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Meaningless
Tomorrow’s Results Today >> Politicians: Clear Winner >> You: Clear
Loser >> Elections: Fair, Free, Meaningless
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“Let’s move on.” This was PM Manmohan Singh on 1984 genocide.
That is exactly the refrain that the killers of Muslims in
Gujarat
will soon pick up. Move on from the quest for justice. Let’s
talk how to make our lives better. But is it all so simple? |
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 It was amusing
to find Prime Minister Manmohan Singh telling reporters in Ludhiana
in his last press conference before the campaigning for the last
phase of polling on May 13 came to end that though the 1984
anti-Sikh pogrom was a “painful” episode, it was time to move on.
No doubt wide
sections of the Sikh community are proud of Manmohan Singh heading
the Indian government. Just as there is no doubt that not just the
Sikhs but all right thinking people expected Manmohan Singh to push
for justice for the 1984 genocide victims, since he belonged to the
community.
At least no one
doubted that he will take in someone like Jagdish Tytler as a
minister in his Union Government. Or that he will allow the Congress
high command to give a Lok Sabha ticket to the likes of Sajjan Kumar
or Tytler. Or that he will allow the CBI to persist in its efforts
at dishing out clean chits to Tytler.
The Congress in
Punjab has changed its colour. It is no longer seen as a party of
the white turbaned Sikhs. Amarinder Singh, during his chief
ministership, proactively followed an agenda of reaching out to the
Sikh community with his overtures towards efforts to opening the
Wagah trade route, pushing for the expressway to Nankana Sahib and
celebrating Sikh centenaries one after the other. Unlike Manmohan
Singh, Amarinder underlined his moorings within the Sikh community
with zeal. His action of getting the Punjab Assembly to terminate
the river waters agreements, seen as pertinently anti-Punjab, made
him a hero of sorts.
 Not
many will bet that Prakash Singh Badal could have pulled it off in
the face of pan Indian opposition. Amarinder suffered the wrath of
his own party high command in so doing.
So when the
Congress was trying to sell Manmohan Singh as a Sikh PM, and using
the premier’s religion as its USP, Manmohan Singh could have stayed
silent. When the massive protests by the Sikhs brought the national
lime light on the Congress’ tickets to the two killers of Sikhs,
Manmohan Singh could have remained mum or should have ideally posed
apologetic.
Instead, we had
the Prime Minister telling us in Ludhiana
to move on. He said on Monday that the issue cannot be kept alive
for ever and some people were raking it up for their vested
interests.
“Par kuch log
apni dukan chamkane ke liye is kisse ko hamesha ke liye zinda rakhna
chahte hei. Is se na to desh ko koi faida hei na Sikh community ko
(Some people want to keep this issue alive for their vested
interests. It is not going to help either the country or the Sikh
community),” he said.
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Good news
from the Indian election front is the bad news: The Akali Dal
has become a mainstream political party. The Sikh community is
at a turning point. It has seen the Badals reinventing
themselves as secular nationalists. Now there is talk of making
Badal Sr the convener of the NDA at the national level. It shows
his acceptance. This is the ultimate mainstreaming. Now it is
like any other political party. So it can divorce any agenda at
the drop of a hat, change any partner, dump any ideology, marry
any other strain. This is a logical end of perverse politics. |
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There was no end
to the forces which in the aftermath of the Holocaust were telling
the world to move on.
Move on, and by
implication, away, from what, pray? Clearly, from the course that
takes us to justice.
And now that the
Prime Minister has started asking us to move away from the 1984
pogrom pain, how long will it take for Narendra Modi to pick up the
refrain and ask the rest of India to move on and not keep jabbering
about the 2002 killings of Muslims under his watch.
Already Modi has
been saying that a lot of TV channels’ “dukaandaari” was dependent
on what happened in 2002 in Gujarat. Manmohan Singh is saying
nothing different. The moot point is that both Manmohan Singh and
Narendra Modi are saying the same thing: Justice is too elusive, so
please move on.
