editor@indialegalonline.com; twitter:@indialegalmag; facebook: India Legal. L
Archival links:
The nation/Mandate 2014/modi campaign
No longer a political bogeyman
Soothsayers had predicted that Narendra Modi’s
journey to 7 Race Course Road would be marred by communal disharmony and
voters’ apathy. But despite a flurry of hate speeches, electioneering was peaceful,
polling unprecedented, and every other development issue mattered, not Hindutva.
By Inderjit Badhwar
All predictions that India’s 16th
general elections would be marred by violent conflagrations engineered by
terrorists or extremist hate groups designed to sabotage the democratic
exercise of the popular franchise have, thank heavens, fallen flat on their
faces. Neither the flare up and spread of Naxalite and Maoist violence nor the
bloody hand of revanchist sentiment fueled by the Muzaffarnagar carnage
materialized. BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, despite niggling doubts about
his murky role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, remained steadfastly committed to his
attacks on dynastic corruption, the rot within the Congress party, and an
alternative model of an economy-accelerating governance.
Modi, the world over, was projected as
the darling of Hindu terror, (whatever that might mean)—a man whose inexorable
march to power would unleash wave upon wave of jack-booted saffron clad
crusaders with trisuls emblazoned on
their arm bands. But despite some fiery language from all sides of the
political spectrum, some hate speeches, endless ad hominem jibes, the Indian voters who turned out in record
numbers were peaceful, patient and tolerant.
If you think nasty and vulgar
remarks are an Indian specialty (see hate speeches story in India Legal May 15th, 2014), and Modi’s
acerbic references to “shahazada” and “ma-beta” are malevolent, you need look
no further than to our sister democracy—the United States – for examples that
are truly malicious. Here are some illustrations, new and old from the New York Times: In one of the first US presidential elections, Thomas Jefferson against John
Adams in 1800, a Jefferson spokesman wrote that Adams was a “hideous
hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man,
nor the gentleness and sensitivity of a woman.” In return, Jefferson was called
“a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired
by a Virginia mulatto father.”
But you don’t have to
go back centuries to find such comments, the New York Times said. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign circulated
a television ad featuring an
adorable girl counting petals on a daisy, and ending with a nuclear explosion, suggesting that his Republican challenger, Barry M Goldwater,
would precipitate a nuclear war. The Johnson campaign also crafted a coloring
book in which children could fill in pictures of Goldwater wearing Ku Klux Klan
robes.
Two
years ago, Stephen A Schwarzman, the chairman of Blackstone Group, compared
President Barrack Obama’s plans to raise taxes on private-equity executives to
the Nazis’ designs on Europe. “It’s
a war; it’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,” he said.
Actually, Modi’s
campaign has been less divisive than past BJP campaigns despite his having
borne the brunt of combined opposition onslaughts. I
am not for a minute forgetting the brutality that overwhelmed Gujarat during
his chief ministership in 2002. And I am certain that Modi will have to live
with the horror that engulfed his state for as long as he breathes on this
earth. But history will show that his advent on the national stage in
the role of a national candidate, even while it prompted a “stop Modi” fervor
among opposition parties, did not create the kind of backlash as did some of
the earlier campaigns of Ashok Singhal, Vinay Katiyar, Pravin Togadaia, Uma
Bharati, and Sadhvi Rithambara, who seemed to put Lord Rama above the Indian constitution.
In fact, Modi has
faced more television cameras in both soft and hard interviews and answered
more direct questions than any other prime ministerial candidate in living
memory. And the point he has been at pains to stress is that the Indian constitution
overrides all other concerns, including religion. This is a sharp break from
conservative, hardline, Hindutva thinking.
Today’s
liberals shed crocodile tears over the so-called sidelining of Lal Krishna
Advani and lament that this represents the death of the moderates within the
BJP. Advani may have attracted many western-educated
hagiograpahers like Swapan Dasgupta, Chandan Mitra, Kanchan Gupta, Sandhya Jain
to his side, but as the inventor of modern political Hindutva, its
lexicography, the concept of “majority insecurity”—along with the late Pramod
Mahajan—he remains unbeaten.
The
anti-Modi, pro-Advani spin doctors who wove the yarn of Advani as a “moderate”
conveniently ignore the events starting in September 1990 when he undertook his
rath yatra—starting from Somnath in Gujarat with Ayodhya as its final destination
after traversing central India—to “educate” the masses about the Ayodhya
campaign—the BJP’s main election plank during the elections.
The
Advani juggernaut, two years later, precipitated the demolition of the Babri
Masjid after traversing the country, working up mob fury and religious mania,
creating riots in Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh. In his
book, My Country My Life, Advani
called his rath yatra “an exhilarating period in my political life.” I doubt that
Modi would describe the 2002 nightmare in similar terms.
And herein lies a lesson for India and
Indian politicians, especially the hawks in the BJP (Advani among them) and
other parties who are calling for a surge in Indian policing activities against
terrorist violence. The Indian “surge” would create additional troops, more
lethal weapons and draconian curbs on liberty through new legislation. But will
it work?
The fear—perhaps unfounded, but
perpetrated nonetheless, is that in Modi’s ascendancy the population on the
receiving end of this would be Muslims. Why deny that? But a “surged” war on
terror could well turn into a war against the Muslim community just as the war
against Khalistani terrorists, sadly, turned into a war against the Sikhs in
the 1980s. Sikh militants were able to recruit converts from among moderates
and ordinary people as this perception strengthened.
