When India’s Election Commission asked the BJP to explain why it should not be derecognized as a national political party for producing a CD calculated to inflame “anti-Muslim communal passions,” it struck a blow for the most fundamental of the values free India has sought to build itself on and the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, died for — secularism and hate for none. Of all the nations that regained their self when European colonialism was rolled back in the mid-20th century, perhaps India alone rode to freedom without unleashing forces of hate against anyone — even the empire that had enslaved it. When its first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru, announced India’s awakening to freedom, he spoke on behalf of the India of all faiths, castes, and languages. The founding fathers wrote that into the constitution, making discrimination a crime against the nation.
While the people of India — educated and illiterate, rich and poor, Muslim, Hindu, Christian and Sikh — overwhelmingly endorsed this inclusive India, there were always a petty-minded few, of all communities, who could not reconcile themselves to this India of equals. Worshippers of power, they tried to exploit facts and myths of history to keep hate alive. Copying the tactics perfected by fascists and Nazis, they too spoke in the name of reviving ancient glory to misguide the unwary. The Bharatiya Janata Party has the distinction of having inherited this philosophy of hate. It is the third bottle packaging the same old stuff — after Hindu Maha Sabha and Jana Sangh failed to find takers.
Those like Rajnath Singh and Lal Krishna Advani, who ask in outraged indignation how a party that once ruled India could be accused of such a thing, are hoping that the public has forgotten how the party came to rule India in the first place. It reached for power standing on the pulled-down domes of Babri Masjid and on the piles of bodies of Hindus and Muslims cut down in the aftermath. The defeat in the next election showed that Muslim baiting was a double-edged sword that could cut both ways. Now that poll surveys show growing disenchantment with the Congress-led ruling coalition, the BJP is smelling power again and wants to add to it the intoxicant of fresh human blood.
The Election Commission should investigate the matter and, if the BJP leadership was involved, take the action that the law prescribes for such violations. If derecognition is the punishment, derecognition it should be. Of course, that will not stop the spread of the poison. The BJP’s much-transmigrated soul can retransmigrate into yet another body and register itself as a new political party. But secular India will have delivered its message. That is more important than worrying about a bunch of self-servers wriggling out of a mess.
India, acknowledged as a candidate for the top table in the councils of the world, cannot afford to deliver itself into the hands of petty men whose vision of India’s future is Iraq’s present. This is the message the BJP and all other hate merchants — not all of them Hindus — should get.
