4 October 1999

by Praful Bidwai

As these lines appear in print, India will have begun evaluating its 600 million electors’ verdict in hard numbers. Regardless of which combination of parties forms the next government, a few things can be said with certainty despite the mutually contradictory, and confusing, exit polls which in turn are also incompatible with opinion polls. This election does not mark a break from the long-term trend (barring 1984) of indecisive or fractured verdicts and political instability. Indeed, it confirms India’s most important political sub-trend, that of the ruling party/ies going to the people for approval, and the people rejecting them with varying degrees of contempt.

Whatever its faults, the NDA cannot be accused of having run a lacklustre campaign. The Alliance, especially the BJP, went into electoral battle firing all cylinders, energetically rubbishing its opponents. Its high-profile, do-or-die, campaign had three central planks: Kargil, Ms Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins, and Mr Vajpayee’s “image”, which is supposedly high among the upper class, upper caste elite. All these are issues of identity, or symbols of loyalty. They pertain to who you are—Indian, Hindu, government loyalist, etc.—not what you do or stand for.

                             In all fairness, the BJP must admit it has failed at least on the first two counts. The attempt to present the Kargil war as a high point of national achievement came a cropper within the first half of the campaign itself. By mid-September, murmurs of popular protest against the politicisation of Kargil had grown into loud growls, especially in areas such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand which had seen a large number of casualties. The NDA’s opponents could no longer be maligned as churlish critics and spoilsports for questioning the claim that a wholly avoidable, costly, military confrontation which wasted 500 lives and Rs 10,000 crores was a “grand victory”. By the end of the campaign, the wind had been taken out of much of the BJP’s “national security is in peril” hype. The party’s claims to patriotism were widely questioned on the basis of Mr Vajpayee’s own record as regards the Quit India movement, the RSS’s history of collaboration with the British, the government’s pro-Western policies and its dubious sugar imports which continued even while Kargil was raging.

Much of the shine in the NDA campaign, including Mr Vajpayee’s own prestige, quickly came off. Its rifts on caste and factional lines came out in the open—most starkly in UP. The wholly negative campaign on Ms Gandhi’s foreign origins may have generated a lot of gossip, abuse and vulgar jokes about Monica Lewinsky, but it probably didn’t bring many votes. The bulk of our voters were quick to see the identity issue as hollow. They decided to favour the Constitutional-pluralist notion of citizenship and give Hindutva nationalism the go-by. It is only on Mr Vajpayee’s image projection that the BJP probably made some gains—if only because he seems rather unlike the rest of itself. Even these gains may prove trivial and temporary.

And for good reason. The BJP came to power in 1998 on account of two factors: a give-us-a-chance platform based on rejection of the Congress and the United Front; and an appeal to the Famous Five Ss: suraksha, swadeshi, samata, shuchita, and samrasta. Look at its record on each of these. The party’s militarism and nuclear jingoism have degraded India’s security. Today, millions of Indians have become defenceless against a nuclear attack by Pakistan. Any number of our cities can be targeted by missiles, which can’t be intercepted.

Maximally, our generals can hope that Pakistan will be deterred from attacking India. But such hopes involve mind games. At best, nuclear deterrence is a flawed doctrine. The Cold War witnessed over 10,000 incidents where deterrence nearly broke down despite sophisticated early warning, and command and control, systems. Neither India nor Pakistan will have these for decades. That’s why it was arrogant, foolish and disingenuous for our government to publish the Draft Nuclear Doctrine and ignite a nuclear arms race. This has alarmed not just Pakistan, but China as well. The DND makes nonsense of “minimum” deterrence.

The DND is indeed a recipe for a spectacularly wasteful nuclear arsenal, with an all-horizons global reach. Its prescriptions are destabilising of security not just in the Indian sub-continent, but the whole Asian continent. Potentially, they spell a shift in global security equations. As India gets sucked into a nuclear arms race, and spends unaffordable sums on super-expensive nukes, it will remain vulnerable at the conventional level, as Kargil showed with a vengeance. So much for suraksha!

