Saturday, May 09, 2009
Hindu rate of BJP growth - By Shekhar Gupta - The Indian Express
ABOUT THE 800 POUND GUERRILLA IN THE ROOM THAT IS INVISIBLE TO BOTH BJP AND CONGRESS
http://www.indianexpress.com/
Hindu rate of BJP growth
Shekhar GuptaPosted: Saturday , May 09, 2009 at 2301 hrs IST
You can drive around the country in the course of this five-week election, and the one thing on which you will find remarkable unanimity among the thinking classes is that this is an “issue-less” election. Or, that in the absence of a real pan-national issue, the election is being fought entirely on local concerns, as if this was municipal or panchayat election by another name. It is tough to argue against this yawn-inspiring view. The failure of both national parties, the Congress and the BJP, to build a pan-national contest is phenomenal, and disappointing at a time when voter fatigue is increasing with small parties — the spoilers and spoil-hunters of split verdicts. This failure has reduced the leaders of both parties to being like admirals or generals who command vast fleets and armies, and have great ambitions, but have wound up fighting in penny pockets, for minor pickings.
If we continue, seeking parallels in military science (because electoral politics is war by another name, only more vicious), our politics, for exactly two decades now, has been a kind of stalemated, stationary trench warfare. The unlocking of the Babri Masjid, and the shilanyas of Ram Janma-bhoomi in the last months of Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership, made secularism the centre-point of our natural politics, particularly in the Hindi heartland; combined with a Mandal-ignited OBC surge, it led to the destruction of the Congress in the entire Gangetic plain — even today, it can barely hope to touch 20 in India’s most politicised zone, from Uttarakhand to West Bengal, out of a total of 167. The BJP was able to harvest this for some time, as the Ram Temple fervour overwhelmed caste. But it declined shortly thereafter, as the promise of building a grand new temple for Lord Ram did not quite have the oomph that the idea of destroying an old mosque did. As history, ever since man discovered God, shows, destroying has always held much greater sex-appeal than building. So the Ram Janma-bhoomi-Babri site has remained frozen in time since 1992, and so has our politics. This new polarisation is loosely defined as secular versus communal, or who can afford to join hands with the BJP and who cannot. Its corollary is that it enables parties with total ideological, philosophical and even political conflicts to come together on the principle of secularism or anti-BJP-ism. This is the now-fossilised state of our politics, and that is why the boredom, issuelessness, sameness and indecisive verdicts. There has to be a reason why the same voters who give us such utterly clear verdicts in the states give us such muddled ones nationally.
The BJP would say this analysis is simplistic, even hypocritical. They will say: the secular-communal discourse is just a camouflage for a large number of political parties effectively handing out to Muslim voters a veto on who can rule India. Any party that needs (and has a realistic chance of getting) the Muslim vote, will “blindly” oppose the BJP, they say. That is why, according to them, the BJP and the NDA have to build their politics in a field with a maximum of 325 out of a House of 543, since at least five parties — the Congress, the Left, the SP, the RJD and the NCP — can have nothing to do with them. That is the line of untouchability in our politics. Or perhaps the line that separates the rival trenches, and political mobility, therefore, is confined to hopping from one trench to another, mostly on the same side — barring some small, serial defectors like the Gowdas, Paswan, Ramadoss and Ajit Singh, the entirely mobile operators blessed with total ideological fungibility.
You can feel sorry for the BJP. But this is a problem for the BJP to fix. No political party can grow, even survive, by only feeling sorry for itself. Beginning in 1989, the polarisation had helped the BJP. By 1998, it had peaked. It was for the party’s vastly experienced leadership to read the writing on the wall. And probably it did, but did not quite have the conviction, the fibre to lead a change, an evolution that would have repositioned the BJP as a party of the centre-right rather than a party of the Hindu Right.
Vajpayee, the BJP leader most respected by the minorities, tried, but lost his nerve at the most decisive moment, a moment that, if seized, would have placed him among India’s great statesmen for ever, in fact our first real statesman of the Right, or may be the second, if you place Sardar Patel somewhere there. This moment was the killings of Gujarat in 2002 — on the flight to Goa, for the party national executive meeting, when he had to decide on sacking Modi after his “Raj-dharma” speech. But he blinked. In the process, he diminished himself, and his party, and gave its opponents Modi as their second rallying point after Ayodhya.
