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Showing posts with label Narendra Modi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Narendra Modi. Show all posts

Saturday, October 18, 2008

India is revealing its moral vacuum

The National Integration Council has met — 146 individuals representing the cross section of India’s political and intellectual class, including leaders of the government and the opposition. According to the Prime Minister’s summing up, “there is across the board consensus on the need to contain communal discord and violence, protect minority rights and uphold our cherished values of nationalism, secularism, inclusiveness and non-violence.”
If anyone believes this, he also believes in the tooth-fairy. The bald fact is that there is no consensus in this country on the issue of communal peace. The Council may have been unanimous in condemning the wave of communal violence sweeping the land, but neither its deliberations, nor its condemnation matter a whit to those who have been killed, raped, made refugees in their own land. The fact of the matter is that the system has singularly failed to act in the face of a rising nihilistic mood in the country which seems devoid of all human consideration.
Take the behaviour of the Goa police in the latest case relating to the rape of a minor. After the Scarlett murder, we would have thought that they would be hyper active in pursuing similar charges. Instead, they have acted true to form. Because a minister was involved, they dragged their feet, and actually tried to get the mother to drop the charges, and acted only when she went public. So is it surprising that the nun who was raped in Orissa says that policemen watched on while the assault was taking place?

Disorder


The anatomy of the failure of law and order when confronted with inter-religious violence appears to be the same whether in West Asia or India, or for that matter anywhere else — a blind and unreasonable hatred for the ‘other’ that spares neither man, nor woman or child. A hatred that corrodes the police force and the custodians of the law. It has nothing to do with education. Jewish rioters in Israel are highly educated people as compared to their Indian counterparts, but they do not lack in barbarian behaviour when it comes to their Arab counterparts, as was evidenced in the city of Acre recently.
In this situation, parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress are merely fishermen casting their line in the troubled waters to see how many electoral fish they can land. There is a cynicism in their behaviour, and a dangerous degree of opportunism.
As for religion, it is an even more complex issue. Among the founding values of this nation is “secularism”. But the concept of the state being blind to religion has been long abandoned. The result is a pandering to its proclivity by the Congress, and a naked assertion of its primacy by the BJP.
The police are not partisan here in the sense of favouring a religion or caste, but simply behaving like a force belonging to a banana republic. As for the politicians, the less said the better. Take the violence in Orissa, Karnataka and Maharashtra. It is easy to pin it down to a sinister effort by the BJP to stir up the temperature and harvest Hindu votes in the coming elections. But even if there is just a grain of truth in that, it shows how foolish the party is. The social and psychological behaviour of large populations is not something that you turn on and off like a light bulb.
Once a certain pattern of behaviour is given sanction, it becomes the norm. Currently, the ruling party and the opposition are giving sanction for use of violence to: the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena for the assertion of a regional identity; Bajrang Dal activists for the reconversion of tribal converts to Christianity; the Gujjars in Rajasthan for the right of reservation in jobs. Another kind of coercion is being aimed at the Muslim community in the name of fighting terrorism.
The BJP may hope that in this climate they will best the Congress, as they well may. But they will not be able to cool the raised temperatures that easily. Breaking order into disorder is an easy process, but trying to restore order from disorder is not that easy. What has happened in the Kashmir Valley is a case in point. Years of repression and electoral malpractice brought the old order down, but the torn social fabric of the state is not amenable to easy repair.

‘Indian’

India is a land of communities and castes which is striving to make them into a nation of “Indians”. The problem is that we have two major visions of what this means. There is one that can be ascribed to Nehru and Ambedkar which sees an India rid of the taint of caste and functioning on the basis of its principal values —democracy and secularism. There is another vision, authored by Golwalkar and Hegdewar which sees India as a “Hindu” nation. Just what this means is not clear, because neither asserted that this should be based on the Manusmriti or the Dharamshastras, which means that caste would remain as one of its defining principles.
Unfortunately, the Nehru-Ambedkar project is not doing too well. Instead of eliminating caste as a pernicious factor, we are celebrating it — the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan which was based on the community’s desire to go down the caste ladder, rather than come up, is a case in point. The push for OBC reservations is another instance.
The perverted logic of reservations and its mindless application has brought us to a cul de sac and no one knows the way out. There are protagonists of reservations who no longer see it as a means to get ahead, but to keep others down.

