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PATRIOTISM is the last refuge of a
scoundrel, warned Samuel Johnson. I wonder what the celebrated
English writer and lexicographer would have said about our friends
from the Bharatiya Janata Party who love to wear their patriotism
on their sleeve, ever ready to wave their flags and tridents at
the drop of a hat. One wouldn’t mind their patriotic zeal so much
if it weren’t for their tendency to offer condescending lessons in
nationalism to the rest of the world, implying everyone except
them is a traitor.
Every time it finds itself painted in a corner or gets that
sinking feeling that it’s running out of issues to keep itself in
the media spotlight, it dips into its deep bag of tricks. Like the
Bedu’s camel, patriotism — or politics of patriotism rather — is
the cure-all panacea for the Hindutva brigade. Combined with
bigotry, ignorance and hatred, this competitive patriotism could
be really lethal.
One has lost the count of hate-spewing yatras the party has
organized over the past couple of decades to burnish its image not
just as the champion of the Hindus but Bharat Mata (mother India)
itself. And it always seems to work. Who cares if such marches to
cuckoo land end up driving the nation of a billion people over the
edge? How many innocents are consumed by its cauldron of hatred
and bigotry matters little. What really counts is how many people
are taken in by your rhetoric and end up voting for you. At the
end of the day, it’s all about power.
This is not the first time the Hindutva brigade has given the call
to hoist the Indian flag in Srinagar, the scenic capital of Jammu
and Kashmir. We have been here before. Exactly a decade ago, Murli
Manohar Joshi launched an Ekta (unity) yatra from Kanyakumari, the
southernmost tip of India, to Kashmir. After much hand wringing
and sleepless nights in Delhi and Srinagar, Joshi was rescued by
security forces from his own dangerous devices.
Joshi was of course trying to do a Lal Krishna Advani after
stepping into his oversized shoes. India can never forget the
terror and devastation sparked by Advani’s rath yatra in September
1990, which eventually led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid
in Ayodhya, not to mention the thousands of innocent lives lost in
communal violence that followed.
India has yet to recover from that long winter of madness in the
1990s. However, it helped the BJP grow and mutate from a marginal
player with two members in Parliament into the “natural party of
governance,” as it once lionized itself. No wonder the BJP and its
numerous avatars are on an endless road trip, perpetually milking
the golden cow called patriotism. Consequences for the country be
damned!
This is what the party tried to do all over again this week with
its campaign to hoist the tricolor at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. The
stated objective of this yatra was to protect the nation’s unity,
pride and honor. Is the pride and honor of this amazing democracy
so fragile that it constantly needs the Hindutva forces to protect
it? As someone said, a politician can drape himself in the flag
but it is the texture of his politics which will determine if he
truly cares for the nation or not.
The truth is, this is nothing but old-fashioned politics of
opportunism. It’s just another cheap, attention-grabbing tactic.
Or should we say, attention-diverting tactic? There’s a distinct
possibility that the BJP came up with the idea of Kashmir yatra to
deflect the undesirable spotlight chasing the Hindu groups after
the recent revelations of RSS leader Swami Aseemanand linking the
saffron brotherhood to numerous terror attacks across the country.
Aseemanand’s stunning confessions implicating the Hindutva groups
in terror strikes on the Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer
shrine and Malegaon mosque, blamed all these years on local
Muslims, have caught the RSS and company with their pants
(shorts?) down.
Whatever the reason, the BJP is out to extract maximum mileage out
of a sensitive issue like Kashmir all over again, at a time when
the governing Congress is finding the going tough. To the
opposition’s glee, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is turning out to
be a monumental disaster. The World Bank-trained economist with
impeccable credentials has had the rare distinction of presiding
over some of the biggest corruption scams in the nation’s history,
squandering all the good will the Congress had generated under
Sonia Gandhi.
Kashmir remains on Hindutva’s radar for the very same reasons that
it has doggedly refused to acknowledge all these years. Even as
the BJP and company refuse to acknowledge the special status of
the Himalayan state and all the promises we made to the Kashmiris
when they decided to join India after the independence, they end
up training the global spotlight on the K conundrum with these
shenanigans.
Where were these patriots when Kashmir was burning until recently?
Throughout last year, the state was rocked by fierce protests that
were not just against governments in Srinagar and Delhi and
security forces, they were a vote against all that has been
visited on the state in the past six decades or so. In the last
quarter century, Kashmir has lost nearly a hundred thousand people
to this never ending siege within. Thousands of men, both young
and old, have simply vanished. Tens of thousands of Kashmiri
Pandits have been living in refugee camps in Delhi and elsewhere
for years.
In the recent protests demanding the withdrawal of omnipresent
security forces, more than a hundred youths, some as young as 13,
died in police firing. Even if those boys were hurling stones at
the security forces, how do we justify such lethal use of force
against civilians? Protests are not unusual in other parts of
India. But nowhere else in the country do the troops open fire on
a crowd of protesters. The reality is, even as we Indians proclaim
Kashmir to be an “integral part” of India, we seldom view the
Kashmiris as part of the mainstream.
For the Sangh fanatics and much of the establishment, Kashmir is
merely a prized piece of territory that we must protect at any
cost from the devious designs of Pakistan and the ISI. The
Kashmiri people were never part of this scheme of things. As
Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in The Hindu this week, this approach
is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra
nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather
than a land with a people and soul who have as much right to a
life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.
But I think this is less about Kashmir and more about the skewed
worldview of the Hindutva clan, which wants to paint this melting
pot of a nation with myriad identities and voices in its own color.
Now everyone is entitled to his/her views and beliefs and change
the world according to them. The trouble arises only when you tend
to accomplish this at gunpoint, as our Taleban comrades once did —
and the Hindutva forces have been doing all these years. In this
idea of India, there’s no place for nonconformity or cultural and
ideological diversity.
This will not go on forever though. India is not the country it
used to be, say when the Hindu extremists held the entire country
to ransom with their temple-mosque politics. India and Indians as
a nation have moved on. Today, they have little patience for those
who not only remain handcuffed to history, they want the rest of
the country to sleepwalk back into the past. Globalization and the
unprecedented economic empowerment of middle classes, and those
trying to catch up fast, have transformed the country and its
outlook. India has truly arrived and is enjoying its new exalted
status. It will not tolerate anyone who tries to spoil the party
by dividing Indians along narrow religious and sectarian lines.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a
Dubai-based writer who has written extensively on the Middle East
and South Asia. He may be contacted at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com
The above article
first appeared in
Saudi Arabia's leading
English daily Arab News.
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