Many of the BJP MPs are new to Parliament and, indeed, to the rough and tumble of ‘democratic’ politics. As such, it is possible that they are not yet attuned to the fact that charges and counter-charges, often not only unsubstantiated but also unsubstantiable, have come to constitute the very ‘essence’ of the Indian political ‘discourse’. That could well be one reason why they reacted angrily last week to Madhavrao Scindia’s deshdrohi charge and decided to paralyse Lok Sabha proceedings for two days and boycott them for another.
Novices or not, BJP activists are a patriotic lot. However strongly one may disapprove of their Hindutva platform, with special emphasis in recent years on the construction of a Rama temple on the Janambhoomi site in Ayodhya, one cannot possibly dispute their commitment to the country.
They are well motivated even if they are misguided. India is Mother India for many of them and Mother India the embodiment of Mother Goddess. So the deshdrohi charge was bound to hurt them and infuriate them much more. They can live with allegations of communalism and fascism but not of anti-nationalism.
That may well explain why L.K. Advani had to allow the anger among party MPs to subside a little before he could accept last Monday the reasonable solution of leaving the matter to the Speaker. For all we know, he too was taken by surprise by the virulence of the reaction to Madhavrao’s remark and embarrassed by the expression it took in the Lok Sabha. It is, in any case, no great secret that some of his senior colleagues would have liked him to use his authority to end the rumpus in the House quickly. This, they were convinced, was doing the BJP no good. On the contrary, it was helping Madhavrao acquire a national stature he was not entitled to by virtue of his experience and acumen.
It is also obvious that there exists among top BJP leaders considerable sympathy for the Prime Minister who they believe is trying to cope with a highly critical and dangerous situation for the country in the face of heavy odds, arising partly from disarray in the Congress party. They did, therefore, not wish to complicate his task by helping, even if indirectly, to raise the stature of someone who could one day challenge Narasimha Rao. Rightly or wrongly, they believe that Madhavrao nurses prime ministerial ambitions and maintains contact with 10 Janpath, a euphemism for Sonia Gandhi.
The absence of as many as 33 Congress MPs from the Lok Sabha at the time of the election of the BJP nominee as Deputy Speaker in spite of the party whip on Tuesday provides confirmation for their view that the challenge to Narasimha Rao’s leadership already exists, even if it has not yet become explicit and aggressive. This is especially so because the defiance of the whip has come in the wake of the government’s recent defeat in the Rajya Sabha and that, too, on a resolution moved, surprisingly enough, by a Congress member who happens to be in the forefront of the campaign to persuade Sonia Gandhi to enter the political arena via the by-election in Amethi, Rajiv Gandhi’s constituency since 1982.
It is difficult to say whether the defiance of the whip by Congress MPs is an offshoot of the Scindia-BJP controversy. For, it is not possible to say whether these MPs would have behaved the way they have either if Madhavrao had not made the deshdrohi remark or if BJP had ignored it. That apart, however, there is perhaps more to it than meets the eye.
The Congress leadership, it may be recalled, had made a deal with the BJP leadership whereby the former was to support the election of a nominee of the latter as Deputy Speaker in return for the latter’s support for the election of its candidate as Speaker. As such, Congress MPs would have been honour-bound to live by this agreement even if there was no whip. The whip brought in the issue of party discipline as well. The MPs in question have clearly ignored both these considerations. The anti-BJP sentiment in the Congress alone cannot explain it.
One more point may be recalled in this connection. The deal with the BJP was not Narasimha Rao’s first choice. He would have preferred an arrangement with the National Front-Left combine. But the Front-Left alliance did not budge from its insistence on Rabi Ray as Speaker. As the ruling party, the Congress could not possibly accept this proposition. That would have meant a loss of face for it. The Congress MPs, who have chosen to ignore the whip, were not only aware of all this but were, in a sense, also party to it. After all, Shivraj Patil was elected Speaker with the BJP’s support in the face of opposition by the National Front-Left group.
