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|  | Carving a path to Hindu rashtra
By madurai collective 16/06/2002 At 01:04 By Achin Vanaik The next Lok Sabha elections could well be the key turning point in
the struggle pertaining to the future of Indian democracy - whether
it has one or not.
SOME OF the wider strategic implications of the Gujarat pogrom and
the latest bout of war-mongering (including nuclear brinkmanship by
both India and Pakistan) over cross-border terrorism are now becoming
clear. The moderate mask has been dropped and the Sangh has decided
that an unequivocal Hindutva posture is its preferred route to
achieving greater power and influence in the future. But this still
leaves key issues open. First, we have to be clear not only about the
immense danger that the Sangh represents to Indian democracy's future
but also about the path it is most likely to take in order to fulfil
its ambition of establishing a Hindu Rashtra. Then, we can try and
assess the obstacles and difficulties facing it, explore what tactics
the Sangh might adopt, so that forethought and challenge can stymie
its effort at advancement.
Though Hindutva ideologues often try and confuse matters by claiming
that India is already a Hindu Rashtra, which in English translation
means a "Hindu nation", they know that their model of Indian society,
if it is to come about, requires the prior establishment of a Hindu
state comfortably under Sangh control, which in coordination with the
RSS, can then carry out the dramatic re-shaping of Indian
society/polity demanded by a proper Hindu Rashtra. But there are only
two routes to achieving or attempting to achieve such sufficiently
strong state power - the electoral one of securing an absolute or
near-absolute majority for the BJP in Parliament; or bypassing
altogether the constitutional-electoral route and carrying out an
authoritarian coup either of a military-police kind, or a civilian
unconstitutional coup of the Emergency-type.
Fascism in Germany and Italy combined the electoral and
unconstitutional processes. A dominant but minority party comes to
power in a coalition through elections but then overthrows all
democratic-electoral restraints and establishes its authoritarian
state. For a number of reasons, the BJP cannot do this (as evidenced
by its period in power at the Centre since 1998), not least because
of the profound regionalisation of Indian politics. Nor does it seem
likely or possible for the BJP and the Sangh Parivar to repeat the
Emergency-type coup as a minority party though dominant in a ruling
coalition. The Congress, it should be remembered, was in 1975 already
the majority party in the Lok Sabha when it took that measure.
Moreover, once bitten twice shy. There is no way that the other
parties or the Indian public would quietly accept a repeat of the
imposition of Emergency-type rule.
The only realistic route for the Sangh, therefore, is in trying to
secure an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha elections or as close to
it as possible. Here it is faced with an obvious dilemma. Given its
static performances in the last two elections and the enduring
strength of regional parties, there seems to be no escape from
coalition rule whether it is led by the Congress or by the BJP at the
Centre. The earlier strategic perspective of the Sangh (before
Gujarat) seemed to be a more patient and longer term one. It was a
kind of two-stage approach. For sometime to come, coalition rule at
the Centre would be the norm and the Sangh should make sure the BJP
remained at the hub of successive coalition Governments. This would
help make it the "normal" party of national-level governance
enhancing its credibility in ever widening circles of the electorate
as well as giving it time to pursue a differentiated geographical
strategy aimed at weakening all its rivals. So, a somewhat more
aggressive Hindutva could be pursued in places where it was strong
but a more cautious approach would be adopted, e.g., in the South,
where it had yet to achieve a strong enough implantation. But Gujarat
has shown that the dominant sections within the Sangh no longer have
patience for such a strategy, one that is also uncertain and provides
no guarantees for delivering the final desired outcome. The next Lok
Sabha elections could well be the key turning point in the struggle
pertaining to the future of Indian democracy - whether it has one or
not. Obviously, the Sangh would like to get a sense of where it
stands, and of its wider prospects, after the Gujarat Assembly
elections which some believe can be called this October. If it
retains power or does not fare badly then this will be read as a
strong endorsement of the value of pursuing an aggressive Hindutva
stance. But even were the BJP to fare badly, aggressive Hindutva is
almost certainly still going to be seen as the only viable or
preferable option for it to pursue elsewhere in the country.
After all, so far nothing else has worked, with the BJP's inept
record of State-level governance leading to today's situation where
it is ruling only in Goa, Jharkhand and Gujarat. Thus, the key
tactical tasks of the Sangh are what steps or measures it must take
to create the circumstances that can polarise the next general
elections into a referendum on the ideology of the Sangh and help it
obtain enough support!