Emptiness

On the other hand, the Sangh Parivar is gaining more and more success in damaging India’s composite culture, though it is not clear whether they will ever be able to achieve their concept of “Hindu” India without destroying the nation as we know it now.
In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Andre Béteille has referred to the shoddy record of governments and opposition in upholding the Constitution and meeting the demands of the people. He has ascribed the failure to the lack of what he calls “constitutional morality.” To my mind this means they may be observing the letter of the Constitution, but not its spirit.
The problem does not arise because there is no word for “morality” in Hindi or the Indian languages, but that our political class and along with them, the bureaucracy and police, have become totally amoral. Atal Bihari Vajpayee understood this when he urged Narendra Modi to observe raj dharma in 2002, but we know that he did not succeed. So Vajpayee must share the stigma for Gujarat with Modi. What we are witnessing today in Orissa and other states is a consequence of the inability of our rulers and the opposition to observe constitutional morality, or raj dharma, if you will.
This moral vacuum is reflected in a small way in the inability of the Goa police to be moved by the plight of a 14 year old girl who has been raped.
This article first appeared in Mail Today October 16, 2008

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall"

Can the UPA be put together again ?


Once upon a time, six months ago to be exact, there was a government that was moving full steam ahead. The economy was flourishing, the allies quiescent, and the Opposition dead beat. The ruling party had managed to get its nominee appointed President of the Republic — a sign of its commanding position — the Sensex had breached the 15,000 mark in the space of just half a year, and India’s traditional bugbear, Pakistan, was in the midst of a deep political crisis brought on by the sacking of the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court and the Lal Masjid affair.
Then suddenly the ground started slipping. And in the space of the next six months, Humpty Dumpty was pushed off his perch, ironically by his own friends, and has come apart. Now the proverbial King’s men are exerting mightily to put him together again to fight the next general elections, but somehow the glue does not seem to stick.

War

It is not as though the warning signals were not there. The defeat in the UP assembly elections in May came despite an enormous amount of effort by the crown prince Rahul Gandhi. But the rapidity with which the whole picture changed in August and September was staggering. It began with the revolt of the CPI(M). For two years since the Indo-US nuclear deal had been announced in July 2005, the party had gone along with the government probably in the belief that the deal would not really come through. Then at the end of July it became clear that the impossible had been achieved, that the country had managed to get a generous 123 Agreement with the US. Suddenly the Left attitude changed and CPI(M) General Secretary Prakash Karat launched a major campaign to derail not just the deal, but question the entire foreign policy track of the United Progressive Alliance.
Buoyed by its success till then, the Congress was initially inclined to fight and tell the Left where to get off. In early October, Sonia Gandhi declared that those attacking the deal were “enemies of development”. There was talk of a possible general election. And then came the craven U-turn: Sonia said her reference was specific to Haryana and Manmohan Singh declared that if the deal did not come through it would not be the end of life. The Congress’ enthusiasm to fight the Left came a cropper when close allies like M. Karunanidhi and Lalu Prasad Yadav said that they were not for elections and could even break with the UPA on the issue.
Coincidentally just as the UPA relationship was hitting the nadir, the Sangh Parivar got out of its trough. Confronted with the possibility of general elections, the RSS and BJP sorted out their differences in quick time and formally anointed L.K. Advani as the leader of the party. This came with the important electoral victory of the party in Gujarat, and then Himachal. There has been a great deal of hand-wringing and analysis over the BJP’s success and the Congress’ defeat.


