Sandhya Jain
An unmistakable thread is now visible between the impressive victory of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Akbaruddin Owaisi's diatribe aimed at polarising voters ahead of a possible election this year, the arrest of a Hindu sadhu who challenged Owaisi in Hyderabad, and the Union Home Minister's attempt to revive the bogey of 'saffron terror' at the Congress Jaipur conclave the very day Rahul Gandhi was anointed PM-in-waiting.
Sushil Kumar Shinde's blatant charge that the BJP and the RSS operate terror camps, which he later modified into saffron terror after Congress veterans thought the talk of "Hindu terror" could alienate the majority community, indicated that the party was keeping its options on an early election open in view of the complete disarray in the BJP on the matter of electing a new party president or announcing a prime ministerial candidate. With Congress having smoothly paved the way for the Amethi MP, any inability of the BJP to similarly clear the decks for Narendra Modi will be counter-productive with voters who are fed up with the Congress and the corruption it has presided over in the terms of the UPA. The near certain second term for Nitin Gadkari as party president is anyway likely to come with a high cost to the credibility of both the BJP and particularly the RSS which only three years ago bragged that it had 75 worthy candidates to promote as BJP chief.
It is in the context of a strategy to polarise communities and consolidate certain vote-banks that the arrest of Swami Kamalananda Bharati, on January 14 makes sense. The sanyasi, who is little known outside Andhra Pradesh, had sharply taken on A the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeem legislator Akbaruddin Owaisi for communal incitement at a public rally on January 8. As it well known, the state government took no action against Owaisi despite his making highly provocative statements at a number of venues, until social media conducted a high decibel campaign, uploaded the speeches on YouTube, and forced his arrest after he returned from London where he had ostensibly gone for medical treatment.
In sharp contrast to this kid glove treatment of Owaisi, Swami Kamalananda was arrested just five days after his supposed 'hate speech'. This was widely perceived as an act of communal balancing by the regime, and the making of a 'base' for Hindu terror, as per the UPA script, as first articulated by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram.
Mercifully, while Owaisi remains in judicial custody, amidst sustained leaks that the audio in the incendiary tapes is not his voice, Swami Kamalananda was granted bail on January 19 by the Nampally Court in Hyderabad. It bears mentioning that Swami Kamalananda, like most Hindu spiritual leaders, is essentially concerned with intra-Hindu affairs and does not galvanise his followers against any community or person. Thus, he founded the Hindu Devalaya Parirakshana Samiti to protest against the state government's mismanagement of Hindu temples taken over on account of their handsome coffers, and energetically opposes conversions.
It was the abrasive tone of Akbaruddin Owaisi's long-winded speech at Nirmal that prompted Swami Kamalananda to take him on, as many of his followers were hurt at the manner in which the MLA spoke about the Mother Cow, Kaushalya ji, and Sri Rama. (The original speech in Telugu can be seen here.)
According to a rough translation of the speech, Swami Kamalananda Bharati cautioned the minority community, saying, "If such patient Hindus lose their patience, please think where will you be?" Mocking the rhetorical flourish with which Owaisi asked for police to be removed for just 15 minutes, he said, "For a man who can threaten to murder 100 crore people if given 15 minutes, has the fever come because there is a plane ready to take you away (to London), or were you afraid of being at home?" Surely that is not hate speech. Muslims have objected to the Swami's reference to the fact that Hindu civilisation has survived attacks by the (Islamic) sword for 1400 years. While Muslims may feel uneasy about historical references of Hindu resistance to their hegemonic designs, it is not tantamount to hate speech. Swami Kamalananda merely warned that while Delhi had no objection to (Owaisi's) speech, if each (Hindu) was given a sword, who would have the courage to face them? He added that we (Hindus) are not afraid "of your theories, your ways, your bullets, your AK47s, your bombs, your RDX, your mines, your Pakistan and your Bangladesh. You can continue with your efforts…". The Indian Army, he said, was more than a match for Pakistan and Bangladesh, which were partitioned out of India. Hindus, he said, had listened to Owaisi's speech for one hour fifty minutes. It agitated Hindus living in 26,000 villages in Andhra Pradesh. But the truly interesting part of the speech was that it had nothing positive for Muslims! He never spoke about Muslim unemployment, health issues, poverty, economic status, their development. The whole tone of Owaisi's speech was only about how to foster the division of Indian society. It was a command performance at the behest of Pakistan, more specifically the ISI, he alleged. In 1989, Swami Kamalananda claimed, the Ram sila movement succeeded, not because of LK Advani's rath yatra, but because, from 1985 to 1989, all over the country Ganesh Utsav processions were pelted with stones from some religious places. There were bomb blasts in many cities and too much ISI terrorism. As for the abuse of Kaushalya ji by the legislator, it will rouse the Sakti in every woman. Don't forget, he warned, that though there are many problems for Hindus in the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were driven out, when Mahila Sakti was roused, then even with the military and the police present, the Amarnath Yatra was held as per the wishes of the people (for two months in 2004). Swami Kamalananda demanded that the MIM party be banned. This is a political demand, but it cannot be regarded as hate speech; it is at best a personal opinion. Interestingly, on January 5 this year, the Andhra Pradesh Government declared it would hand back 34,682 single-trustee temples to the archakas. These are temples with an annual income of less than Rs. two lakhs, which suggests that it may not be remunerative for the Endowments Department to maintain them. But it is a beginning in the movement for restoration of Hindu temples to the community.
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