Two approaches are likely to be combined. One could be to instigate
communal violence and riots in other States. Furthermore, in the
ideology of the Sangh, being anti-Muslim, anti-Islam and
anti-Pakistan are all linked together. In fact, the constituency that
can be tapped through anti-Pakistan sentiments is much wider than the
constituencies available for the first two. Relations today between
India and Pakistan are at a nadir. And the BJP has noted how its
principal political opponent, the Congress, was effectively
outflanked by the Government's resort to `coercive diplomacy' over
the issue of cross-border terrorism, and how it successfully brought
around an otherwise secular constituency which in a time-honoured
manner convinces itself that in regard to external `security matters'
the Government's policies somehow stand above the narrower
party-ideological considerations of the BJP. Hence, the enduring
political attraction of pushing anti-Pakistan jingoism through the
creation of wartime or near-wartime tensions.
True, the U.S. presence in the region does act as a dampener against
waging a war or enacting the kind of `limited' incursion as a
response to a future act of cross-border terrorism that could then
escalate into a military exchange between the two official armed
forces. But it is not a guarantee that such an outbreak cannot happen
in the future despite the current receding of war clouds.
While winding down tensions between India and Pakistan is clearly a
current priority, one must not allow the deeper meaning of what has
happened in Gujarat to recede from public discourse and attention. It
is not Pakistan or cross-border terrorism inspired by Islamist
fundamentalist groups or the dilemmas in Kashmir (despite their
seriousness) that poses the greatest danger. It is our home-grown
version of religious-political fanaticism striving for ever greater
power that poses the greatest threat to our very existence as a
secular and democratic polity and society.
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i have tried to suggest in my article below that the emrgency route for bjp is possible. your thoughts...
A pliable, militarist president to fulfill India’s rightwing agenda
By Jawed Naqvi
A Pakistani colleague was rather miffed and also possibly somewhat amused when I recently tested him with my shorthand history of the subcontinent. I put it to him that in several ways it was tempting to conclude that the Congress Party had caused the creation of Pakistan, and Pakistan had created the Jan Sangh, the original name for today’s rightwing Hindu BJP. The problem of course is that today, the hitherto centrist, if erratically secular Congress, and the patently communal BJP have both joined hands to target Pakistan, though not for the first time and not with equal venom.
There’s hardly any other explanation for the two rivals, who otherwise would daily fight like cats and dogs in and outside parliament, to come together on the proposed election of APJ Abdul Kalam as India’s next head of state. Neither party is going to be getting Muslim votes if that is their calculation. What is axiomatic is that the move to have a missile-making militarist as head of state is bound to boost the country’s rightward lurch, forcing the presidency to play easily into the hands of the neo-fascist Hindutva’s agenda of poisonous militarism and rabid communalism.
But what does the Congress get in reward? A tight slap on the face, one guesses, after describing the very people it has aligned with as fascists -- only to quickly forget the sting if history has any lessons at all left to teach the original handmaiden of narrow nationalism. Some of these lessons are too obvious to miss.
Who can forget the nefarious role a head of state can play in India’s fragile and overstated democracy? It was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who showed the way most dramatically in 1975 when she asked President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (another Muslim!) to bend, and he crawled. Her Congress Party’s Emergency rule didn’t last for even two years, but that was not due to any great efforts by the opposition, whether from the left or the right. Mrs Gandhi was heady enough with power and cavalier enough with spurious intelligence to hold and lose the election of 1977.
The role of a president or a state governor, or a speaker of parliament or of India’s numerous legislative assemblies can play the role of a crucial institutional cover for subverting the system from within. Why else does a change in a government in New Delhi so often result in the change of governors in the states? So Speakers are in a qualitatively different league. Sometimes it would seem that it is more useful to have the speaker of the assembly or parliament on your side even if the rest of the house has deserted you.
Recently the rightwing alliance of Shiv Sena and BJP were at the receiving end of this politically lethal institution – the speaker of the Maharashtra state assembly bluntly changed the equation in a fragile assembly by suspending half dozen deputies, thereby enabling the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party coalition to survive a close call in a trust vote.
The Maharashtra speaker had obviously learnt his lesson from a similar event a few years earlier, when the BJP’s presiding officer in Uttar Pradesh, had brazenly helped break up the Dalit party of BSP leader Mayawati, by suspending a number of deputies to ensure that she would lose the majority. I am not sure what happened to the legal tangle that followed in the Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that Mayawati is back in a new assembly as chief minister with the BJP’s support and her tormentor is back also as the BJP’s speaker no less.
To be fair to Mrs Gandhi and to the BJP, the presiding officer’s importance in subverting democracy is not an Indian phenomenon. It was first spotted by Adolf Hitler. In fact it remains a moot point whether the Nazis would have succeeded in capturing power in Germany at all had they not first installed Herman Goering as the President (Speaker) of the Reichstag on August 30, 1932.
