Sectarian politics is destroying India

Do you want to see how a nation builds itself? Look at the People’s Republic of China. From a tattered country, wracked by civil war and internal strife, in 1980, it has systematically pulled itself up to emerge as one of the leading powers of the world.
The Communist party there abandoned dogma to unleash its economic potential, and reformed itself to provide effective governance based on giving the levers of power to the best and the brightest in a systematic, time-bound manner.
In these years, it has sand-papered regional and linguistic variations by a national culture, built on a bedrock of a new network of road and railways, extending into the outermost reaches of the vast country. Its great metropolises like Shanghai and Beijing vie to become world centres of industry, finance and culture.
To see how a nation destroys itself, however, you do not have to go far. You only have to look at India.
In 1980, we were ahead of China in almost every department, except nuclear weapons. But over the years, we have fallen behind everywhere— in science, agriculture, manufacturing.
Our political system increasingly based on parties that seek to exclude or divide people on the basis of caste, creed, region or language seems determined to destroy the unified fabric of the country.


Hindutva

Our vaunted right of democratic protest has degenerated to a point where tearing up national communications networks like roads and railway tracks has now become the norm. Our great metropolis Mumbai has been blessed with leaders whose perspective does not extend beyond the state of Maharashtra.
In this process, the country’s leading political party, the Congress, has been the most complicit for its failures of omission, rather than commission. It has failed to provide the kind of national leadership that was expected of it. Instead, it has kowtowed to fundamentalists, fumbled before separatists and failed to keep the country’s tryst with destiny.
But perhaps the biggest immediate danger we confront is from the actions of the Bharatiya Janata Party which projects itself as a super-nationalist organisation, but seems determined to diminish the nation, and not just geographically. Recall, in the 1990s, it demanded that a Ram Mandir be established on the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and unleashed a national movement that led to widespread rioting and mayhem in the country.
It’s double-barreled somewhat transparent aim was to humiliate the Muslim community whose demonisation has always been a part and parcel of its mobilisational strategy, and to gain the support of the majority Hindus who worship Lord Ram. That project as we know has only been partially successful. The Muslims have been humiliated to the point that some of them have turned to radicalism and even terrorism, but the Hindus have not rallied behind the party in the numbers that were expected.

Jammu & Kashmir

So in the past year or so, the party has experimented with a number of other issues like Sethusamudram, hoping that one of them will be the spark that sets off the prairie fire. But last month it believes it hit pay dirt when the issue of the transfer of land by the Jammu & Kashmir government to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board rocked the state. There is no doubt that the protests in the Valley had a communal colour, led as they were by the Mir Waiz Umar Farooq and Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Neither is there any question that it was mishandled by the previous governor Lt. Gen (retd) S.K. Sinha and the coalition government of the Congress and the People’s Democratic Party.
The counter-agitation may appear to be a spontaneous upsurge of Jammu-based Hindus angered by the communalism of the Valley leaders, but it is in fact a well organised campaign being directed by the Sangh Parivar which had, as recently as 2002, backed the idea of a separate Jammu state. The leaders of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board Sangharsh Samiti are known Parivar men — Tilak Raj Sharma of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, VHP state president Ramakant Dubey and the BJP state chief Ashok Khajuria.
When militancy broke out in 1990, some administrators like Governor Jagmohan had suggested a scorched earth policy of destroying the financial support structure of the separatists by blockading the Valley and preventing any export of its fruit and handicraft products. Fortunately better sense prevailed and the Indian security forces were able to restore a great measure of authority of the state without having thrown the baby out with the bath-water.
But the Jammu agitation is trying to do precisely that by blockading the Valley and preventing the export of its apple produce. It is being assisted in the process by the Punjab government which is a coalition between the Akali Dal and the BJP. It does not take much imagination to see that the consequences of these actions will be to deepen the sense of alienation of the Kashmir Valley Muslims from the rest of the country. Since the other major route out of the Valley leads out of the Jhelum Valley to Pakistan, this will go a long way in promoting the Pakistani project in the state.
But these things do not matter much to the BJP. It has not hesitated to pursue a cynical and dangerous policy of alienating the 140 million Muslims and pushing them over the brink through actions like the Babri Masjid demolition and the Gujarat massacres of 2002.

Typhoon

Now it seems determined to push the scheme of trifurcating the state which was last attempted by the Jammu Mukti Morcha, an RSS-backed body, in the 2002 elections. It should be clear what trifurcation implies — the Valley, Doda, Poonch and Rajauri becoming 100 per cent Muslim and edging towards Pakistan, so that the rump of a Hindu Jammu and Ladakh remain with India.
The BJP leaders think that once they have consolidated their electoral majority in Parliament, they can douse the fires they have lit, or coerce the Muslim community into total submission. But given the experience of the consequences of Babri Masjid and Gujarat — the repeated acts of terrorism that we are witnessing in the last couple of years — it should be clear that they will be unleashing a typhoon which will destroy the nation as it is constituted.
This article appeared first in Mail Today August 7, 2008

The Congress has lost the fire in its belly

According to Michael Ignatieff, Harvard professor and now Canadian politician, “In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success.” What lessons does the Congress need to learn from its defeat in the Gujarat state assembly elections, and what does the BJP need to do to exploit its success ? Obviously the most important thing for the former is to deconstruct its election campaign and see where it went wrong.
Learning from your errors is always a good thing, but easier said than done. There is little unanimity in determining what the Congress’ mistakes were. Was it the lack of an identified chief ministerial candidate, or was it in playing footsie with BJP rebels, including the likes of Goverdhan Zadaphia, whose record in dealing with the 2002 massacres as state Home Minister was shameful, and possibly criminal. Could it have been the “maut ke saudagar” taunt, or the flip-flop thereafter that showed the Congress to be weak-kneed in front of Modi’s fighting retort ? Or was it the inability of the party to put forward boldly a coherent ideological programme, emphasizing its secularist beliefs and aam admi (common man) approach ?