Take swadeshi. This was unconvincing even as an attempt to appropriate Gandhi’s slogan while denuding it of its emancipatory content and its pro-poor orientation. After Maharashtra’s BJP-Sena government cosied up with Enron, which it had earlier threatened to dump into the Arabian Sea, the slogan’s real meaning became clear. Today, even swadeshi’s pretence to self-reliance stands dropped. There is wholesale embrace of MNC-driven globalisation.

With this has come an attack on samata: income and regional disputes have widened in the past 17 months as never before. Even as the government gave the rich huge tax breaks, and real prices of luxury goods fell, the poor suffered greater deprivation, unemployment, and loss of consumption. Consumer prices, the real test of inflation, are likely to spurt further as soon as long-postponed price hikes (e.g. diesel) are levied. Social disparities have greatly widened under the NDA’s top-down policies.

As for shuchita, the less said the better after the sugar and wheat import scams, the telecom turnabout, and growing privatisation of infrastructural services. We now have an I & B minister who shamelessly hands over a prime Doordarshan contract to his own novice son. We also have Banana Republic-style deal-fixing. In Mumbai, for instance, the very person who headed a committee on flyovers was given the contract to build them! The PMO is deeply implicated in this Crony Capitalism. It has emerged as an independent (if shady) economic power centre. (It is another matter that it has also been used to settle the BJP’s intra-party disputes).

Perhaps the worst area of the BJP’s performance is in samrasta. Its rule has segmented this society as never before. Today, all of India’s hierarchical and reactionary attitudes are coming out in bilious forms. Our religious, ethnic and tribal minorities do not only feel threatened with domination. They are being subjected to atrocities—from Gujarat to Orissa, and from Haryana to Tamil Nadu. The culture of the dominant sub-groups in the majority community is being palmed off as “mainstream”, while all other cultures are being marginalised. Under the BJP’s majoritarian rule, this society now experiences its worst forms of cultural disunity and lack of cohesion. The promise of a riot-free and fear-free India now sounds not just hollow, but sinister.

This betrayal of the Famous Five Ss is inseparable from the BJP’s misgovernance and its communal agenda. Communalism is not just about discriminating against people on the basis of religion. It provides a cloak for, and means of rationalising, many injustices and inequities, including class and caste exploitation, gender discrimination, hierarchical domination of elite linguistic groups, and so on. We have thus had 17 months not just of a corrupt and venal government, but one that delights in further deepening India’s chasms.

Last year, the people of India—to be more accurate, a quarter of them—gave the BJP a chance in the hope that it would reform and “normalise” itself and move away from sectarian politics of identity to substantive issues. The BJP promised—and to some appeared—to be the Party of the Future. It has proved itself to be the opposite—an organisation which lacks a vision for the future, which has nothing to offer to this society. The BJP has already exhausted its novelty appeal. Worse, it has shown itself to be unworthy of trust, incapable of taking India forward, and of enthusing any section of the population barring its own coteries.

No wonder it has desperately tried to revive its so-called “hidden” agenda—of temple, Article 370, uniform civil code, etc. This too has earned it notoriety, disdain and ignominy. But we should not be fooled. The BJP has two agendas: the long-term, “hidden”, one; and a short-term agenda. It is wrong to think that the “hidden” agenda is the only dangerous one. Of course, it is dangerous. But its the short-term agenda, of weakening democracy, undermining institutions, spreading fear among the minorities, demoralising and harassing those working to empower the poor, and for social and gender justice, is equally pernicious as well as negative.

That is precisely why the BJP must not be condemned only for its long-term goal of “Hinduising” this society, even as praise is showered upon Mr Vajpayee for the un-hidden agenda. His un-hidden agenda can only pave the way for a fascist transformation of this society. In the short run too, it is pure poison for our democracy’s health. One can only hope that it is stoutly resisted and comprehensively defeated