Casualties

But not many have considered asking as to why the average voter in Gujarat and Himachal, even if they were no votaries of Hindutva, would have voted for the Congress. First, the advocates of anti-communal politics had muddled their message by associating with a range of BJP rebels, some who were no less communal than Narendra Modi. Second, the sight of the great anti-communal warriors fighting each other to death on the specious issue of “American imperialism”, would not have been the most reassuring for a voter.
Having humiliated the Congress, the Left could hardly expect it to look tall and fight the BJP in Gujarat. Purely coincidentally, these developments came at the very time that the Left got the worst drubbing of its recent political life on the Nandigram issue where, among others, it confronted the Jamiat-ul-ulema-e-Hind, the powerful organisation of Muslim clerics.
So here we are at the beginning of 2008, surveying the ruins of a once proud alliance and wondering whether it can be put together again. With elections just a year or so away, the Congress and its allies, which includes the Left, must ask the question: Just what have they achieved in the past three years? On what basis should the people vote for them the next time around?
True, the UPA has given us a stable government whose record is not marred by a Gujarat-type pogrom; its competent handling of foreign relations has enhanced India’s standing in the world. But economic growth has come on its own, or at least, without any significant government intervention, and despite the best efforts of the Left to sabotage it. Let’s not tarry on the still cooking nuclear deal. What about the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme? According to a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, it is not working. The government has hardly shown itself as an exceptional protector of the country, or a fighter against communal violence.
This is not to say that the condition of the other parties is any better. The coming year will see a bonfire of the vanities of other political formations as well. The BJP may send out its new poster-boy Narendra Modi to sup with Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, but it remains to be seen whether he gets the same kind of reception with Chandrababu Naidu or Nitish Kumar. Nandigram has yet to play itself out, not so much in terms of Mamta Banerji’s antics, but the alienation of the Muslim community from the Left.
Both the Congress and the BJP have been out of the Uttar Pradesh playing field and they don’t know how to get back on. The Congress’ chosen method is throwing sops that elude the targets and land up in the pockets of middle-men; as for the BJP, it is whistling in the dark hoping that Sethusamudram will do for them what the Ram Mandir did not. Turning up the communal temperature by using terrorism as the issue remains its most visible option.


Choice

Almost all political formations, barring Mayawati, want elections to take place at their assigned time in the first half of 2009. But that may not be possible. After its political mugging by the Left, the UPA does not look like it has the stamina to carry on for another year. If it does try, it could make the situation worse for itself. So, patchwork solutions are being attempted. In the coming weeks the Congress and the Left will try to pretend that their no-holds-barred battle never happened. Pranab Mukherjee’s declaration that the Congress would itself not like to proceed with a deal minus the Left’s support could be the beginning of an effort to revive the coalition. The effort would be to forget the August-December 2007 period.
There are straws in the wind to suggest that the Congress will again surprise the Left with a draft IAEA safeguards agreement that meets their somewhat extravagant demands. The Left will have the opportunity to reconsider. In the meantime, Mr. Karat may speak of the new Third Front and the Congress may dream of a modified UPA with Mulayam Singh, but time is not on their side.
As they confront the next general election, the future course of our political parties will be shaped by habit and vanities, rather than any deterministic unfolding of events. Choices exercised now could still make a difference, but just about.

This article was published in Mail Today January 16, 2008

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

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

Sunday, December 16, 2007

He is only past his first hurdle

L.K. Advani, the BJP’s PM-in-waiting carries the huge burden of his past, of NDA’s failings and his advancing years

Lal Kishen Advani has been anointed leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party after many trials and tribulations — and a great deal of humiliation. Yet the party's war trumpet signaling its readiness to face another general election has been unusually muted, and somewhat out of tune. Coming as it does on the eve of the first round of Gujarat polling, the designation of Advani as Prime Minister-in-waiting is a complex one. The decision has been pending for quite a while and an announcement was expected on his 81st birthday on November 8.
Some say that the decision is aimed at showing that it is not connected to the outcome of the Gujarat state assembly elections — whatever it is. Others argue that it could be seen as a means of getting some bump out of the electorate, because Mr. Advani represents Gandhinagar and has carefully cultivated his constituency, even though reports from the state indicated that attendance at his rallies was thin.
It is more than likely that the real reason is to put Narendra Modi in his place. In many ways Modi's persona and age seem to be better tailored to lead the party of Hindutva than that of the ageing Mr. Advani. But Modi’s style that brooks little dictation from the Sangh Parivar or anyone else goes against the grain of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh that prides itself in keeping its pracharaks and sympathisers on a short leash.

