| Election 2009 - The BJP got what it deserved - III |  |  |  |
Abandoning Kurukshetra before the war is won
The BJP’s loss in 2004 cast a pall of gloom over Hindu nationalists; for some of us even in 2004, the gloom came with intense anger. Five years later, the BJP’s loss in 2009 has caused more anger than gloom because five years is a long time
Just so did Murli Manohar Joshi react on television two days ago when asked why he thought the BJP failed so miserably at the hustings. Joshi, who prides himself on his scholarship, was so eager to throw his hat into the ring and succeed to the throne as secular leader of a secular party, that he failed to recall history to mind when he declared solemnly that the BJP leadership alone was to blame and the BJP lost because it had not fielded Muslims in significant numbers!
And just so did Arun Jaitley forget his party’s history. The Times of India carried in February 2009, ahead of the elections, answers from different political parties to the question, “Who does your party represent”? Like Gandhi before him, who said the Congress was not a Hindu party and did not represent Hindu interests, Jaitley, deliberately choosing to forget the historical context in which the RSS and the Jana Sangh came into being answered, “BJP represents the common man, the underprivileged, the Dalit, minorities, agriculturists as well as industrialists. Despite the Congress’ efforts to brand BJP as a Hindu party and malign us as communal, more and more Muslims are coming to the party fold. Isn’t it enough indication to prove that ours is truly a secular party”? The BJP had metamorphosed into a grotesque imitation of Gandhi’s Congress.
The Congress party, controlled by the iron fist of Sonia Gandhi was not described as a creature of colonial intent for nothing. The Sachar Committee, like the Minto-Morley ‘reforms’ aimed at empowering the Muslims on all fronts. Aurobindo then called it “encouraging Mahomeddan rowdyism”. This was communal politics of the most brazen kind; to make sure that the Hindus got the message loud and clear, Manmohan Singh pronounced that Muslims had the first right to all resources in the country.
All political parties, the BJP included, have courted the Abrahamic minorities because irrespective of their actual numbers or population percentage, they constitute a decisive vote-bank.
This minority vote-bank could have been rendered ineffective only by Hinduising the election agenda. Speaking for the Abrahamic minorities was ‘secular’ while speaking for Hindus was ‘communal’.
Farooq Abdullah, the arch communalist, in whose body there is not a drop of secular blood, former Chief Minister of a state whose state constitution refuses to accept secularism even in principle, a state which with its peculiar and Islamised electoral arrangement will not allow Hindus or Buddhists to become Chief Minister, hailing from a state whose jihadis genocided and threw out all Hindus from the Kashmir Valley, without batting an eyelid, when asked to comment on the election results, declared deadpan – the people of India have voted for secularism. This Sunni Muslim in whose state a Hindu cannot become a Chief Minister openly expresses his fierce ambition to be the President of this Hindu-majority nation.
The country’s political discourse defines secularism in practice as being uncompromisingly anti-Hindu, which makes Hindu interests and Abrahamic minority interests a zero sum game. It was so under Nehruvian secularism and it continues to remain so in Nehru-Gandhian colonial rule.
The BJP’s fall was imminent because it entered the political arena without a commitment to Hindu rajya to protect the Hindu rashtra. It captured power with the Hindu vote and then kicked the Hindus in their teeth. The BJP kicked the ladder that lifted it up. It was expected of the BJP to –
- Reclaim PoK
- Annex Bangladesh
- End separatism in J&K by de-legitimising the state constitution; Article 370 would have disappeared automatically
- Check the influx of Bangladeshi Muslims
- Stop all foreign funds for NGOs
- Halt the uncontrolled mushrooming of churches, prayer houses and madarasas
- Ban religious conversion altogether
- Bring in a central legislation to free all Hindu temples from government control
- Ban cow slaughter and protect cattle wealth
To make sure the BJP was not given the time to go back to its Hindu agenda, the UPA and the hands that pull the UPA strings, threw one red herring after another under the BJP nose. First they ran mindlessly behind the Volcker Report, then they ran behind the Mitrokhin Report, and then they ran behind the invisible Ram Setu.
The BJP was like several animal rights activists I know; they will not lift a finger to put a little crow back in its nest, nor feed the street dog or the cow at the gate; but they will form a human chain to stop killing of the distant whale or the seals in the Antarctic.
Now, as always, Hindus of this nation had been betrayed and let down only by their leaders. A large measure of the blame for the BJP’s fall has to be laid at the RSS door.
