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| Jaitley only made a statement of fact | | Hindutva, BJP-Style | | Neha
JAMMU, Mar 29: Wikileaks cables on March 26 reported that Robert Blake, Charge d' affairs in the US Embassy in India, had conveyed to his government in Washington D C, after a meeting with senior BJP leader and presently Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley on May 6, 2005, that "Jaitley argued that Hindu nationalism 'will always be a talking point' for the BJP" and "characterized this as an opportunistic issue." This leak has put the BJP leadership on the mat and provided a god-sent opportunity to the otherwise cornered and despised Congress to hit back and call the BJP's bluff. Jaitley has, however, maintained that he had not used the word "opportunistic." He has said: "It was neither his view nor his language." No responsible and concerned Indian would ever buy the argument advanced by Jaitley.
Commenting on the latest leak, Union minister Kapil Sibal has said: "Arun Jaitley's reported comment that the BJP was using Hindutva as an opportunistic tool has exposed the real face of the party" and demanded an "apology" from him. He has asked the BJP veteran, LK Advani, and the RSS leadership to inform the nation as to "what they now think about Jaitley." He has said that "a comment of a responsible leader of the opposition that the BJP was using Hindutva as an opportunistic tool is a very, very serious issue"; that the "Congress has been (consistently) saying that the BJP is misleading people"; and that "this means they (BJP leaders) speak something and do something else." "Now, they should apologize to them," Sibal has asked Advani and the RSS. "For years, we have been saying about their politics of opportunism. Now, people should also know the real face of BJP," the Law and Telecom Minister has also said.
It is always impossible to share the views of Sibal. For, he belongs to a school of thought that preaches fake secularism; that always demonizes those who actually believe in genuine secularism and people's democracy; that pits the minorities against the majority community to garner votes; and that doesn't mind even if the paramount interests of the country are jeopardized and compromised. Actually, he belongs to a party that has no ideology or that he belongs to a party whose only ideology is to capture power and retain control over it using all means, fair and foul, and even at the cost of the nation. But one cannot but endorse his stand on what Jaitley reportedly told Robert Blake. The fact of the matter is that Sibal has only hit the nail on the head and shown the BJP its rightful place.
One can catalogue here innumerable instances to prove that the top-ranking BJP leaders always took recourse to the politics of emotion and deceit in order to mislead and hoodwink the Hindus and that they were never really committed to what they had been saying between 1951, when the Jana Sangh was founded, and 1998, when the BJP entered into an unholy alliance with those bitterly opposed to the BJP's three fundamental lynchpins -- abrogation of Article 370, application of Uniform Civil Code and construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya - to fulfill its lust for power and pelf. A reference here to just a couple of examples would be enough to lay bare the disparities between what the out-of-power BJP leaders preached till 1998 and what they actually did when they came to power.
One, the BJP leadership had till 1998 fought elections on three specific planks: Article 370, Uniform Civil Code and Ram Temple. These formed an integral part of the party's so-called pro-Hindutva ideology. The first thing that they did after coming to power in New Delhi for the first was to adopt a Common Minimum Programme (CMP) that rigorously excluded from it any reference to Article 370, Ram Temple and Uniform Civil Code. In other words, it took no time to outrage its constituency by abandoning the very core of its ideology. It let down the people across the country - people who had returned to the Lok Sabha more than 185 BJP candidates with the hope that they would enter the Parliament, take on the fake secularists, promote the national cause and do their best to give an effect to their ideology. Nothing of this sort happened. The result was that the people who had reposed faith in the BJP leadership between 1996 and 1998 abandoned it and the result was that it suffered humiliating defeats in the 2004 and 2009 general elections. Its tally came down to 115 in 2008.
Two, the BJP had all through till 1998 talked about the integration of Jammu and Kashmir into India. But when it came to power, it adopted a line that only suited Pakistan and the votaries of greater autonomy, bordering on sovereignty. So much so that it joined hands with the National Conference and hobnobbed with the People's Democratic Party. It shared power with the same National Conference it had consistently opposed. Not just this, it initiated the so-called peace process with Pakistan that had done all that it could do to bleed India with a thousand-cut every day and break India. It weakened the Indian case in Jammu and Kashmir. The Congress government is simply pursing the line the so-called ultra nationalist BJP adopted in 1999 in Sri Lanka and sought to implement. It is a different story that the historical forces defeated the dubious game plan of the BJP.
Three, the attitude of the top-ranking BJP leaders, particularly Advani, towards the demolition of the disputed structure at Ayodhya is a classical example of its belief in opportunistic politics. He mobilized the Hindu opinion and later described the demolition as the blackest day in his life. Vajpayee had even wept when the Kar Sevaks demolished the disputed structure. That neither Vajpayee nor Advani was committed to Hindutva ideology and that both of them were ardent admirers of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was responsible for the communal partition of India, could be seen from what Vajpayee did at Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore and what Advani said about Jinnah in Pakistan itself. Today, Advani hailed the decision of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to invite Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the semi-final cricket match between India and Pakistan at Mohali - something that further exposes the BJP and its so-called belief in Hindutva. There is no doubt that he, like many other BJP leaders and his supporters and speech-writers like Sudendhra Kulkarani, has forgotten the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks, which took away hundreds and hundreds of innocent lives.
These and several other similar instances, including the BJP's dubious role in the case of Ram Setu, should leave no one in any doubt that it says one thing when out-of-power and does exactly the opposite when in power. The fact is that the BJP leadership is highly opportunistic and that it is interested in power and not in the ideology, it says, it stands for. It simply rakes up certain emotive issues to garner votes. Indeed, there are leaders in the BJP, including the likes of Jaitley, who dismiss the genuine nationalists and genuine secularists as extremists and militants; who hold the view that we are living in the 21st century; we cannot be rigid; we have to be flexible; we have to accommodate and take along Pakistan and who not.
Noted political commentator Tavleen Singh is right when she writes in her twiter: "The people in charge of making political strategy in the BJP at the national level, need to be put out to grass in some very remote rural outpost as soon as possible. After this happens, the BJP must organize one of its famous `chintan shivirs' not just to think about where the party is going but to actually worry about the directionless meanderings that have defined its course since the 2004 general election was lost. So purposeless has the BJP's role become as our main opposition party that we have grown accustomed to it making a racket about the wrong issues and remaining silent about real ones." |
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