That Advani tried to address the same ideological isolation subsequently, with his statement on Jinnah, underlines the fact that, deep down, political wisdom does exist while the will and conviction are lacking. He has tried to re-position his party closer to the centre in a slightly more complex, but fascinating manner. The alliance with the Akalis in Punjab and with Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, he thought, had helped move his party to the centre; and while the Muslims may still not vote for it, if he could simply persuade them not to treat the BJP as their permanent enemy — that needed to be defeated by voting tactically against it all over the country — he could change its politics fundamentally. But neither had he prepared his party and its ideological mentors, nor had he the audacity and conviction to bash on regardless. So this break-out from the trenches remained short, half-hearted and a failure. Yet again, Advani and his BJP blew an opportunity presented by Varun Gandhi’s speeches. Imagine if, instead of rushing to his defence and demanding a forensic examination of the DVDs, Advani stated unequivocally that he abhorred such language and politics and dropped Varun as his candidate? In one stroke, it would have brought his party closer to the centre, given it wider acceptability, and enhanced his stature in a manner that no website or ad-campaign, howsoever brilliant, could ever have done.
Indian democracy is not unique in having to deal with such a divisive issue of history and legacy. Race and segregation was a divide that determined American politics for a long time. But the Republicans cut their losses in the course of time and so it ceased to be the central issue. Surely, many more Blacks still vote for the Democrats but the Republicans totally dumped the race issue, giving America its most prominent Black public leaders in Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — and the Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas. And while the larger majority of voters of colour were still on the “other” side, and there was no foreseeable prospect of those “vote banks” shifting, remember how even George Bush (junior) dealt with Trent Lott, the Senate Republican leader who, in a 2002 fund-raiser to celebrate Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday, made remarks that appeared to raise the race-issue again. (He said “problems” could have been avoided had Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid succeeded; Thurmond had based that campaign on a racial segregation platform.) Bush dumped Lott immediately, and two weeks later he had lost his job.
The beauty of democratic politics is that such opportunities do arise every now and then. Smart leaders seize them, particularly when it is an opportunity to rectify fundamental imbalances in the national political debate. Vajpayee had his big moment once, with Modi; Advani has had his, twice, with Jinnah and Varun. But the BJP, and Indian politics, are now paying the price for those long marchers having blown all three. And that is why their politics, or India’s, remains frozen. That is what will give at least three other possible “fronts” space to try setting up a “secular coalition” after May 16, the only factor overriding all enmities and contradictions among likely new partners being the “exclusion of the BJP.”
Until the leaders of the BJP accept the inevitability, and the wisdom, of moving closer to the ideological centre-right, and of growing out of the fantasy of one day reaping the harvest of Hindu resurgence, there will be, to steal the words of one of its own stalwarts (Jagmohan), no unfreezing this political turbulence. Of course, the Congress too has had its failures and lost opportunities to break out of this low-150s stagnation. But let that be an argument, a sermon for another day.
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Labels: About the 800 pound Gorilla in the room invisible to both BJP and Congress, BJP, Congress
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Why CPI (M) is better placed than Congress or BJP to lead a stable coalition at the center and secure India? - By Ghulam Muhammed
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Why CPI (M) is better placed than Congress or BJP to lead a stable coalition at the center and secure India?
The times have changed. No single party, whether they call itself, national or regional, can on their own get a majority in the Parliamentary elections to form a government of its own. And the way, coalition partners of UPA and NDA has gained in their respective constituencies; it is natural that they would bargain to get the best positioning with their share of contribution of seats to the central coalition.
Compared to Congress, BJP is more pliable to accede to the demands of its prospective coalition partners, but it has such a checkered record of its ideological excesses, that it has lost trust of even its old allies.
Congress under Manmohan Singh is run like a dictatorship imposed on the coalition. Manmohan Singh, a widely believed choice of the USA, maneuvered into the post of Prime Ministership, with hardly any sense of accountability to the people of India, however much he may assume that he is working for the best of his country. His democratic credentials are highly questionable, both, at electoral level and at the executive level, with his haughty style of working with keeping all his moves to himself with the steely notion that he is not answerable to anybody; least to his coalition partners.
