BJP Future - 4

[acharya]

Monday, June 12, 2006

HUM HINDUSTANI: A tale of two transformations — J Sri Raman

If Mahajan’s “lifestyle” did not make him a “moderniser”, it did not make him a sorry exception to the rule in the “saffron” camp, either. What made a personality cult of Mahajan unwarranted was not his “five-star” peccadilloes, not a narcotic-cocktail circuit, but his politics of non-uniformed fascism aka “cultural nationalism”

You may or may not agree that man creates God — and the Devil. Few in India today, however, can dispute the proposition that the far right can create a political saint or sinner out of the same personality. Not after the country has witnessed the case of a twice-transformed Pramod Mahajan.

On May 15, in these same columns, we talked of the first transformation. In less than a fortnight, the former leader and fund-raiser of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) died by degrees and was reborn as almost a saint fit for reverence. The canonisation began as Mahajan lay in a Mumbai hospital fighting for his life after falling to a fratricidal bullet. It was carried to a pitch of tearful piety in the two days after his end and until his funeral amid full state honours. The salute of police guns might seem glaringly ironic today in the light of what has transpired since then.

As we noted then, the essence of the canonisation by the BJP and the media consisted in Mahajan’s exaltation as a “moderniser” of the party and, by extension, some of the parivar (the far-right ‘family’). It was almost suggested that the party took the first significant step towards “modernisation” with the suave, second-rung leader starting to sport a cell phone when the instrument was still new to India. He was supposed to have taken the process to a point of no return by forging — and flaunting — corporate connections.

What needed to be noted, really, was the utterly nonsensical character of this assessment. <span style='color:blue'>We made the point before, but it eminently bears repetition: a man of Mahajan’s political accomplishments — including his roles in the Ayodhya campaign that communalised post-partition Indian politics as never before and in the forging of the fascist Shiv Sena-BJP axis in his home-state of Maharashtra, to name just a couple of instances — could not be called a moderniser of the party in the sense of a moderator or a bulwark against the ‘backward’ forces in the ‘family’.

A similar point needs to be made about the second transformation, even if the de-canonisation may delight many on this scribe’s side of the political divide.</span>
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Mahajan’s demise led speedily to a divide in the BJP itself. The party did not seem prepared for what followed, though quite a few in its fold or close to it now see it all as an inevitable sequel. </span>Pramod’s son Rahul is now in prison, facing criminal charges for consumption of narcotics and worse, after a mysterious party in Mahajan’s New Delhi residence ended in another unnatural death. Bibek Moitra, said to have handled the finances of the slain BJP fund-raiser, became a victim of either a “conspiracy” or a “cocktail of drugs”, depending on the version one believes.

Whether a “conspiracy” or a forbidden “cocktail” — its impact on the BJP was immediate. And in the subsequent days it has only increased. Rahul was a special, surprise invitee at the first post-Pramod BJP national executive session, but all talk of the ‘rising son’ becoming a youth leader and even a vice-president of the party died with Moitra. Sushma Swaraj, one of the high-profile BJP luminaries to visit Mahajan in the Mumbai hospital, spoke for others too when she asserted that the party had no “lena dena” with (or little interest in) the Rahul-Bibek affair or its ramifications. Party chief Rajnath Singh pretended to have a hearing problem, when the media asked him about it, and joined in the ensuing hilarity.

More was to follow. As the story began to unfold in some sordid detail, the party began to distance itself from not only the subject of police investigation but also the person it was about to deify. More and more voices from inside the BJP were heard regretfully recalling the Mahajan “lifestyle” that had led to it all. The media talked of the “high life” that was supposedly in striking contrast with the holiness or ‘Hindutva’ of the party. A parivar hack, who is known for proximity to Lal Krishna Advani and wrote once of his eyes “moistening” as Advani stepped down as BJP president, was entirely dry-eyed in a television programme as he denounced Mahajan’s “unethical” management of the party funds.

The process might have continued and the party could have disowned Pramod completely, had not former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee intervened — possibly seeing a factional angle in the entire affair. At Vajpayee’s insistence, a couple of lesser BJP leaders visited Rahul in detention. However, this marked no reinstallation of Pramod in the party pantheon.

The de-canonisation is as deceptive as the defeated attempt at canonisation was. If Mahajan’s “lifestyle” did not make him a “moderniser”, it did not make him a sorry exception to the rule in the “saffron” camp, either. What made a personality cult of Mahajan unwarranted was not his “five-star” peccadilloes, not a narcotic-cocktail circuit, <span style='color:red'>but his politics of non-uniformed fascism aka “cultural nationalism”.
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Denunciation of Pramod’s or Rahul’s foibles deals no heavy or long-term blow to the far right. It is hardly a secret that leaders in other parties are not free from them, either. The BJP apologists are bemoaning the fact that the episode exposes its claim of being a “party with a difference”. The far right, actually, stands to gain from promotion of a public outlook that perceives no difference among segments of the political spectrum. The middle-class denunciation of a consolidated political class as “corrupt”, accompanied by a denial of the relevance of all ideology, has only helped Mahajan’s kind of politics.

For the truth about the Rahul-Bibek affair, we may have to wait longer than for the result of the World Cup football tournament. The truth about Mahajan’s two transformations, however, needs immediate recognition by forces that take seriously their fight against the far right.

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’