Sangh

Mr Advani has come to the fore also because he is the last man standing in the group of leaders who have had their hat in the ring for the past three years. Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's reluctant retirement has been brought on by chronic illness in the past year. Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi's presence at the ceremony indicates that for the present, at least, he has conceded Mr. Advani's claim to primacy. Both he and the hapless Mr. Rajnath Singh became lame duck ever since the party was decisively trounced in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls earlier this year.
What remains to be seen now is whether there is a similar shift in the RSS. As long as Mr. K.S. Sudarshan remains Sarsanghchalak, the BJP will be forced to adjust to his eccentric demands and not be able to set its own agenda. As of now it would appear that the RSS wants a dual party-government type system where it can retain control through the party president who owes his position to the organisation. But this has not proved to be a workable proposition. Mr. Vajpayee's success lay precisely in avoiding the Sangh dictation. On the other hand, the manner in which the RSS savaged Advani on the “Jinnah was secular” remark indicates that the new leader has much less room for manoeuver.
Advani brings to the party a number of strengths. He is clear-headed and a good networker with regional parties which is needed to establish a new National Democratic Alliance. He has the loyalty of the younger crowd of leaders. But given his long innings, his weaknesses are also manifest. Primary among these is that he is cynical and self-serving.
He tailored his personal beliefs to ride a chariot across the country for the cause of building a temple for Lord Rama at Ayodhya. He did the same last year when he visited Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s mazar in Karachi and declared him secular. Cynicism is a pre-eminent trait of all successful politicians, but in Advani’s case it has been a source of weakness and brought disaster for the country and himself. Its latest manifestation is his opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal, something that the pro-American Advani knows is good for the country, but he cannot get himself to say so because he sees no advantage in it for himself.


Rival


And, of course, there is the issue of age. Though he is in excellent health, he is 81. That is an age when infirmity steals up with ruthless speed and unpredictability. More important, he will be pitted with the Congress’ Rahul Gandhi who has recently been anointed crown prince of the Congress. Besides Rahul, there is the relatively young Sonia (61), who is increasingly assertive and sure-footed because the “Italian origin” slur has found little footing with the electorate. While Rahul has yet to make his mistakes, and will any way be given a long rope because of his inexperience, Advani has already made his, and will be judged on their basis.
Mr. Advani saw the moment of his greatness wither a long time ago. If it did not do so after his Babri Masjid movement destroyed social peace in the country, it certainly did so with his indifferent performance as Union Home Minister. The repeated instances of terrorism — Parliament, Akshardham, Kaluchak and the humiliation of exchanging a plane load of hostages in Kandahar for three top terrorists — are damning. His failure to formulate an effective strategy beyond talking tough marked out Advani as the non-Sardar Patel. A former intelligence chief's assessment was that “Mr Advani is incredibly shallow”. He showed an unusual appetite for accessing intelligence information, but he did little with it.
His remarks on Pakistan just after the nuclear tests were downright irresponsible and his predilection towards the US nearly got India caught into the Iraqi quagmire. The handling of a law to tackle terrorism, POTA, was so partisan that it prevented the enactment of an effective anti-terrorist legislation. He was completely swamped by the Intelligence Bureau and Home Ministry bureaucracy and did not provide the kind of ministerial leadership that was expected from the strong man of the BJP.
Beyond his own person, Mr. Advani has to contend with the problems of his party. While it does not have the stultifying leadership culture of the Congress which is dominated by a family, the BJP is a house divided everywhere. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s relationship with his Cabinet colleagues, including Deputy Prime Minister Advani, were just a shade better than that of Shah Jehan with his sons.
The basic problem that Mr. Advani and the BJP have to confront is that they are a party espousing Hindutva, and by and large subsist on upper caste Hindu votes, but their potential allies come from a variety of parties, some based on caste, some on ethnicity. They do not see Hindutva as their lodestar, and neither do they necessarily demonise Muslims. The issue of Muslims has gained considerable salience considering that the National Democratic Alliance almost certainly lost the 2004 general election because of the Gujarat massacres of 2002. In the UP Assembly elections earlier this year, the BJP’s sorry showing was not just because of the state of the party organisation and leadership, but the fact that across the state Muslims made it a point to support the candidate most likely to defeat the BJP nominee. Alienating a bloc of voters is not a recipe for success in elections, except perhaps in the special conditions of Gujarat.

