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Election 2.0
Church and State Issues Remain
Mansewak Singh
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The church
and tate have not been assiduously been kept apart in India, but
do mix rather to the utter disadvantage of the people and
advantage of the politician. Self-styled holy men like Sirsa
dera baba, mahants and maulvis have always existed around the
periphery of power structures. Congress has over the decades
used the Muslims as a vote bank and called this tricky game
‘secularism’. |
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 Even
as Punjab's ruling Akali Dal moves miles away from the panthic
agenda, Sikh issues and even Punjab issues, and Chief Minister
Parkash Singh Badal and his secular son Sukhbir Singh Badal,
currently president of the Akali Dal, take the party down a road
that continuously veers away from religion, the fact remains that
almost all political parties in India somehow do end up using
religion as a card.
Time and again
Sikhs are told that religion and politics do not mix, and low
specimens of political life have had a persistent problem with the
concept Miri-Piri but little has been written about the fading of
the boundaries between religion and politics in case of other
parties.
Who does not know
how the BJP has used religion to advance its agenda in India? There
is no firewall that separates politics from religion, and the only
difference is that the Sikhs actually propagate the notion becase
they believe that politics myst be guided by the higher universal
principles of religion, while others use religion for narrow
political ends.
The church and
state have not been assiduously been kept apart in India, but do mix
rather to the utter disadvantage of the people and advantage of the
politician. Self-styled holy men like Sirsa dera baba, mahants and
maulvis have always existed around the periphery of power
structures. Congress has over the decades used the Muslims as a vote
bank and called this tricky game 'secularism'.
The world well
remembers the Shah Bano case judgement in 1985 which was a turn
towards secularism but then while the Hindu religious organisations
got a fillip with the dilution of this secular judgement in 1985 and
Indian Parliament saw the brute Congress majority overturning the
apex court's verdict by passing the Muslim Women’s Bill, the
orthodox Muslims were sought to be won over by the so-called
secularists. The effect was to make it legally tenable for Muslim
men to skip paying alimony to their divorced wives.
Now you have an
India where Gujarat has dominant Hindu communalism, Punjab is home
to hundreds of deras of localised gurus, UP is full of either Hindu
mahants and sadhvis or the Muslim madrassas, and Jharkhand, Orissa
and Northeast are teeming with Christian evangelists. Religious
leaders, notwithstanding all protestations of the Election
Commission and sundry other clauses, laws and statements, do exhort
their flock to go out and vote. Punjabis are well aware of the Radha
Soamis, the Nirankaris, the Dera Sirsa directing their followers to
vote for particular parties and candidates.
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Sikhs have
always maintained that religion and politics go hand in hand.
The official Indian establishment has often protested that it
was a corruption of polity and religion has no place in
politics. Ground conditions remain very different in India and
religion remains interminably intertwined with a propensity to
impact the politics in all its myriad forms. |
Obviously, there is
no gain saying in repeating that such appeals are not made in favour
of candidates who may some day stand up for the Sikh panth.
In Kerala, the
Muslim League, which is a critical ally of the Congress-led LDF, has
at its helm Syed Mohammedali Shihab Thangal, a spiritual leader with
a following of his own. ‘Thangal’ is an honorific title that traces
its lineage to the Prophet no less. Kerala Muslims flock to his
meetings.
Through the 1980s
and 1990s, with Uttar Pradesh seeing a spurt in madrassas which has
taken Muslims away from modern education towards fundamentalism,
Hindu ‘sansthan’ and ‘dharma raksha manch’ sprouted.
Gorakhpur,
which has Azamgarh in its neighbourhood, became a militant Hindu
hub. The mahants and acharyas led by Yogi Adityanath, who calls for
strident Hindutva, regularly clash with Muslim activists who they
accuse of being ISI agents and worse. In 2005, riots broke out in
Mau between supporters of Yogi and SP’s Mukhtar Ansari. But Hindu
sects at times cut both ways: Just before the 2002 assembly
elections in Gujarat in the aftermath of the riots, a high priest
from Puri, Swami Adhoksjanand, camped with Congress’s CM candidate
Shankersinh Vaghela and ran a surrogate anti-Narendra Modi campaign
by telling religious gatherings to defeat the forces of Hindutva.
Mufti Shabbir Alam
of Ahmedabad’s Jama Masjid issued a fatwa on the day of the Assembly
elections in 2002, urging Muslims to come out and vote. Congress
leaders believe the fatwa helped BJP because Hindu organisations
decided to counter it. Mufti’s subsequent denials about never having
issued the fatwa were of no use.
In Punjab, the
Sirsa Dera followers are an important consideration for Akali and
non-Akali politicians, specially in Malwa. In the last assembly
election, the Dera head Gurmeet Ram Raheem, who faces multiple
criminal charges helped Congress get 25 out of 65 seats in Malwa.
The Dera support
was open, but little can the Akalis do about it. After all, the Dera
has also seen men like Parkash Singh Badal standing in the darbar of
Gurmeet Ram and asking for votes.
The Badals are
famous for knocking at the doors of many a self-styled babas for
votes if they find time from attending jagratas, performing aartis,
visiting one or the other Kaal-Kapaal-Mahakaal kind of tantriks.
 In Jharkhand,
Orissa and Northeast, Christian missions play a significant role in
mobilising voters. But while in Mizoram the Christian missions
involve the people in the democratic process — former CEC J M
Lyngdoh once described Mizoram as a model state for elections — the
ones in Jharkhand are known to harbour political preferences towards
which they egg their supporters on. Christian missions in Orissa are
unlikely to remain impervious to taking a pro-Congress and
anti-BJP/BJD stand.
In Goa, Joaquim
Loiola, secretary to Archbishop, said, ‘‘The Archbishop will be
signing and publicising the message of Catholic Bishops’ Conference
of India on the elections.’’ While it’s unlikely to be a direct
endorsement of any political party, the circular will tell its flock
‘‘how to vote’’. Though it’s anybody’s guess which way the religious
heads will ask their flocks to vote.
11
March 2009
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