The four months leading up to January 30, 1933 when Hitler was grudgingly inaugurated as Chancellor by the ageing German President Paul von Hindenburg, were fraught with perils for the arriving Fuehrer.
William L. Shirer in his celebrated masterpiece on the history of Nazi Germany -- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – gives an insightful account of how Goering as the Speaker of the Reichstag had actually saved the situation for Hitler at a highly critical juncture of his thrust to capture power.
The description of the clownish rightward-leaning but Hitler-baiting Chancellor Frantz von Papen and his bid to outmanoeuvre the Nazis in a fateful Reichstag vote need to be recalled here.
According to Shirer, when the chamber convened on August 30, 1932, “the Centrists joined the Nazis in electing Goering President of the Reichstag. For the first time, then a National Socilaist was in the chair when the Reichstag convened on September 12 to begin its working session. Goering made the most of the opportunity.
Now Chancellor von Papen had obtained in advance from President Hindenburg a decree for the dissolution of the chamber – the first time that the death warrant of the Reichstag had been signed before it met to transact business. But for the first working session he forgot to bring it along. He had instead with him a speech outlining the programme of his government, having been assured that one of the Nationalist deputies, in agreement with most other parties, would object to a vote on the expected Communist censure of the government. In this case a single objection from any one of the 600-odd members was enough to postpone a vote.
When Ernst Torgler, the Communist leader, introduced his motion as an amendment to the order of the day, however, neither a Nationalist deputy nor any other rose to object.
“The situation was now serious,”Papen says in his memoirs. He sent a messenger posthaste to the Chancellory to fetch the dissolution order.
In the meantime, Hitler conferred with his parliamentary party group in the Reichstag President’s Palace across the street. He decided to swallow the unsavoury pill and join the Communists in a censure of the government and ordered his deputies to vote for the communist-led censure and overthrow Papen before the Chancellor could dissolve the Reichstag!
To accomplish this, of course, Goering, as presiding officer, would have to pull some fast and neat tricks of parliamentary procedure. The former air ace (for missiles had not yet been invented as we know them today), a man of daring and of many abilities, as he was to prove on a larger stage later, was equal to the occasion.
Here comes the punch, something India’s myriad rightwingers must have absorbed and digested many times over. Says Shirer:
“When the session reconvened Papen appeared with the familiar red dispatch case which, by tradition, carried the dissolution order he had so hastily retrieved. But when he requested the floor to read it, the President of the Reichstag managed not to see him, though Papen, by now red-faced, was on his feet brandishing the paper for all in the assembly to see. All but Goering. His smiling face was turned the other way. He called for an immediate vote. By now Papen’s countenance, according to eyewitnesses, had turned from red to white with anger. He strode up to the President’s rostrum and plunked the dissolution order on his desk. Goering took no notice of it and ordered the vote to proceed. Papen, followed by his ministers, none of whom were members of the chambers (another familiar old trick), stalked out.
“The deputies voted: 513 to 32 against the government. Only then did Goering notice the piece of paper which had been thrust so angrily on his desk. He read it to the assembly and ruled that since it had been counter-signed by a Chancellor who had already been voted out of office by a constituional majority, it had no validity!”
Dr Abdul Kalam has many good attributes; among them he has an ear for music, which would appear to make him a far less dangerous person than Cassius, with no interest in music, was for Julius Caesar.
Under the given scenario there are various ways in which a pliable president could help the BJP. Citing an external emergency, as Mrs. Gandhi did with an internal situation, and with an emasculated, divided and confused opposition, he could help declare a state of emergency. The Nazis used the enabling act to fix their political opponents. In India, the so-called anti-terrorist POTA extracted out of another parliamentary footsy by convening a joint session of the two houses, is much more lethal than any enabling act ever was.
Since the BJP will never be 100 percent certain of Kalam’s attitude to something as grave as tinkering with the constitution, it already is planning a standby arrangement by considering a Hindutva acolyte, possibly Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the former chief minister of Rajasthan, as its candidate for the vice president. As for the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, it has already named Shiv Sena’s Manohar Joshi as its chosen nominee.
But how does all this slide towards the right account for the collective hostility towards Pakistan, both by the BJP and the Congress? Pakistan, by kindling various layers of jingoism among the mainstream parties, assures the survival of some degree of competition in politics. But there is no perfect competition in real life. Therefore, for the Congress, there is something to be culled from the disappearance of the Centrists in Germany, after they joined hands with the National Socialists to elect Goering as the Reichstag Speaker.
End of story
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