Hindutva

Advani and Vajpayee know that a pure Hindutva party does not have much traction with the electorate. Advani has himself publicly spoken about how the Jana Sangh had to become the “Bharatiya Janata Party” and later constitute a National Democratic Alliance before it could wield power at the Centre. Both Vajpayee and Advani had boasted that their government had a riot-free record in relation to Muslims, and then came the Gujarat cyclone and all pretensions were blown away.
Vajpayee’s attempt to sack Modi was defeated. And the consequence was the defeat in 2004. Vajpayee’s efforts to woo the community through a Dalit party president Bangaru Laxman, too came a cropper when he was caught in a sting and Bangaru’s remark that Muslims were the “blood of our blood” forgotten. Advani’s elliptical, though clumsy effort in hailing Jinnah nearly ended his career with the Parivar.
No two general elections are ever the same, and neither do issues that dominated one transfer to the other. The coming elections, whether in 2008 or on schedule the year after, will also be no different. To become Prime Minister, Mr. Advani will have to go beyond Lord Rama, rath yatras, terrorism or Pakistan. He has been a resourceful, if ruthless, politician in the past; what the future holds now for him only time will tell. But his margin for error is already that much thinner.

The article appeared in Mail Today December 12, 2007

Saturday, December 08, 2007

The Modi Trap: He may win in Gujarat, but the BJP will lose everywhere else

The ghosts of the Gujarat dead will not lay quiet. Those who thought that the massacres of 2002 — that of Godhra and its aftermath—will fade from public memory are mistaken. Murder, especially mass murder, is not something that ever has a closure, especially when the guilty remain unpunished. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s stand on the killings is striking for how it reveals the hollow moral core of the party.
Whether or not the party’s government was guilty of complicity in the massacre of Muslims, we would have expected some expression of remorse. L.K. Advani has claimed that the Babri Masjid’s demolition was the saddest day in his life. Yet neither he, nor Narendra Modi have ever expressed the remotest sense of shame that during their watch — the former was the Union Home Minister and the latter the Chief Minister of the State — hundreds, if not thousands of people were killed by mobs led by goons belonging to the party and its fraternal organisations — the VHP and Bajrang Dal. The consequences of such a moral vacuum are usually severe. If unchecked they lead to the kind of excesses committed by Adolf Hitler, Stalin or Mao Zedong.

Root causes

Advani and Modi are a real and present danger for our polity. Intelligence agencies are not willing to say so openly, but their actions — Babri Masjid demolition of 1992 and the Gujarat killings of 2002 — gave the biggest fillip to terrorism in the country. Terrorists may need no motivation, but those who believe that a grievance does not play a role in fertilising the ground for recruiting terrorists are deluding themselves. In 1991, when Pakistan wanted to incite Indian Muslims, they sent Manjit Singh alias Lal Singh to Aligarh, Ahmedabad and other places disguised as a Muslim, Aslam Gill, because they had no reliable Indian Muslim agent. He found the ground sterile and was arrested in 1992. But that same year, Advani and his cohorts brought down the Babri Masjid and spurred horrific riots across India, especially in Surat and Mumbai. The result? There has been no shortage of recruits thereafter.
The elections in Gujarat are important, maybe, the BJP even has good reason to believe that they are crucial. But they are only one state elections in a very large country. Recent elections and political trends have indeed shown that the hard Hindutva line of the BJP may give dividends in Gujarat, but nearly everywhere else it will cost the party heavily.
The reason is that while Modi’s personality and Gujarat’s history may be tailor made for a chauvinist campaign, the rest of the country is marching to a different tune. This was manifest in the UP state elections recently where the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat. In almost every constituency, Muslims, who may constitute anywhere between 50 per cent and 15 per cent, voted only to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The BJP should not have forgotten the lesson of 2004 when it lost what was an almost shoo-in election. Allies like Chandrababu Naidu squarely blamed Gujarat for the defeat. Andhra’s Muslims are numerically less than those in UP, but if they vote en bloc against a party aligned to the BJP, it makes a difference. In the divided polity of the country, a bloc vote of 5, 10 and 15 per cent is enough to spell disaster for a party.
The BJP’s tallest leaders — Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishen Advani — are well aware of this. It was the former’s acceptability with constituents that made the National Democratic Alliance possible. Not for nothing did Vajpayee seek to have Modi dismissed in the wake of the Gujarat happenings. Advani, too, is aware of the national ramifications of the Gujarat BJP’s near-homicidal attitude towards the Muslims and sought to square the circle by praising Mohammed Ali Jinnah, only to fall afoul of the RSS leadership. So the challenge before the party remains — be inclusive and go against the RSS’s Hindutva lakshman rekha; be exclusive and run the risk of being dumped by the
electorate.