The answer is
not letting go of the quest.
And even as I
say this, there is something much larger at stake. Manmohan Singh is
a Congressman, a Congress PM, but with not even a distant linkage
with the genocide. At best, he is guilty of living in denial and not
being pushy enough on the issue of justice. During his campaign for
South Delhi seat a few years back, he had repeatedly said that the
Congress had nothing to do with the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 and
deservedly lost the election because of such a stance.
But Narendra
Modi is a different kind of a nut.
If young BJP
activists wear Narendra Modi’s masks, it is not because he is the
face of development as the BJP would have the audience believe on TV
debates. Even the BJP does not project Modi masks as the symbols of
his popularity as a development man. He is called Hindu Hirdaya
Samrat for the BJP, something in which Modi takes pride publicly.
His main achievement is in running an administration accused of
doing little to stop the Hindutva inspired mobs’ fury and on
occasion, abetting it. Even India’s Supreme Court, in its strongest
move yet, has ordered a special police team to investigate Modi’s
role in killings of Muslims. The BJP has had no qualms about using
Modi as its biggest crowd-puller. On his part, he has been clearly
positioning himself for the top slot in the next race.
For the Sikhs,
for anyone bothered about the idea of democracy and justice, for the
Muslims at the receiving end of the Hindutva inspired hatred and
ire, and for those in the Akali Dal who have made it a habit to
sardonically parrot the “Congress is an enemy of the Sikhs” line, it
is important to focus on this difference.
 Much
of the Indian election campaign has been sardonic, churlish, always
theatrical. The media loves a debate about Modi calling the Congress
an aging woman. At one of the rallies, Modi taunted Manmohan Singh
for turning to the United States for support in the aftermath of the
Mumbai terrorist attacks in November. “Look what this Prime Minister
is saying: O-baaaa-maaa...O-baaa-maaa....Our neighbor has come and
attacked us. Do something!”
The crowd lapped
it up, hollering, clapping and imitating his cry of “O-baaa-maa.” So
much for a serious discussion on terrorism, its origins, its causes.
L K Advani used to act as the hawk of the BJP. Now that he is making
a serious bid at Prime Ministership, the BJP needed a Modi to keep
its hol don the radical Hindu support base. Merely pitching itself
as a party wedded to the idea of development and national security
will not get it as many votes. Yes, talking about TADA and POTA is
fine, but these are laws, even in their worst form, to be used at
best against terrorists and at worst against political opponents.
You need something heavier than a sledgehammer law to kill Muslims
with impunity. Modi is a good way to project the continuing
tradition of turning India into a Hindu rashtra.
Not even Advani
denies that he gets inspiration from the RSS. He, in fact, says it.
Not even the RSS denies that its dream is to turn India into a Hindu
Rashtra. It, in fact, says so. LK Advani was not opposing the
Congress government for sending troops inside the Golden Temple.
He, in fact, has tried to take credit for it in writing in his book.
It is not a very old book. It was, in fact, only released last year.
The BJP opposes the Anandpur Sahib resolution, calls it separatists.
Akali Dal sent hundreds of thousands to jail for getting it
implemented. It is not a question of the BJP opposing the
installation of a portrait of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the
Sikh Museum in Amritsar.
 When
Parkash Singh Badal appears on the stage, beaming proudly, in the
company of L K Advani and Narendra Modi, there is a message that
goes out to the rest of India, to the rest of the world. Badal may
have compromised every single principle dear to the heart of the
panthic forces but the fact remains that the perception in the
outside world is that he is a democratically elected chief minister
of a political party that claims to be a representative of the
Sikhs. (The protestations about secularism are fed to the EC, the
real signals are clear to the world.)