He has an Idea of India and he has every right to have an Idea of India, just like any other citizen of India. But at his level, he has to share his views with his partners, his people at large and only after getting their full consensus he can make major changes in the direction in which he proposes to take his country along.
He has miserably failed in that quarter and with his public spate with the Left and even Right, he has become a big liability to any coalition, be that Congress, BJP or Third Front. He had been a career bureaucrat and like all bureaucrats, he loves to be left untouched, unquestioned and unaccountable in his private domain. That cannot win friends and influence people.
On the other hand, his party, The Indian National Congress was gripped with sudden panic of being left in the lurch in 2009 elections and had gambled to get its old glory by going it alone without seat sharing arrangements with any of its UPA partners.
It had no time to realise that in each of the state in which it is pitting its candidates against its potential coalition partners, it is getting the kind of reputation that it could have better avoided in these days of coalition politics. In each state, the feeling of sons of soil is getting heightened mainly due to the callous and insensitive handling by the so-called ‘National Political Parties’. The general feeling is that the High Command does no know what is best. The logical conclusion is for the regionals to be allowed to stake their claim on a national government, without becoming a vassal to the so-called ‘National Parties’.
With such a scenario now unfolding, CPI (M) is the only party that could find common ground with other secular regionals, without becoming a threat to them in their respective state. It may suit CPI (M) to remain confined to the state it is ruling and leave the entire country to its potential coalition partners. At the center it will have to rule by consensus. A public commitment by CPI (M) would ensure that people will start evaluating the gains that they will enjoy by getting the Third Front into the saddle.
This will eventually shift the national focus from secularism v/s communalism to issues of welfare and development, so dear to the people within their own immediate enclave of existence. If Dilli door ast, let Delhi be far!
Besides, CPI(M) has the best credentials to protect the nation from the dangers from the north, without getting under the yoke of US/UK/Israel axis.
www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.
Labels: BJP, Congress, CPI (M) better placed than Congress and BJP to secure India, Third Front, US/UK/Israel Axis danger to India
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Shadows of Violence Cling to Indian Politician - By Somini Sengupta - The New York Times
Shadows of Violence Cling to Indian Politician
Mr. Modi campaigning last week in Gujarat State. He was chief minister during a deadly episode of Hindu-Muslim violence in 2002.
AHMEDABAD, India — Narendra Modi, India’s most incendiary politician, is trying to cast himself as the vanguard of India’s modern industrial future. The ghosts of this city’s savage past, though, are refusing to leave his side.
A young supporter of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party wore a mask with the likeness of Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat State.
Mr. Modi, 59, is the thrice-elected chief minister of the western state of Gujarat. On his watch, this city witnessed one of the worst episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence in the history of independent India: in the spring of 2002, mostly over three days, 1,180 people were killed across the state. Most were Muslims. Mr. Modi’s administration was accused of doing little to stop the fury and on occasion, abetting it.
On Monday, India’s Supreme Court, in its strongest move yet, ordered a special police team to investigate Mr. Modi’s role in the alleged conspiracy to attack Muslims.
With national elections under way, Mr. Modi is the biggest crowd-puller for India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party. And while party hierarchy means he is not the B.J.P.’s candidate for prime minister this year, he is positioning himself for the top slot in the next race.
On the campaign trail, he is sardonic, often churlish, always theatrical. At one rally, he compared the ruling Indian National Congress, the nation’s oldest party, to an aging woman. At another, he assailed the incumbent prime minister, Manmohan Singh of Congress, as so “weak” that he ought to get a medical check-up; Mr. Singh had recently recovered from heart bypass surgery.
At a third, stabbing the air with his finger, he taunted Mr. Singh for turning to the United States for support in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November, which India said were the work of a Pakistan-based militant group.
“O-baaaa-maaa,” he whined, referring to President Obama. “O-baaa-maaa. Our neighbor has come and attacked us. Do something!” The crowd lapped it up, hollering, clapping and imitating his cry of “O-baaa-maa.”
Mr. Modi’s success offers a window into the B.J.P.’s delicate balancing act: It has to hold on to its radical Hindu support base even as it pitches itself as a force of prosperity and security. His rise also suggests a turning point in Indian politics, in which voters weigh what matters more: identity issues, like faith and caste, or practical issues, like electricity, water and roads. Opinion polls show that Hindutva, or Hinduness, has diminishing appeal.
