BJP Future - 4

[acharya]

Monday, May 15, 2006

HUM HINDUSTANI: Mourning Pramod Mahajan —J Sri Raman

Mahajan was the main organiser behind the Ayodhya campaign of 1990-92 that created a new space for communal politics in India. He was the chief architect, in his home state of Maharashtra, of the BJP’s alliance with the Shiv Sena of the unspeakable Balasaheb Thackeray. Mahajan was also among the main BJP advocates of an inane ‘second war of independence’ against Sonia Gandhi

On May 3, a leader of the BJP breathed his last. As the media kept a 12-day vigil as he battled for his life, and for two days after that, Pramod Mahajan became an unrecognisably transformed figure. From a second-rung politician in the main opposition party, he became a saint.

The media mourned and deified him not only because he had fallen to a fratricidal bullet; and not only because he was a very reliable and valuable source of off-the-record stories and always-entertaining sound-bytes. The media mourned him as, more than anything else, a faithful representative of a middle class that needed its far-right heroes.

Frequently recalled was the fact that he was one of the first Indian politicians to sport a cell-phone. Fondly remembered was the other significant fact that he had brought computers to his party’s Shining-India election campaign that flopped so spectacularly. Anybody who knew Mahajan noted that he knew just about everybody who mattered — in the big business and among media barons. The media mourned him as a ‘moderniser’ of the BJP.

Nothing can be more nonsensical. Like many another BJP leaders (including twin titans Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani), Pramod Mahajan was also ‘loaned’ to the party by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), patriarch of the parivar (the far-right ‘family’). Mahajan was the main organiser behind the Ayodhya campaign of 1990-92 that created a new space for communal politics in India. He was the chief architect, in his home state of Maharashtra, of the BJP’s alliance with the Shiv Sena of the unspeakable Balasaheb Thackeray. Mahajan was also among the main BJP advocates of an inane ‘second war of independence’ against Sonia Gandhi.

It is of the same Mahajan that some media pundits talk as a bulwark against the BJP’s return to its ‘communal agenda’. They mourn him as a bulwark that has disappeared, despite the known and notorious fact he used all his corporate connections throughout his career to fund and fuel communal politics and campaigns.

In other words, the canonisation of Mahajan has been no different from the sainting of Vajpayee. The only difference is that, in the former prime minister’s case, dubious poetry and periodically pious declarations of un-BJP like sentiments with a semblance of secularism took the place of electronic gadgets et al.
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In other words, Mahajan was the ‘modern’ face of the BJP just as Vajpayee was its secular visage — ‘the mask’ as a past parivar ideologue once put it. Little wonder that Vajpayee gave added legitimacy to Mahajan’s role by describing him as the Lakshman, the loyal younger brother to Advani’s Ram.
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The assumption of the BJP’s party-political opponents is that ‘masks’ and ‘faces’ conceal or camouflage the obscurantist and outdated ideology of the BJP. The argument of the BJP’s advocates addressed to its middle-class constituency, is that the Mahajans and Vajpayees ensure the BJP’s march towards modernity despite the party’s backward sections. Both the apologists and adversaries forget or feign ignorance of the fact that both the party and the parivar as a whole represent fascism.

The point is that fascism is itself a modern phenomenon. The BJP and parivar would in fact be far less of a threat to India and its people if they represented only forces of backwardness fated to popular rejection sooner or later. The far right elsewhere in the world as well, has stood for national development, often of a faster kind than its opponents. However, because of its ideology and politics of hatred and militarism, the fascist path of development is bound to lead deluded nations and peoples down the course of destruction.<b>

Vajpayee is right when he says that the BJP needs another Lakshman, another Mahajan. It will continue to need modern faces to hide its ideology that envisages mass-murder as a ‘final solution’ to the problems of the nation and its neighbourhood.</b>
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Speculation continues about who will replace Mahajan in the party. The BJP leadership is right again to believe that other Mahajans will ‘arise’. Several likely successors, in fact, wait in the wings. Sophist Arun Jaitley, with little trace of saffron in his lifestyle; ex-Army Jaswant Singh, the erstwhile columnist of an English daily; a smart-talking Sushma Swaraj, who looks like no orthodox Indian woman despite her much-hyped outrage at the very idea of ‘Italian’ Sonia as India’s premier, and others — the party can have its pick.</b> For the peace-loving people of the country, however, there is no real choice between Pramod Mahajans and more plebeian, more patently communal leaders of the BJP.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he has contributed the main essay to “The Media Bomb,” a study of Indian media responses to India’s nuclear-weapon tests of 1998. He is also the author of a sheaf of poems under the title ‘At Gunpoint’

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