Moral vacuum

The Modi position on Sohrabuddin Sheikh killing lacks any kind of ethical or moral foundation. In his fulminations, Modi does not refer to the “collateral” murder of Kausar Bi, Sohrabuddin’s spouse. If she was killed only because she was the wife of a bad man, the logical extension of the argument could be that we have the licence to kill the family of a terrorist, and, perhaps, members of the the community from which the terrorist hails. Those who laud Modi because he is only advocating a tough line against terrorists need to carefully look at the slippery slope ahead.
In our Constitutional scheme of things, only the judiciary has the right to punish wrong-doers. Neither the President, Prime Minister nor Chief Minister have this right, most certainly not police personnel like D.G. Vanzara, or for that matter S.S. Rathi and the other murderers in uniform who the media insists on calling “encounter specialists”.
Modi and Advani have perhaps not thought about this, but the only other set of individuals who believe that they have the right to decide whether or not “wrong-doers” shall live or die are terrorists. Modi’s posture is no different from that of a terrorist.

The trap

A great deal now depends on the Congress party. Its hands are not clean, though they are cleaner than that of the BJP. But for a brief flurry of “when a big tree falls” rhetoric, the party has steered clear of arrogantly defending the Sikh massacres of 1984. That it has kept politicians like Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler in the margin is proof that there is some sense of guilt in the party. But it has everything to gain, and nothing to lose by taking a hard line against religious, ethnic and caste fanatics. There may be losses, but in the long term there can only be gains. Nothing, in any way, could be worse than its fate in the last couple of decades. It has pandered to forces of casteism, chauvinism and fundamentalism and still remains unrewarded by the electorate.
As the clock ticks for the next general elections, it is clear that neither the Bharatiya Janata Party, nor the Congress will come near to a working majority on their own. Both will need support of substantial chunks — Left parties, TDP, AIDMK/DMK, BSP, SP, various factions of the Janata Dal and so on. Look at the list. None of them are likely to back a party that has a hawkish anti-Muslim stand.
Given the usually craven behaviour of the Congress, I may be over-interpreting the signs, but BJP and Modi may be walking into a trap of the Congress party’s making. Sonia’s “maut ke saudagar” comment immediately got Modi’s goat and his hard-line response has now set the tone for the party’s Gujarat campaign. The Bharatiya Janata Party may yet savour temporary success in the state, but hriday samrat Narendra Modi’s victory will spell disaster for the party elsewhere.
The article appeared in Mail Today December 7, 2007

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Executing Justice

Upholding the law is not just a matter of morality, but pragmatism. Extra-judicial killings by the State only promote terrorism. This article appeared in Hindustan Times May 2, 2007


On Monday in London, five men were convicted for a plot to set off a large improvised bomb. As conspiracies go in our abnormal times, the 2004 conspiracy does not appear shocking or unexpected. What was remarkable was the acquittal, after almost 27 hours of consideration by the jury, of two persons. This is a hallmark of the sophistication of the trial and its verdict. It would have been all too easy, in this era of secret prisons and fake encounters, to railroad these two as well. One of them, Sujah Mahmood, was the brother of the chief accused, Omar Khyam, and lived in the same room as him. The other, Nabeel Hussain, was charged because his debit card was used to pay for the storage unit where the fertiliser to make the bomb was stored.

British justice is not naturally just — we only have to recall the stories of the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and the Guildford Four, all convicted of bombings in Britain in the 1970s, to show how justice can be perverted in the mother of democracies as well. All 17, suspected to be Irish Republican Army supporters, did time in prison before their cases were overturned after sustained campaigns and appeals.

The Irish, always ill-treated, were from across the sea. On the other hand, the July 7 bombings and other conspiracies were largely perpetrated by alienated British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent, living in the cities and towns of Britain. The country is tackling the latest threat with great care. It is not something that can, or ought to be, fought merely by a policy of blood and iron.