Thus, the
leaders of the Sikhs are seen supping with the killers of the
Muslims. The Badals try to defend it by painting the Congress as the
enemy of the Sikhs. The world knows the difference. And it is not
just the recency factor, of course very important in electoral
politics. The BJP faces are the ones under whose direct watch the
2002 happened. They not only condoned it, but in fact their
lionisation of men like Advani and Modi is because of their role in
Ayodhya or Gujarat killings. The Congress’ lionisation of Manmohan
Singh, whom it is trying to sell in Punjab as a Sikh PM, is because
this helps the party in isolating itself from the taint of the 1984
genocide.
But then there
are for sure many similarities between the Modis and the Badals.
Both owe their rise to issues that seemingly mattered more than
development: identity issues. Modi went after Muslims with a
strategy to polarise the state and consolidate the Hindu vote. The
Badals have spent a life time doing politics on faith issues and
identity related debate. From Sikhs being a separate quom to
Anandpur Sahib Resolution to River Waters issues to Chandigarh
belonging to Punjab, the Akali Dal has followed a certain grammar of
politics in which it wasn’t very feasible to monopolise the
transport sector, arrogate to oneself all the bus route permits,
sell off vast assets of the people (often called government owned
properties by the media) to private players, follow a linear agenda
of development by setting up SEZs, pushing for international
airports, and tom tom a reductive politics of cheap atta-dal to the
poor.
In its new
avtar, the secular avataar that Parkash Singh Badal drifted towards
and that came in so handy for his son Sukhbir Singh Badal, the Akali
Dal has found it easy to sup with those who deny that the Sikhs are
any different from the Hindus, who take credit for forcing Indira
Gandhi to attack the Golden Temple and who are nowhere near being
ashamed of what happened in 2002 in Gujarat.
The Sikh
community is at a turning point. It has seen the Badals reinventing
themselves as secular nationalists. Now there is talk of making
Badal Sr the convener of the NDA at the national level. It shows his
acceptance.
Beware of the
mainstreaming, the renowned Marxist academician and scholar Prof
Randhir Singh often says in his lectures. This is the mainstreaming
of the Akali Dal. Now it is like any other political party. So it
can divorce any agenda at the drop of a hat, change any partner,
dump any ideology, marry any other strain.
Only such a
perverse politics allows parties to induct people from other parties
overnight with not even a semblance of debate for a single day. So a
Sukhdev Singh Libra became a Congressman and a Gurcharan Singh
Ghalib became a senior Akali Dal leader. Senior enough to get the
right to represent the party in Parliament!
Just as the
Badals have metamorphosed from being leaders of the Sikhs and have
dumped the legacy of the burden of representing the quom, a legacy
that they negate by not referring even once to the days of the
Dharam Yudh Morcha, Narendra Modi has assiduously sought to reinvent
himself from a scruffy mascot of Hindu nationalism to a decisive
corporate-style administrator.
Both Sukhbir
Badal and Modi talk of double-digit economic growth, public-private
partnerships, 24-hour power, turning Ahmedabad or Bathinda into
California. Sukhbir takes years to partake of ‘Amrit’, his wife
still has to show any such inclination. Modi quickly dons business
suits to meetings instead of homespun tunics. Modi has the need to
lampoons the urban, English-speaking elite, Sukhbir wants to
cultivate it. Both have the same agenda: pose what you are not.
Modi talks of
Nano as his achievement, Sukhbir boasts of oil refinery. Both are
projected as aggressive modernizers.
In this age
where the politicians are trying to sell their rotten weather-beaten
agendas wrapped in new verbiage as dreams for the young, will the
electorate buy their gimmickry? By all indications, on the evening
of May 16, you will find that the politician is one of the most
successful when it comes to hand-selling himself. If we do not
engage, if we do not understand the larger forces at work, if we
ignore the hidden tagged agendas of the political parties, if the
entrenched brahamanical forces escape our notice for decades, then
obviously we will not have to wait till May 16 for the results. Let
us give it to you here, right now. Politicians: Clear Winner. You:
Clear Loser. Elections: Fair, Free and Meaningless.
13
May 2009
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