The politics of abuse

An ugly contest has broken out in the Sangh Parivar over who can reach the lowest possible depths of abuse and vulgarity while pursuing the politics of communal hatred. While Mr Pravin Togadia has instantly descended to the gutter level by calling Ms Sonia Gandhi 'an Italian dog' (more accurately, 'bitch,' going by the original Gujarati word kutri), Narendra Milosevic Modi during his Gaurav Yatra termed her 'Italy ki beti.' He then threatened to 'wipe Pakistan off the map of the world' through 'Hindu militancy'.

This comes on top of Mr Ashok Singhal's grisly threats to repeat Gujarat's 'successful' ethnic-'cleansing experiment' all over India, ie, to butcher Muslims on a mass scale. These threats have raised international concerns about the safety of India's 180 million-strong religious minorities. For his part, self-styled Hindu hriday-samrat Bal Thackeray has openly appealed to Hindus to form 'terrorist suicide-squads' to attack Muslim civilians.

In his Vijayadashami address in Mumbai, Mr Thackeray not only parodied Mr Vajpayee through tasteless mimicry for his 'soft' stand on Pakistan; he even equated Hindutva with desh-hit and rhetorically asked: 'Why do you hesitate to declare the country a Hindu rashtra? Why do you continue to put up with the insults you are being subjected to by Pakistan,' and four million Pakistani 'infiltrators'? He called all Indian Muslims 'traitors'. Worst of all, VHP vice-president Giriraj Kishore, citing the shastras, put the life of a cow higher than that of men --- the five Dalits lynched in Jhajjar, Haryana.

True to cowardly type, Mr Togadia has since said he did not name any particular individual in his reference to Italian canines. Mr Thackeray has, similarly, claimed that his remarks were only directed at 'pro-Pakistan Muslims,' and not Muslims as such --- a ludicrously false statement, but duly certified as true by BJP general secretary and legal sophist Arun Jaitley. Transcriptions of their speeches --- published, for instance, in The Indian Express (October 21) --- should knock these claims out totally. Mr Thackeray's defence is as untenable as it is false. It is downright criminal to threaten to kill anyone with 'terrorist suicide squads.'

Actually, Mr Togadia's offence goes much further than abusing Ms Gandhi in his October 19 speech. He demanded that Indian Muslims should get their genetics tested. He atrociously chided Gujarat's minorities for their small numbers: 'We are five crore, you are just 50,000. You think Hindus can be suppressed with bomb explosions or violence? We are five crore Hindus. If 50,000 Hindus get killed in a terrorist attack, the five crore figure will not get smaller. If you people who number 50,000 die, no one will be left.' He also underlined the need to militarise Hinduism into a malign, violent faith: 'Hindus have the tradition of wearing a garland of flowers, but the Hindu deity wears a garland of human skulls. We wrongly adopted the (first) tradition...'

These vituperative speeches mark a true new low in Indian politics. BJP-VHP-Shiv Sena leaders have dragged even the language of politics down to the most abysmal level conceivable. Modern Indian historians will confirm that our political discourse did not fall so low even before that terrible trauma called Partition with its ghastly bloodbath. We are witnessing an explosion of an altogether new politics --- of ethnic venom and hatred, which violates the foundations of pluralism and tolerance. Nothing can be more corrosive of our democratic sensibilities and our claim to be a minimally civilised society. Such venomous politics could not have developed 40, 30, even 20 years ago. What made it possible is the Parivar's anti-Babri campaign launched in the mid-1980s and its still-unfolding sequel. This is Hindutva's sole contribution --- to India's political coarsening and decay.

Parivar hate speech is not only vile in itself. It is backed by action or serious intent to act --- as in Maharashtra and Gujarat, which witnessed our two worst pogroms, both inside a decade; in Rajasthan, where the BJP-RSS-VHP are systematically trying to polarise politics communally; in Tamil Nadu, where Ms Jayalalithaa has promoted obnoxious Hindu majoritarianism through an ill-conceived ordinance banning religious conversion; or in Haryana, where five Dalits were barbarically beaten to death in police custody because the VHP spread false rumours that they had killed a cow. This speech-action connection gets consolidated each day as Muslims and secularists are gratuitously called Ghaznis. Each time Mr Modi descends to the ham-panch-hamare-pachees-level of abuse and each time BJP leaders justify this as only a reference to 'family planning', they further vitiate our public life.