Like the Scindia-BJP rumpus, the whip defiance episode will probably also blow over. It is unlikely that Narasimha Rao will think it expedient right now to allow himself to be seen to pay much attention to it. But clearly both events speak of tension in the Congress. There is also a connecting link between them. This link is the pervasive anti-BJP sentiment in the Congress.
The Congress has not been coherent entity in ideological terms. It has been held together by the force of the leader’s personality, whether acquired through a bitter struggle, as in Indira Gandhi’s case, or inherited, as in Rajiv Gandhi’s. Narasimha Rao cannot perform that role, at least not yet. But there is more to the tension in the Congress than the leadership ‘vacuum’, that is the absence of the kind of leader the Congress(I) has been used to.
The party no longer possesses a consistent and a viable platform. Two legs of its tripod – socialism and non-alignment – have obviously collapsed, the first partly on account of the mismanagement of the economy under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi and partly on account of factors such as the Gulf war beyond New Delhi’s control, and the second on account of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and uncertain future of the Soviet Union itself. The Home Minister, S.B. Chavan’s reference to the ‘superpower’ (read the United States) in connection with the inquiry into Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination is a hangover from a past now beyond recall.
On the face of it, the Congress will stick to the concept of secular nationalism with even greater determination than in the past precisely because it has little else to lean on till positive results of the new economic policy begin to materialise. This will take at least three to five years if the circumstances are generally favourable. No one can guarantee that this will be so.
That apart, secularism has been part of a package; it cannot possibly take the place of the entire package. Moreover, socialism, and not secularism, has been the critical component of that package. For, it not only helped legitimise the pro-Soviet tilt in our policy of non- alignment but also enabled its proponents to espouse a theory of Indian nationalism which could do without nationalism’s normal civilisational-cultural underpinning.
A couple of points may be made in this regard. Indian nationalism has more often than not been defined in terms of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-racialism. This could be possible only in the context of the ruling party’s and dominant intelligentsia’s commitment, though mostly superficial, to socialism.
There has been a lot of talk of a Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis in support of the concept of secular nationalism. This has been so much hogwash. For, while, in spite of the fact of partition, there can be differences of opinion on whether such a synthesis took place – Nehru himself admitted in a public speech that the process could not be completed before the British arrived on the scene, that is not the critical issue. Socialism, however defined, must transcend nationalism. That is why Nehru saw India’s freedom movement as part of a much larger anti-imperialist struggle. His foreign policy flowed from this perspective of Indian ‘nationalism’.
By this reckoning, an alternative theory of nationalism must arise following the end of socialist-communist dispensations all over the world. That theory cannot but emphasise the cultural-civilisational base and defining framework which in India’s case can only be Hinduism.
It can be argued in a challenge to this proposition that present-day capitalism, with multinational corporations as its principal instruments, too must undermine a nation’s civilisational base and defining framework. The verdict of history is, however, different. Capitalism reinforces nationalism except perhaps in special circumstances as have obtained in post-war Europe and at the last stages of development. India is far, far away from that stage, if it ever reaches there, and its history could not have been more different from Europe’s.
In theoretical terms, therefore, the BJP appears best qualified to champion the new theory of Indian nationalism which world developments favour. Seen in that perspective, it is fortuitous, not critical, that the Ramjanambhoomi-Babri mosque controversy has helped it emerge as the principal challenge to the Congress and possibly its replacement.
It is self-evident that no party can rule India without the co-operation of the Muslim community. It follows that if the BJP is to manage the country’s affairs, it shall have to try and reassure Muslims that it shall look after their rights and interests as well as that of any other section of society. But the Muslim question has often been blown out of proportion and torn out of context. The issue will get sorted out in the new framework as it was after partition.
Subjective attitudes are not particularly relevant at a turning point of the kind we are witnessing. That much should be obvious from the speed with which apparently powerful communist elites have been overwhelmed and in fact have joined in the dismantling of the system. We have been and remain too preoccupied with our own immediate problems to be able to pay much attention to what is happening around us and how these developments are likely to determine our own future. But such events have a remorseless logic of their own.
Sunday Mail, 18 August 1991