The Waking Serpent

The conflicting statements made by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last week reflect the deep crisis that has overtaken the parliamentary wing of the BJP and threatens very soon to engulf the nation. On Friday the 15th, he severely criticised the VHP's attempt to launch a 'Vijay' rath yatra from Godhra, backed the EC's decision to stop it and took members of the organisational wing of his party, notably BJP president Venkaiah Naidu and spokesman Arun Jaitley, to task for their attacks on chief election commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh. Yet, a day later, he asserted he was prepared to campaign for his party in Gujarat and expressed his belief that the party would return to power.

Precisely what message was he trying to send? That Narendra Modi and the BJP deserve to win but the VHP does not? Is such a distinction even remotely feasible? Or is Vajpayee running with the hare and hunting with the hounds? Although that is almost certainly not his intention, one is forced to conclude, with deep regret, that that is what he has ended up doing.

The truth is that while it is possible to draw a distinction between the BJP—which is a member of a 24-party ruling coalition at the Centre wedded to defending India's secular constitution—and the VHP with its goal to destroy this constitution, the distinction cannot be drawn in Gujarat. To all intents and purposes the VHP and Modi are one and the same. It was Modi who set the stage for confrontation between the Constitution and Hindutva by giving the Gujarat government's endorsement to a state-wide bandh called by the VHP after the Godhra outrage. This made it impossible for the Gujarat police to round up known VHP and Bajrang Dal troublemakers on February 27 and 28, as was done by every other neighbouring state. That set the stage for the horrifically brutal massacre of innocent Muslims that followed.

It was also Modi who saw in the Hindu anger over Godhra an opportunity to win the next election in the state. This led him to protect each and every VHP activist whom the police picked up for instigating or taking part in the riots, even if this meant punishing police and district officers who had done their duty.

It was Modi who fed the rankling, unsatiated anger of the 'Hindu' mobs after the army entered Gujarat's major cities, by making calculatedly unsympathetic remarks about the Muslims and accusing them of having brought their slaughter down on their own heads. It was Modi who then tried to, and partially succeeded in, advancing the date of the next state election to take advantage of this anger.

It was Modi who kicked off his poll campaign with gaurav (Hindu pride!) yatras in which he spared no opportunity to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment. But during the yatra Modi developed an even more deadly political platform. Gujarat, he has said over and over again, is under attack from the national and, therefore by default, the English-speaking media, the 'pseudo-secular' elite that runs it, the large cities where they live and the rest of India that nourished it. Modi has attempted to turn all of these into objects of Gujarati, 'Hindu', ethno-nationalist hate. He is thus attempting to fuse some of the worst features of the Indian psyche—religious intolerance, ethnic chauvinism, provincialism and populism—into a platform against plural secularism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism and modernity.

Modi, in short, has metamorphosed into the precise Hindu counterpart of Osama bin Laden. He's relatively well educated, urban and, in a small-town kind of way, modern. But he has deliberately turned his back on modernity in the accepted, benign sense that's enshrined in the Constitution. Instead, he's posing an alternative modernity built out of an inferiority complex towards western cosmopolitanism and an alternative way of life that's in some twisted sense 'purified' of its Muslim, Christian and western elements.

If Modi and the BJP win the Gujarat elections, as opinion polls suggest they are likely to do, it'll not be simply because of Hindu anger over Godhra, but because of the deeper and darker feelings of inferiority, provincialism and ethnic chauvinism that he will have succeeded in tapping. This sleeping serpent that Modi is trying to awaken is capable of swallowing the India that Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru tried to build, in a single gulp. It, therefore, poses a more deadly threat to the future of India than any that we have been able to imagine so far.

If the BJP wins in Gujarat, the stage will be set for a political battle that will dwarf the battle of Kurukshetra. Nine more states will go to the polls towards the end of 2003. Among these will be the crucial Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi, where the BJP directly faces the Congress. Ambitious younger elements in the BJP, like Jaitley, have already sensed that Modi may have pulled together something far more potent than simple communal animosity and are preparing to jettison time-honoured and more moderate leaders like Vajpayee and Advani for the likes of Modi and VHP general secretary Praveen Togadia. These electoral battles will enable the metamorphosing BJP to sharpen its new weapons for the nation-wide battle in 2004.

The antidote to Modi's poison is neither universal condemnation nor sole reliance on the secular institutions like the courts and the EC. It's to remind Hindus all over India, as Swami Vivekananda did barely a century ago, that their religion is not only secular in its essence, but quintessentially modern in as much as it automatically separates the church from the state and makes salvation the business of the individual. Perhaps the time has come for all secular parties to stop defining secularism in terms of agnosticism and seek sustenance from Hinduism itself.