THE POLITICAL establishment, barring the Left parties (whose
idea
of fighting the threat posed by the right wing by roping in the
Congress has taken a beating once again), is now finding ways to
prove its
patriotism as defined by the communal-fascist coalition headed by
the BJP
and aided so well by India's own soldier of the social-democratic
tradition,
George Fernandes. There is no disputing that Mr. Fernandes, who was
once
seen by Petra Kelly and Olaf Palme as their pointman not just in
India but
across Asia, has turned out to be the drumbeater of the right wing
to the
point that he puts even the committed disciples of the Fuehrer and
Il Duce
(and their variants in India belonging to the Golwalkar tradition)
to shame.
This, however, is not new. Mr. Fernandes seemed to have decided
against looking back long ago and after he showed up at Pokhran in
May
1998 (with clenched fists) there was nothing surprising about his
willingness to be counted with those who now want to celebrate a
brand of
nationalism that is sought to be served by nominating one of the
main brains
behind India's weaponisation programmes for the post of President.
Mr.
Fernandes had, after all, showed no compunctions about being seen
with the
communal-fascists in between these two occasions — May 11, 1998, and
June
11, 2002 — and the worst of those instances was when he held a brief
for the
Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi.
The more significant aspect in this context is the way in which
those parties in the Opposition that do not belong to the Left have
behaved in the aftermath of the NDA announcing its nominee for the
President's post.
In their enthusiasm to be seen as patriots and to establish
their
own credentials among the articulate middle classes, the secular lot
among the political class too are willing to play ball with the
communal
Right.
They, after all, cannot afford to be seen as throwing a spanner
in the works of the "nation-building-process" the Sangh Parivar is
seriously engaged in. They did so even in May 1998; Mulayam Singh
Yadav
went to town claiming that Pokhran-II was about to happen when he was
Defence Minister while Laloo Prasad Yadav made it clear that there
was no
space for party politics when it came to the nation's security. They
all
agreed to define
Indian nationalism by the same paradigm as the right wing. This
was reflected in the Congress' enthusiasm to establish its love for
Dr. Kalam.
This, after all, is what one could make out from S. Jaipal
Reddy's refrain that Dr. Kalam was put in-charge of India's missile
development programme by the Congress. It is another matter that Mr.
Reddy
was unaware, when he made the statement, about the candidature of the
legendary Lakshmi Sahgal; she and her comrades in the Indian
National Army
were defended (against charges of treason levelled by the colonial
Government in 1946) by the luminaries of the Indian National
Congress in the
INA trials. For those in the Congress unaware of this part of
history,
Jawaharlal Nehru himself wore the gown (along with Bhulabhai Desai
and
several others) to defend the INA soldiers.
Sonia Gandhi and others in the Congress will now be voting
against someone who was described by Rajiv Gandhi's grandfather as a
patriot
and a soldier who fought for India's freedom. Here is one more
instance of
the Congress, in its post-Independence phase, displaying a
reluctance to
internalise into its agenda the nationalist ethos constructed in the
course
of the freedom movement and represented by the Indian National
Congress.
All these aspects have become relevant now not because Dr.
Kalam's candidature is undesirable on the grounds that he is a
novice in the
political arena. It is another matter that the articulate middle
classes, full of contempt for men (and women) belonging to the
political
class, are now celebrating the choice of someone who is not a
politician.