Secularism
But then we are assailed with even more questions. Does the party have the capacity to admit its mistakes? Only if it does, can it correct them. As of now, the Congress is hamstrung by a culture that declares that the leader—whether it was Jawaharlal Nehru in relation to China in 1962, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency in 1975, or Narasimha Rao and Babri Masjid in 1992— is never wrong. Neither, for that matter, is the heir-apparent. Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon in the past couple of years to the detriment of the party.
The Congress is now confronting a revitalised BJP which is determined to press on with its Hindutva project. Despite its victory in 2004 general elections, the Congress has not displayed any special strategy, or leadership to deal with it. As Gujarat revealed, all that the party did was to try and exploit the BJP’s inner divisions and make a fleeting reference to the 2002 events. Beyond that there was neither intention and nor effort.
Given the Indian tendency towards self-flagellation in defeat-- and boast in times of victory—there is a tendency to overstate the lessons of a single state assembly election. Understand that even before Modi came to the scene, the BJP was the dominant party in the state having won the elections of 1995 and 1998 by a near two-thirds majority, now the Congress has added eleven seats and the BJP lost ten. Even though it has wrested more seats to compensate, its losses of sitting seats have been significant. What Modi has done is what the Left has done in West Bengal—become the vessel for the pride of the citizens of the state. Yet the bald fact is that the Congress was defeated in an election it could have won, and one that took place at a critical time in relation to the dynamics of the UPA government at the Centre.
This must be seen as a defeat of secularists and not secularism, of their ability to deliver their message, not the message itself. Any strategy for an umbrella-party like the Congress which has an all-India, all community spread, must be based on a determined enunciation of secular politics. Secularism is a good intellectual notion, worth pursuing and indeed endorsed by our Constitution. But trying to master the political grammar of secularism in semi-literate country like India is more complex as Rajiv Gandhi, himself no doubt a secular person, realized.
Two decisions by his government in 1986—the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid and “balancing” it with the Muslim Women’s Act to counter the Shah Bano judgment were both seen by the Congress as their version of secularism which emphasizes equal respect for all religions. But this peculiar definition of secularism has brought disaster for the party. Perhaps the ideal needs to move back to what it was in Jawaharlal’s time—strictly separating state and religion.

Leaders
What the party needed to do in Gujarat was to understand the reality of a state that was, rather than what it should be. Given the fact that the Congress has allowed its secular ideology to erode over the past decades, it could not have pushed a hard secular line overnight. But it needed to make the line itself clear in the first place. The way to take on the BJP was not by trying to outflank it on Hindutva, or make adjustments for it, but to categorically contest that vision and bear with the consequences.
In the coming months, the Congress will have to make many decisions. Whatever some American dons suggest, decision-making is not a science, even of the social variety. Experience does help, but as TS Eliot pointed out, “it imposes a pattern and falsifies.” It pushes you into well-trodden and sterile paths, and prevents you from looking at “out of the box” solutions. So, there is no substitute, really for leadership which is a compound of instinct, experience, intellectual integrity, courage and ruthlessness.
Effectiveness requires all these to be present in the compound. The Congress does not lack experience, but it does have difficulties with the other elements of leadership. Part of the problem is diarchy and part the nature of the party. Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister, while the real leader of the legislature party is its leader, éminence grise and principal campaigner, Sonia Gandhi. No one is clear as to how decisions are taken, in the party but we all know that the process is labyrinthine.
In Singh and Sonia Gandhi, we have prudent and good leaders. But people, whether in India, or elsewhere, also want leaders with vision and daring. They are ready to overlook mistakes, provided the leader is seen to have made them with seeming conviction. In any case as Mao and Indira have shown, bashing on regardless of your mistakes, too, has been the hallmark of great leaders.
The problem, however, is also in the nature of the Congress. If the BJP has a retrograde social and political message, it has a sophisticated management style, one that encourages merit, naturally within certain bounds. While the Congress is a party with a progressive political orientation, but its organizational approach is at present feudal, if not tribal.

Ruthless
The Congress cannot easily change its nature. It is no longer the party of Jawaharlal, but of Indira who changed its DNA irrevocably. It is a family proprietary company and like such firms in the business sector in India and around the world, it continues to have a unique relevance.The problem for the proprietors is that security compels them to remain somewhat isolated and so it requires uncommon instinct to understand issues and take decisions, which in turn need a base of expert ideation and solid conviction to be efficacious. But the firm has yet to get the right mix in combining proprietary concerns with furthering corporate interests. The result is a perception that its top management does not have the kind of autonomy that is desired, and perhaps also not the right mix of executives. Keeping family retainers like Arjun Singh and Shivraj Patil in key appointments, for example, betrays a certain lack of ruthlessness.People have called Sonia many things, but never ruthless. But that missing attribute seems to be the key factor in the Congress’ present make up. This quality runs through the government many of whose principal officers and numerous advisers are sinecure holders rather than shop-floor performers and street-fighters. Three years after the party assumed power, it has taken the lost election in Gujarat to tell us how much things have remained the same, even when they were supposed change.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 26, 2007