With a national profile clearly in mind, Mr. Modi has assiduously sought to reinvent himself from a scruffy mascot of Hindu nationalism to a decisive corporate-style administrator. His talking points these days are Gujarat’s double-digit economic growth, private seaports and round-the-clock electricity in Ahmedabad, a booming western city that Gandhi once called home. He wears business suits to business meetings, instead of homespun tunics. He still lampoons the urban, English-speaking elite, but he is also honing his English skills.
His biggest coup has involved the Tata Nano, the world’s least expensive car. Last fall, Mr. Modi persuaded Tata Motors to relocate its Nano factory to government-owned land not far from here. The company had been buffeted by protests over land acquisition in another state.
Soon afterward, several of India’s most prominent industrialists gathered in Gujarat for a meeting and declared Mr. Modi, a former tea shop manager, fit to be a future prime minister.
Swapan Dasgupta, a columnist who advises the B.J.P. on strategy, described him as India’s “aggressive modernizer.”
The B.J.P “promises growth, good governance, development and security.” But it also returns to the party’s original ideological pillars, from pledging to build a Hindu temple on the site of a razed 16th-century mosque to resurrecting a preventive detention law that Muslims said had been unfairly applied to them.
Rarely does Mr. Modi make overt appeals to faith. He does not have to.
“Modi has learned that you have to do development to get re-elected, you have to have a secular image if you want to be prime minister,” said Ajay Umat, editor of a Gujarati-language daily newspaper, Divya Bhaskar, who has known Mr. Modi for more than 20 years.
Mr. Modi has also learned, Mr. Umat said, that his core Hindu supporters will not easily forget his original incarnation as their “protector.”
That image was sealed in 2002, after a train ferrying Hindus was set on fire by Muslims in a town called Godhra, killing 59 people on board and prompting Hindu mob attacks onMuslims across the state. The mobs stabbed, raped and set their victims on fire; they burned homes and businesses. Mr. Modi has never apologized for what happened. (His office did not respond to numerous requests for an interview with The New York Times.)
His admirers say he has moved on. They credit him for removing red tape for business, improving the state’s road networks, and cracking down on lawlessness and petty corruption. His detractors call him an autocrat. (Sonia Gandhi, the president of Congress, once called him “a merchant of death.”)
If and when Mr. Modi becomes the standard-bearer for his party, Indian voters will have to decide whether they can overlook what is called the “2002 stigma” in favor of the “aggressive modernizer.” His critics hope they will not.
“This man can’t represent India, either as a civilization or as a nation,” said Shiv Visvanathan, a sociology professor and one of Mr. Modi’s critics. “He can represent a part. He can never represent the whole. That is the sanity of Indian democracy.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Modi, the past has been hard to cast off. A police team appointed by the Supreme Court has begun to pry open several cases from 2002, making fresh arrests.
Maya Kodnani, Mr. Modi’s former minister for women and child development, was arrested on charges of helping a Hindu mob attack two nearby Muslim enclaves. She is awaiting trial on accusations of arming the mob with kerosene cans, which were then used to set people on fire. All told, the mob killed 106 people on a single day, including seven members of Abdul Majid Mohammed Usman Sheikh’s family.
Mr. Sheikh, 56, who came to the courthouse on the morning of the arrest in late March, called it the beginning of justice for the dead. Among them were his pregnant wife, three sons and three daughters. He carried their pictures in a plastic shopping bag. He said he felt “a little satisfied.”
Labels: BJP, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Muslims in Gujarat riots, Muslims in Indian politics
Sunday, April 19, 2009
India's all-important Muslim vote : By Suvojit Bagchi - BBC News Delhi
India's all-important Muslim vote | ||||||||
The Indian government's "war against terror" may cost the Congress party dearly in the election. Arrests and alleged extrajudicial killings of Muslim youths have angered many in the Islamic community. "People in power have branded us as terrorists and used us as a vote bank, this cannot go on," said the all-powerful cleric of Delhi's Jama Masjid mosque, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, in a recent press conference. Speaking about the deaths of two Muslim students allegedly at the hands of police in South Delhi's Muslim area last October, Mr Bukhari said the Muslim community "wants justice". 'Safety and security' This sense of injustice has resulted in the formation of new Muslim political parties over recent months.
