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It is difficult to understand why
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should have suddenly adopted a
combative patriotic posture on Kashmir in the midst of its fairly
successful campaign against the Congress on the corruption issue.
Prima facie, it is a self-defeating move. It has been criticised
not only by its political opponents and the mainstream media but
also by its ally the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) while the Akali Dal
has maintained a studied silence.
The reason for the criticism is not far to seek. For one, the
choice of the present time for beating the nationalist drum was
deemed inopportune because the valley was slowly returning to
normalcy after a summer of turmoil when more than 100 people,
mostly young men, were killed in police firing during the
stone-pelting agitation.
For another, such adventurism is always inadvisable because of the
still unresolved problem of alienation of a large section of the
people in the valley. It is all the more so now when the
separatists have admitted, for the first time, that some of their
top leaders died as a result of internecine warfare or and were
not killed by the security forces, as was earlier alleged.
If the BJP still felt a need to display its patriotic fervour by
marching to Lal Chowk in Srinagar to hoist the national flag, the
explanation perhaps lies in its conviction that the party needed a
new, preferably emotional issue since its anti-Congress campaign
was reaching a dead end. The fact that the Left has said that the
parliamentary proceedings cannot be held up indefinitely means
that the BJP may not be able to carry out its earlier threat to
disrupt the budget session as well after having stalled the entire
winter session.
As it is, the BJP's anti-corruption plank was a weak one because
of the charges of nepotism against the party's chief minister,
B.S. Yeddyurappa, in Karnataka. Even the party chief, Nitin
Gadkari, has admitted that the chief minister is morally in the
wrong in his land deals even if these are not illegal. The
Yeddyurappa factor forced the BJP to keep him, along with all its
other chief ministers, including the party's showman, Narendra
Modi, out of its rallies directed against the Congress. But the
pointed exclusion only underlined its vulnerability on this score.
It was possibly to chalk out a new course in the event of a
faltering anti-corruption agitation that the BJP played its
favourite patriotic card. Since the party and the Sangh Parivar
led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have been forced to
moderate their anti-minority rhetoric in recent years because of
electoral compulsions, the Kashmiri separatists remain the only
Muslim groups it can openly castigate.
Yet, the renewal of the demand for the scrapping of Article 370
conferring special status on Kashmir means that the BJP is
reviving its pro-Hindu agenda relating to the Article and also to
the Ram temple and uniform civil code, which it had shelved in
1996.
It is not impossible that the adoption of this Hindutva plank of
cultural nationalism - one nation, one people, one culture - is a
defensive reaction against the adverse political fallout from the
implications of the court cases on saffron terror implicating the
RSS and another militant outfit, the Abhinav Bharat, linked to the
relatives and admirers of Nathuram Godse, Mahatma Gandhi's
assassin.
Since the Congress has seemingly decided to make this issue one of
its propaganda points in the coming days, as its senior general
secretary Digvijay Singh's comparison of the Hindutva groups with
the Nazis showed, the BJP has probably decided that it, too, has
to rev up its Hindutva campaign, at least on Article 370 if not on
the two other issues.
The focus on Kashmir is perhaps also necessitated by Narendra
Modi's decision to turn away from minority-bashing to development.
However, it is also indicative of the party's leadership
deficiencies, especially since it is forced to deny Modi a major
role at the national level so as not to antagonise important
allies like Nitish Kumar, who kept the Gujarat chief minister out
of the Bihar poll campaign.
It is not without significance that the yatra to Lal Chowk was
organised by the BJP's youth wing under Anurag Thakur, son of
Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, while senior
leaders like Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj later clambered aboard
Thakur's bandwagon.
However, neither Jaitley nor Sushma Swaraj, both of whom were
denied the top party position by the RSS in preference to Gadkari,
has shown any great leadership potential. In fact, the
parliamentary logjam favoured by them may ultimately prove to be
hurtful for the BJP. So may the current espousal of xenophobia
although Jaitley had ascribed the 2009 poll defeat to such
shrillness.
To the anti-minority world view of its predecessor, the Jana Sangh,
the BJP has added violent anti-Muslim and anti-Christian tactics,
evident in the Babri Masjid's destruction in 1992, the Gujarat
riots of 2002 and the burning of churches in Orissa in 2008. Its
new focus on Kashmir, therefore, has worrisome portents.
(Amulya Ganguli
is a political analyst. He can be reached at aganguli@mail.com)
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