The communal temperature in post-election India is heating up, and if unchecked could open a pandora’s box of religious strife and bedlam. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was presented a landslide victory for promising to re-calibrate the sputtering engine of economic growth and generate mass employment, there’s a clear and present danger that the Narendra Modi-led BJP/NDA government at the Centre will be blown off course by its lunatic fringe comprising the Hindu militant Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the majoritarian sangh parivar of which the BJP is a constituent unit.
Recently, RSS and BJP spokespersons have made aggressive hindutva assertions certain to sound offensive and cause alarm within the 150 million and 25 million-strong Muslim and Christian communities of the country. For instance, on August 10, while addressing a conclave of young cadres of the organisation, RSS chieftain Mohan Bhagwat felt it incumbent upon himself to express the viewpoint that in Hindustan, as India is commonly referred to in vernacular languages, people of all religious persuasions are essentially Hindu.
And on August 13, when Parliament was discussing the alarming incidents of communal riots across the country and in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh in particular — according to Union home ministry statistics, the total number of communal incidents countrywide in 2013 was 823 (23 percent higher than in 2012), resulting in the deaths of 133 people and injury to 2,269, apart from huge property damage — the BJP fielded Yogi Adityanath, a militant MP as its first speaker in the Lok Sabha. This saffron-clad monk against whom there are several pending cases for inciting religious hatred, seized the opportunity to warn minorities that if they don’t respect the majority community, they would “pay a heavy price”.
Against this backdrop of a rising wave of identity and communal politics, the silence of prime minister Modi who engineered the BJP’s smashing electoral victory, is not just intriguing, but deafening. It’s inconceivable that the PM is unaware that his reticence following incidents of inflammatory rhetoric and worse targeting minorities, is likely to be interpreted as approval, if not consent. Nor is it conceivable that Modi is oblivious that if the sangh parivar’s cultural nationalism is allowed to run riot, his party’s economic growth agenda which is dependent upon massive domestic and foreign investment, is certain to be derailed.
The prime minister should also entertain no illusions that minorities bashing in India will create fertile conditions for Islamic extremists active in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East to spread their poison in Indian society. In the circumstances, he must plainly and unequivocally condemn the provocations of Bhagwat and Adityanath. It should be obvious to Modi that his election-winning development agenda is in danger of being derailed by the loony fringe of the sangh parivar nursing historical grievances.
Inspirational address with a blindspot
By all yardsticks and precedents, prime minister Narendra Modi’s maiden Independence Day speech delivered from the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, was an inspirational performance, which has the potential to resuscitate the can-do entrepreneurial spirit of Indian society. Drawing inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi who accorded the highest priority to hygiene, sanitation and head and hands education, the reformist new PM made plain their connection with skills education, gender equality, tourism, foreign investment and poverty alleviation.
The PM’s path-breaking address with its emphasis on separate toilets for girl children in all schools is especially welcomed by the editors of EducationWorld, which for the past decade has been stridently advocating a Central government funded nationwide lib-lab-lav (library, laboratory and lavatories) programme to cover all Central, state and local government schools. Typically and foolishly, our comprehensive schema which would have required a modest expenditure (capital and maintenance provision) of Rs.42,750 crore was completely ignored by the Congress-led UPA-I and II governments.
This is a good time for the PMO (prime minister’s office) to extend the girls’ toilet programme to cover libraries and laboratories given the expenditure involved is less than 0.5 percent of GDP, an outlay which could easily be covered through sale of asset-rich non-performing public sector companies.
There were other statements of intent focused on the nuts and bolts of development in the PM’s address, which were a welcome departure from lofty resolutions of the past. Among them: the promise of enabling the poor to open bank accounts with bankruptcy insurance coverage of Rs.1 lakh, which makes sense to the vast majority of bottom-of-pyramid households; the overdue emphasis on employment-enabling skills education and reviving India’s manufacturing industry.
Although there’s no denying that India’s first post-independence born prime minister has his feet firmly on the ground with sensible socio-economic development priorities, his call for a ten-year moratorium on the divisive issues of caste and religion to enable the populace to get on with the task of nation building, was too broad and general to inspire confidence. Curiously, the PM seems unaware that if unchecked, the majoritarian triumphalism and inflammatory rhetoric of the RSS, VHP and the sangh parivar — Hindu cultural organisations which are intimately connected with the BJP — could torpedo the sensible national development priorities he outlined on August 15.
India’s new prime minister needs to wake up to the reality that maintenance of law and order and provision of speedy justice are vital preconditions of any and all national development programmes in our uniquely plural society.