Ill-conceived, if not unprincipled, anti-Congressism has produced a Frankenstein which threatens to overwhelm not only many of its architects but also the country itself. If steps are not taken quickly enough to contain the monster, it will inflict enormous damage on us all.
To put it plainly, the government headed by Raja VP Singh has become a threat to the very survival of India as one country. It is launched on a programme of action which can mean the Lebanonisation of India. Even the horrors of partition and the communal holocaust that preceded, accompanied and followed it, may not be a good enough and a strong enough warning in respect of what may await us. What the Raja is working for is certainly much worse than Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s design.
The responsibility for protecting the country rests primarily with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For, it keeps in being the Government which is absolutely necessary to get rid of without any loss of time. No consideration whatsoever can justify continued BJP support for it for a day. As it happens, the BJP’s own survival demands that it terminates its ‘alliance’ with the Raja and his ilk at once.
The BJP’s strategy is obvious enough. LK Advani begins his 10,000-km Somnath-Ayodhya rathyatra next Tuesday (September 25) to mobilize support on the Ram Janambhoomi issue. The BJP is cooperating fully with the Vishwa India Parishad (VHP) in the latter’s plans to begin construction of the Shri Rama temple in Ayodhya on October 30. Since the UP Chief Minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav, is determined to frustrate the proposed construction of the temple, a confrontation is unavoidable. The BJP leadership apparently believes that that would be the proper occasion formally to sever ties with the Raja and the Janata Dal.
This may not, on the face of it, be too bad a strategy if the BJP, VHP and RSS volunteers are able to ensure not only that they do not provoke, but also that they do not allow others to provoke, Hindu-Muslim clashes. This is, however, easier said than done, especially if we take into account the government’s interest in such riots. Even otherwise, the BJP leadership should know that this strategy must involve a prolonged anti-government struggle on the Ram Janambhoomi question and that such a struggle is more likely to lead to its isolation than VP Singh’s and undermine whatever possibility now exists for a realignment of political forces necessary for containing the Frankenstein.
The Ram Janambhoomi issue, of course, antedates the Raja’s August 7 decision to implement the Mandal fabrication. But the BJP has clearly decided to step up its commitment to it in the new context in an effort to avoid an open opposition to VP Singh on the Mandal question and to take him on on the temple issue instead. It is fully aware that the Raja is out to divide Hindu society, as it has never been divided. But it is afraid that a decision to confront him on this question would weaken its own support base among the so-called ‘other backward castes’. And it calculates that it might successfully avoid this risk if it is able to arouse sufficient support among the Hindus on the Ram Janambhoomi question.
I for one do not believe that it is possible for the BJP to so circumvent the Mandal issue. Mandal has stirred an overwhelming majority of students and professionals in north India as nothing else ever has. A relatively small section among them has been well disposed towards the VHP’s campaign for the construction of the Shri Rama temple. Even that section now attaches greater importance to the Mandal question than to the proposed temple.
For it too, the temple can wait; the fight against the VP Singh government on the Mandal perversity cannot. A mood of Gandhiji’s ‘do or die’ (1942) spirit pervades the student community. The attempt at self-immolation by a group of students in Delhi on Wednesday (September 19) and the apparent willingness of a larger body of students at least to acquiesce in it speak of a desperation without a parallel in the history of similar agitations in our country.
The BJP is caught in a pincer, one arm of it being the anti-reservation agitation by students and professionals and the other being the pro-reservation campaign mounted by Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Sharad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan and others with the full use of the state machinery and resource at their disposal. It cannot possibly break out of it with the help of an issue which is quite different. Indeed, its enemies in the Janata Dal have successfully mobilised the Muslims against the BJP on the temple issue and they are sparing little effort to mobilise the so-called OBCs against it on Mandal.
Important as the BJP’s contribution has been to the rise of the Frankenstein and important as the BJP’s continued support, even if ‘critical’, is to the Raja’s survival in power, it would be unfair to charge it solely with the responsibility of dealing with the threat of Lebanonisation of the country. Rajiv Gandhi and Jyoti Basu too have to play their role and so indeed have those in the Janata Dal who are genuinely opposed to the Raja’s designs.
1 am not insensitive to the fact that there are Mandalites in Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress and that he faces a major problem in South India where reservation on caste basis is already a fact at the state level. I can, therefore, appreciate his reluctance to come out openly in opposition to VP Singh’s Mandalisation programme. But he cannot possibly avoid the issue for long. Mandal has come to occupy the centre of the political stage in the country. It cannot be pushed back to the sideline. It has to be confronted squarely. Ambivalence can only lead to paralysis and strengthen the position of the Raja Saheb and the self-appointed casteist ‘commanders’ ranged behind.
I do not regard the possibility of a major split in the Congress on Mandal as being serious. Congressmen as a rule are inclined to accommodate rather than split. But if it is less than honest and fair to deny the risk altogether, it also cannot be denied that the risk has to be accepted and faced.
The Mandalites in the Congress have in all but name made common cause with VP Singh already, as the attempt to get the Bihar Provincial Congress Committee to endorse the government’s decision last Wednesday and meetings of OBC MPs at the initiative of certain characters amply prove. They can continue to undermine the organisation from within only so long as the leadership engages in ambiguity and ambivalence.
Past experience should also convince Rajiv Gandhi that attempts to outflank disrupters and demagogues seldom succeed. The Congress brought in Bhindranwale in order to outmanoeuvre the Akalis; it mollycoddled him even when his commitment to violence and secession could not be in doubt; the result is there for anyone to see; terrorism prospers in Punjab. The Congress cannot use its Mandalites to contain VP Singh.
Europeans, including the Soviets, and Americans have not ceased regretting that they did not take Hitler at his word, though he had spelled out his programme of conquest and extermination in the Mein Kampf. The same, in my view, applies to the Raja. He means what he says, unless he is obviously feigning, as he did when he pretended to be disinterested in office. Indeed, even on that score he lived up to his ‘promise’. He said that he would be a disaster as Prime Minister; he has been an unmitigated one.
More pertinently for the present discussion, he has said that the Mandal Commission ‘report’ would be implemented in instalments. The 27 per cent job reservation in the government and public sector undertakings is thus only the first instalment. Others will follow – reservation in schools and colleges, private sector industries and businesses and the armed forces. Surely Rajiv Gandhi cannot sit back as the plan of India’s decimation proceeds apace.
Finally, if there is any political figure in India today who can play the role of an elder statesman by virtue of his experience and status in public esteem, Jyoti Basu is that figure. He has also the mental agility to recognise that demonic forces have been unleashed and that an attempt to contain them is just not possible on the old basis of either anti-Congressism or anti-BJPism. An indication by him that he is willing to ‘review’ his support for the Singh set-up can help the BJP make up its mind and initiate the process of the drastic political realignment India needs desperately.
Sunday Mail, 23 September 1990