As it is, the case also highlights the fact that you need neither draconian laws nor an inordinate amount of time to prosecute those accused of terrorist crimes. All it requires is effort and a calculated understanding of why it is necessary to not only do justice, but to show that it is being done, more so when the violent crimes are motivated by a sense of injustice, imagined or otherwise.

These thoughts come to mind when we are confronted with evidence that Indian police officers detained three people, and gunned down one of them, Sohrabuddin Sheikh, claiming that he was plotting to kill Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. To hide this murder, they casually bumped off the other two, including Sohrabuddin’s wife, Kausar Bi. Those who have defended Sohrabuddin’s murder with the viewpoint that he was a criminal and ‘deserved to die’, have nothing to say about why the life of another person, his wife, was cut short. They also don’t realise that the logic of arrogating to themselves the decision as to who should live and die is exactly the one used by terrorists.

One of the defining characteristics of the modern State is that it largely retains the monopoly of organised killing. In democratic countries, this right is exercised through judicial due process. Only the judiciary has the right to order an execution, not the prime minister, president or the army chief, leave alone a police officer.

In certain circumstances, the police and the army are provided special legal sanction to shoot and kill. This is not some casual convention or idiosyncrasy. It is the very root of civilised conduct and is the basis of a modern democratic society. Rogue police and security force officers, encouraged by politicians who cannot think beyond their nose, are breaking this compact by carrying out extra-judicial killings. And its consequences can be horrific.

In the last two years, there have been several major terrorist strikes, including the Mumbai train blasts of 2006. In most of them, the police found that the conspirators and the perpetrators were locals, though the explosives and their fabrication may have been aided by terrorists from Bangladesh or Pakistan.

For several years, security officials have warned that terrorist groups were growing roots in certain Indian Muslim communities, particularly those in western India. Ever since the anti-Muslim pogrom that came in the wake of the Godhra massacre, there have been a string of killings, mainly of Muslims, all allegedly on their way to assassinate Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

On March 2006, four Kashmiri youth, allegedly Lashkar-e-Tayyeba men, were gunned down in the outskirts of Ahmedabad; in June 2004, four ‘terrorists’ were gunned down, including 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan Raza and her fiancé, Javed Sheikh; in January 2003, Sadiq Jamal was shot dead, allegedly while plotting to kill L.K. Advani; in October 2002, Samir Khan Pathan was killed while trying to escape, again after his arrest for a plot to kill Modi.

None of the killings appeared credible then. And now, after the Sohrabuddin revelations, there is need to probe them thoroughly. It does not take much logic to see that acts of injustice provide fertile ground for extremism to flourish. This reasoning is simple, but it does not seem to have impressed those who believe that ruthless use of force, even if it leads to ‘collateral’ casualties among innocents, will help.

Yet, the story did not begin with Modi, but much further back, in the executions of Naxalites in the 1970s, and then in the killing fields of Punjab and Kashmir in the 1980s and 1990s. In that sense, responsibility for extra-judicial killings must go all the way up to the central government. Hundreds of people disappeared in Punjab and Kashmir when they were under central rule, and the capital itself has witnessed highly suspicious ‘encounters’, such as the Ansal Plaza incident of 2002. It’s no secret that the ‘encounter killing’ of Pakistani terrorists was sanctioned after the IC-814 hijack succeeded in freeing Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar. All this has been excused in the name of fighting separatism and terrorism. In such a climate, is it any wonder that some police officials have anointed themselves judge and executioner, in the name of desh bhakti or service to the nation?

The issue, as the British realise, is not one of morality and ethics alone. There are sound pragmatic reasons for the State to ensure the rule of law and enforce due process, rather than allow a vicious cycle of terrorism and illegal retribution. The logic is simple. If the State cannot protect me, I need to do it myself, or support someone who can do it for me. The same is true for retribution. If the authorities fail in their duty to punish criminals through due process, people will seek other means to satisfy their thirst for justice.

The US State Department’s annual report on terrorism says that there was a staggering 40 per cent rise in the number of those killed by terrorist violence last year. The overwhelming proportion of the increase comes from Iraq. There is a self-inflicted war against terror being fought in Iraq, and there is another real war being fought in dozens of countries against ruthless and fanatical people who think nothing of snuffing out human lives for their ‘cause’. That war cannot be won by tanks and airplanes, or police measures alone, but by patiently proving that your system and cause is more just and humane.