senior police official Vibhuti Narain Rai has written, the investigation was rigged in their favour. The state took nine years to file a charge sheet. The accused were never arrested despite 23 non-bailable arrest warrants.
The main reason for this, as an Outlook magazine investigation (April 6) has revealed, is that the massacre was an act of revenge by an army officer whose brother, an RSS member, was killed in a communal clash. His army unit dragged out young Muslims from their homes and handed them over to the PAC. The government was informed but did nothing.
A day after Hashimpura, the PAC joined a mob in killing 72 Muslims in Maliana next door. Another shoddy investigation followed. The trial in the case has not even crossed the first stage – despite 800 dates having been fixed. Only three of the 35 prosecution witnesses have been examined in 28 years. The last hearing was held almost two years ago. After the Hashimpura verdict, the Maliana victims’ families have lost all hope.
These terrible failures of the justice delivery system have encouraged other uniformed personnel to practise brutalities against citizens – as at Pathribal in Kashmir in 2000, where the army killed five innocent civilians falsely charging them with the Chittisinghpora massacre of 36 Sikhs. The culprits were recently let off by an army court of inquiry.
The latest episode in Nalgonda in Telangana state, in which five Muslim under-trials were killed in cold blood, falls in the same category. The state will not bring the culprits to book unless public-spirited citizens, civil society organisations and political parties intervene and lobby it.
The greatest long-term beneficiaries of such atrocities and justice delivery failures are the forces of right-wing intolerance, bigotry and violence. Self-styled ‘Chhatrapati’ Bal Thackeray wasn’t able to drive non-Maharashtrians out of Bombay or put the Shiv Sena in power on its own in Maharashtra. But he succeeded in inflicting grave damage upon the Left and trade union movements, creating terror, and shifting the entire political discourse rightwards.
Similarly, a Sanjay Raut won’t be able to disenfranchise Muslims, but he has shifted the political terrain to the right, making it more favourable to anti-constitutional forces. There’s no point merely bemoaning this danger. It must be actively combated by those committed to secular democracy and humanism.
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.
Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in