I have repeatedly warned—as I did in
the early 1980s when I reported from Kashmir—that when the state is seen as a
deliberate oppressor rather than protector of a minority community, the result
is anarchy bordering on civil war. Think about it. You may not sympathize with
Islam or Quranic teachings, and you have a right to hold on to your views
unless convinced otherwise, but from a practical, purely realpolitik standpoint
what is the alternative to secularism in India? The two nation theory? Even the
RSS did not support that. The truth is that more than 170 million (about 14
percent of the total population) Muslims live in India. To treat them as a
monolithic Fifth Column, and target “surges” against their youth without
adequate due process is to alienate a minority nearly the size of the American
population. Can we afford that? Can we afford a situation where every town and
bylane has to be policed against violence and anarchy?
We have avoided this horrible
situation—we should all remember partition as a civil war, one of the worst
scourges ever to hit humankind—largely because our founding fathers were
far-sighted enough to seek political accommodation with Muslims (read security)
who had chosen to stay behind and make this country their home, and because a
large portion of Muslims in India are not Arabised, they are among the most
liberal in the world, given often to Sufi leanings—the mystical union between
Vedanta and Islam—(in fact, the Muslim begums of Awadh kept alive the tradition
of Hanuman worship), and who reveled in the cultural fusion and shastriya sangeet that is the soul of
Hindustan.
From a purely administrative point of
view, I would advise our next prime minister that India does need a
"surge" to counter terrorism, but a surge of another sort. I wrote
some years ago during a spate of terrorist violence:
“All hell is breaking loose in Indian
cities. We watch with helpless horror as motorcyclists hurl hand grenades in
flower markets and plant bombs and crude explosive devices, almost at will, in
bazaars, lanes, and transportation systems. Theories about the perpetrators fly
fast and furious. Intelligence agencies and local police departments vie with
each other to name the masterminds, lay out elaborate plots and grand designs,
speculate about international terror groups, claim victories in shootouts,
pontificate on conspiracy theories, and boast about having “finally cracked”
the ring.”
The media, too, flits from one theory
to another, politicians harangue the public about speedy death sentences, harsher
laws, minority appeasement and minority insecurities and persecution. But the
truth is, no one really knows for sure what is really going on. This is not to
support or to debunk any theory or point of view. Its focus is on a severe
dislocation of governance that directly impacts on the gathering of information
on the basis of which any administration or government in power provides
security to all citizens.
Unlike the US where the new Homeland
Security bureaucracy was created to anticipate and prevent terror attacks
through careful vigilance, monitoring and counter-intelligence post 9/11, India
has not even begun to grapple with the subject of modernizing and equipping her
services to deal with terror notwithstanding the parliament attack and the
ghastly incidents that have followed with rapid-fire regularity.
Research and Analysis Wing, the
Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigation, urban police departments—created
for administrative and policing chores with specific mandates—are simply not
equipped or capable of dealing with urban terrorism. Encounters and confessions
in police custody are not the answer. The critical elements are intelligence and
prevention. And, believe it or not, the spirit behind the creation of the
Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and Indian Police Service (IPS)—did create
the right conditions for the achievement of these twin goals.
At the pure administrative level, the
prevention of terror is a grassroots governance phenomenon. In the last couple
of decades, this has just about vanished as district bureaucrats and policemen
have been forced to neglect their real duties and perform tasks assigned to
them by power hungry politicians. In the old days, the district magistrate, the
superintendant of police roamed their districts on foot, in jeeps, on
horseback. They camped for nights at villages. Their headquarters were open
durbars for grievance redressal. They were men and women of the people.
Because they were trusted by ordinary
folk in whose interests they slogged day and night they received valuable
information. They knew where dacoits would be hiding. They would personally be
aware of “bad characters” and bigots and people planning communal violence.
They could persuade village elders to take steps to rein in the “badmaashes.” There was a huge two-way communication—this
is real intelligence—that could help prevent clashes, prevent violent
incidents, and above all, lead to the arrest of the real culprits.
Arresting the real culprits is what
gives law enforcement the credibility it needs to win the confidence of people
and receive valuable intelligence. Arrest the wrong man, and you create enemies
out of people who would be your friends and informants.
That is what has happened in India.
Intelligence that leads to prevention of violence has dried up because the
bureaucracy has moved away from the common man. The common man sees the
bureaucrat as an enemy which serves the political master rather than the
interests of the needy. This is particularly true in cities. As India urbanizes
rapidly, there is an almost total disconnect between city administrations and mohallas and colonies. The police have
not been modernized to interact with the huge socio-economic problems and
disruptions of the traditional patterns of life and breakup of families that
accompanies the mushrooming of cities.
Dealing with urban terrorism and
extremism certainly requires a strong hand. But the hand can only be
strengthened when governmental and police organizations are modernized,
reconstituted and decentralized into the neighborhoods where real people live
in order to feel and deal with their insecurities and grievances.
Good governance, which Modi has been
talking about, would be the first concrete step against terror. Band aid
reactions will not work anymore.
(You can reach India Legal Mag thru twitter: @indialegalmag.com; facebook: India Legal; or editor@indialegalonline.com.
Links to all issues:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment