The anointment of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as prime minister-designate should the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party win the looming general election of May 2014, is a denouement filled with dreadful implications which neither the reckless middle class which has rallied to his banner, nor the nation’s under-educated majority have adequately grasped. The belated misgivings of L.K. Advani, the eclipsed octogenarian leader of the BJP who seems to have some idea of the inevitable descent of the country into civil strife, fascism and dictatorship should the Modi-led BJP win, have been ignored by a narrowly-educated middle class and an intelligentsia which can’t see the wood for trees.
For all its faults and mutation into a grand coalition of political dynasties — according to writer Patrick French (India: A Portrait, 2011), 90 percent of Congress members in the incumbent Lok Sabha are scions of post-independence political families — its saving grace is that it has a secular tradition stretching back over a century. On the other hand, it’s incontrovertible that the prime intent and purpose of the BJP — the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu revivalist organisation committed to reversing the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan — is to end “appeasement” of the country’s Muslim minority and abolish community scriptural laws under which minorities are governed in matters of marriage, inheritance and worship.
Unapologetically majoritarian in its political philosophy, the RSS/BJP is committed to a uniform civil law and is opposed to affirmative action quotas for Muslims and other caste and religious minorities. It is also committed to the abolition of Article 370 of the Constitution which accords special status to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu & Kashmir whose accession to India in 1947 has been continuously disputed by nuclear-armed Pakistan.
The dangerous majoritarian political philosophy of the RSS/BJP is compounded by the abrasive personality and style of Modi, the three-term incumbent chief minister of the western seaboard state of Gujarat (pop.60 million) since 2001. During this period, which began with a callous anti-Muslim pogrom in which over 3,000 citizens were murdered by riotous mobs as the government stood idly by, Gujarat has become a crucible of fascist majoritarian politics — essentially an alliance of government and big business hostile to labour, civil rights groups, the media and minorities.
Clearly, as general election 2014 draws near, having to choose between the spoilt brats of the Congress kleptocracy and the plainly fascist BJP which will surely plunge the nation into a Kashmir-style low intensity civil war, slowing down all socio-economic development, is a cruel dilemma. Therefore it’s a matter of utmost importance that the country’s intelligentsia, which has had the benefit of real education, supports and proclaims several new political formations — Lok Satta, Aam Aadmi Party and Children First Party of India — struggling to save the country from the evil Congress, fascist BJP, and marauding family firms masquerading as political parties in the states. This is not the time to discharge the role of impartial observers.
Electorate needs education to vote for a new order
The shocking communal riots which engulfed the town of Muzaffarnagar (pop.3.5 million) and its surrounding districts in early September, claiming 40 lives and disrupting the livelihoods of over 50,000 people who have fled to refugee camps, have again exposed the deepening fault lines — repeatedly papered over by shallow analyses and futile moral exhortations of the country’s intelligentsia for the past six decades since independence. This ersatz intelligentsia, mostly products of the country’s shabby education system, and unschooled in cause and effect and sequence and consequence, routinely blames win-at-all-costs politicians in cahoots with Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists for stoking sectarian and identity politics and sparking communal conflagrations.
The inconvenient truth ignored by the educated middle class and co-opted intelligentsia, is that post-independence India’s national development effort has been a dismal failure. All pillar institutions of the republic — Parliament, bureaucracy, police, academia, industry and even the independent judiciary and media — are dysfunctional, disabled by sloth, pervasive corruption and unaccountability.
The Congress party which has ruled in New Delhi and most states for over 57 years since independence, is principally to blame for this dismal condition of the nation. The first mistake it made was to ignore the subcontinent’s vintage tradition of private enterprise and trade, and impose the inorganic public enterprise-dominated socialist development model upon free India. Secondly, it failed to accord top priority to universalising primary education immediately after independence which could have prevented the rapid growth of population, and compounded this egregious error by torpedoing the country’s birth control programme during the infamous Emergency (1975-77). Third, by imposing a rigorous licence-permit-quota regimen upon private enterprise, and choking the growth of the manuf-acturing sector, successive Congress governments not only reduced national productivity to rock-bottom level, but also created a huge army of certified but unemployable youth in India’s 7,900 cities and small towns.
Deprived of adequate shelter, living wage jobs, socialisation skills and forced by archaic customs to suffer sex segregation from young age, this growing urban underclass titillated by Bollywood and imbalanced by ubiquitous American pornography, is combustible and easily manipulated by amoral politicians practicing identity and religious politics for self-advancement.
As the nation braces for the general election of next summer, it’s important for the educated middle class, the media and intelligentsia to deeply reflect upon acts of omission and commission of the Congress and the opposition BJP committed to a socially disruptive majoritarian agenda, and acknowledge that a new republic has to be built from ground up. They need to become involved in educating the under-served electorate to vote for a new order.