These parties believe in Indian parliamentary democracy and say they are working to "strengthen" it. The party manifestos unanimously emphasise the "safety and security" of all communities, especially Muslims. "The security of Muslims is one big issue, as after every blast in India a series of arrests of Muslim youths takes place," said a spokesperson for the influential All India Muslim Personal Law Board. Muslim men were "systematically killed" in routine police encounters, he alleged. Muslims comprise more than 13% of India's population and many are aggrieved that proportionately they only have about half that much representation in parliament. More than two dozen Muslim political parties, big and small, are contesting these elections - almost double the figure of the last election. The prominent players are the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF), Ulema Council and Indian Peace Party in Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Muslim Munettra Khazhagam in Tamil Nadu, the People's Democratic Council in West Bengal and veterans like the Muslim League and Indian National League in Kerala, the Democratic Secular Party in Bihar and the Majlis-e Ittihad al-Muslimin in Andhra Pradesh.
Interestingly, even the staunchest supporters of these parties do not believe they are going to win. "Our primary aim is to erode the vote of the Congress party and then to win a few seats," says Buranuddin Qasmi, an election analyst of the AUDF. Meanwhile, many Muslims are questioning the logic behind the hasty launch of such parties. They argue that a party like the Ulema Council will not even be able to emerge as a minor player because it lacks proper planning and goals. Statistics show the parties that manage to win the votes of low caste people along with the Muslim vote bank have a strong chance of winning. Since India's independence from British rule, Congress has been getting a sizeable chunk of Muslim votes at national level, largely because Muslims felt they had to prove their loyalty to India in early post-partition days, experts say. In India, the Muslim League and its president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, are held responsible for dividing India and creating Pakistan. Muslims who stayed in India have traditionally supported Congress since independence "to prove their loyalty". Empowered Yogendra Yadav, the noted political commentator, feels that Muslim parties have "come of age". "Fifty years into independence, the trauma of partition prevented Muslim political parties from conceiving a politics of their own," he says.
"But they are slowly getting out of it. In the last decade or so they have been speaking for themselves - a very positive sign for Muslims as well as for democracy," Mr Yadav says. The figures seem to support his claims - the proliferation of new political parties means that no one party is expected to get more than 60% of Muslim votes. But Congress believes Muslims cannot be empowered by a Muslim party alone. "Muslim parties have traditionally voted for Congress and will continue to do so, as they know only a majority party like Congress with secular credentials can empower them," says Imran-ur Rehman Kidwai, the chief of the party's Minority Cell. He also brushed aside the fact that there is any kind of "insecurity among Muslim youth", calling it a "non-issue". But whatever Mr Kidwai says, in at least one state a Muslim party is creating serious trouble for Congress. The Islamic vote in Assam makes up more more than 20% of Muslim votes and appears to be making forays into Congress bastions. The Hindu nationalist BJP - which Muslims tend to vote against - could win in the state. But that has not stopped the AUDF from running anti-Congress campaigns.
"Enough of that - whenever Muslims vote against Congress, it is said to be in favour of the BJP. Can't we ever raise our voice because of right-wing parties like the BJP?" the AUDF's election analyst, Buranuddin Qasmi, asks. The real Achilles' heel for Congress is the Sachar Report - a prime ministerial committee that recommended several measures to improve the living conditions of Muslims in India. Initiated by Congress and tabled in parliament in 2006, the report has become central to the Indian Muslim community and is often quoted to voice their grievances. During election campaigns, Muslim parties have pointed out that none of the recommendations of this report have been implemented. "Congress and Manmohan Singh may have done a commendable job in commissioning a report of this magnitude. But the minority affairs ministry has done literally nothing to implement it, with the exception of giving scholarships to Muslim students," Dr Abu Saleh Shariff, member-secretary of the Sachar Committee Report, told the BBC. However, Imran Kidwai says that 19 out of 22 of its recommendations have been implemented. "Muslims will vote for Congress," he confidently predicted. | ||||||||
Our primary aim is to erode the vote of Congress and then to win a few seats 
Labels: AUDF, BBC, BJP, Congress, India's Muslim vote