Why has the Sangh Parivar descended to the gutter level, and why have many BJP leaders joined the hate campaign as doers or apologists despite their differences with the VHP? To start with, there are revolving doors between the Parivar's different components. Half of the VHP's top leaders have been, like most BJP leaders, RSS pracharaks --- and in recent years, BJP MPs. The Shiv Sena and BJP are inseparable. One of the Bajrang Dal's leaders (Vinay Katiyar) is the BJP's Uttar Pradesh president. There is no 'external' provocation for this hate campaign either --- no Coimbatore, no December 13, no recent hostile action by Pakistan. The trigger is purely 'internal'.

This trigger has to do both with the intra-Parivar power struggle (discussed in this column earlier) and the BJP's appalling performance in government. Messrs Togadia, Thackeray and Giriraj Kishore are deeply upset at the NDA's drift towards economic policies they don't like, and towards 'appeasement' of Pakistan through demobilisation of troops at the border. These are not differences of principle; rather, they pertain to the sharing of the spoils. Mr Thackeray plucked out Mr Suresh Prabhu from the Union Cabinet because he was getting too big for his boots. The Sena fulminates against the Centaur Hotel's sale not because it opposes public-sector divestment, but because a leader of the party wants the hotel to be sold to his friend Ajit Kerkar.

As for 'appeasing' Pakistan, the NDA government has only done what was long overdue and demanded by the army. Keeping seven lakh troops on high alert for 10 months had become counter-productive and drained away between Rs 5,000 crores and Rs 8,000 crores. The NDA also acted under external pressure, most importantly from the United States, which at one stage even started talking about reimbursing Pakistan for its counter-mobilisation expenses.

The more virulent of our communalists need constant tension and enmity with Pakistan. They see India's neighbours, especially Pakistan, rather than hegemonic powers, as her worst enemies. Demobilisation will temporarily deprive them of this plank. They are also trying to confront the government for its 'inaction' on Ayodhya. In Ayodhya, or in India, there is no popular support for a Ram temple. But this is Hindutva's sole (gambling) counter today.

The hardliners' greatest grievance is that they must play second fiddle to Mr Vajpayee, and more generally, to the BJP's parliamentary wing. They really believe --- not without reason --- that they put Vajpayee & Co in power; without the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign, the BJP couldn't have grown meteorically from 2 to 89 seats, and on to 116 and more. They see Vajpayee & Co as interlopers and usurpers who have let down Hindutva. The BJP's parliamentary leadership, for its part, sees these men as politically too naive and out of tune with the national mood to be good for the purposes of power --- a nuisance. It lacks the stomach to deal with them upfront, or to invoke the law against them. So it deviously relies on the paterfamilias and hegemon of the Sangh Parivar, the RSS, to intercede and settle these internal differences --- as happened on October 24.

This strategy is becoming increasingly unworkable. The RSS leadership, and its equation with the BJP, has changed. All their recent mutual compromises have come unstuck. The latest uneasy truce might go the same way. It is thus a sign of Mr Vajpayee's desperation that he still begs the RSS to intervene, but ducks party MLAs in Uttar Pradesh on the pretext of ill-health. If the Vajpayee leadership really wants to assert itself, it must act in consonance with constitutional principles and the law of the land.

Put simply, the government must strictly apply hate-speech laws like sections 153 and 153(A) of the Indian Penal Code and the SC-ST Prevention of Atrocities Act to members of the Sangh Parivar --- including Mr Thackeray and Mr Modi. It must not cave in to the former's threats to set Mumbai 'on fire,' nor resort to sophistry about how propagating Hindutva doesn't necessarily mean maligning other religions.

The government knows, the whole world knows, Mr Thackeray openly exhorted Hindu youth to take to terrorism --- fighting which is the Number One official priority. Governmental pusillanimity alone has saved Mr Thackeray from arrest and prosecution in the past. All the State needs is the minimal will to bring these dangerous fanatics to book in the interest of the nation, the Constitution, the law, indeed the Establishment itself. If it fails the present test, it will bring disgrace upon itself --- not just from the external world, but its own citizens.

Praful Bidwai