The Congress led opposition has failed to make out who or what had hit them so hard from behind in the last elections.EVMs,last minute sops, communal or any other ignoble and malicious intrigue. It is a matter that remains unresolved like a nightmare that might return to disturb at night. So leaving this problem pending they go into bouts of furious shadow-boxing in Parliament.
Vice-President sagely shakes his head over the continued disruption of parliamentary proceedings,as if the legitimate proceedings of Parliament were only steamrolling over the most valid questions and objections raised by opposition. The objections and questions thar are being brushed aside are on the explosive case against Adanis’ corrupt deals in an American court.It is undoubtedly material for prompt and thorough examination by anti-corruption agencies of the government and lucrative copy for news media.But its political dividend now is zero.
And what do common people make of it? Unlike the worthy knights in Parliament bracing for their gallant jousts,people seem only faintly interested.All this appears to them like a tournament of all-in wrestling to a meek office-goer.After all bribery is their common fate to which they are subject for almost every major serious service from public authorities throughout life.They were fed on news that Congress leaders were rolling in unearned money.Today they hear that BJP leaders have not fallen behind.So what is there in it to fuss about it so much?
And as they too get some odd packet of currency in lieu of their votes or applause at a mass meeting,higher ups also earn some extra income ,only much fatter. Will these breathless bouts of brawling,those rounds of wrestling with marshalls lead to any improvement in their lot?That seems hardly likely.So let them go on with the grappling and wrestling.But the people mind their own business which is getting more desperate as time wears on.
There is going to be the customary response to this dismal scenario.’Oh,but when the people are conscious they will act right.’ What does ‘being conscious’ mean? Is it understanding that things are in bad shape and the BJP government is largely responsible for it?If so,people know it in their bones.No.Being conscious means the real reasons and that the BJP government’s role is only part of it.And once people realize it they also realize that there is no way of getting out of this mess except by overthrowing the entire set of causes that have brought the country to this pass.They thus get ready to act.
Therefore one might as well conclude that our people are not conscious now.They had woken up to the grave danger to their lives and their prospects and acted,handing down to the BJP its first setback to an apparently irresistible offensive. Thanks to a complacent leadership crowing over this feat they had relapsed to a deep slumber once again.
How had they been awoken in the first place?By action that had stirred them and forced them out into the streets and bound them together into a massive human tide.It had been,and I don’t hesitate to repeat it here,Rahul Gandhi’s innovative initiative the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ to begin with.
But it is a mistake to think that he alone with indomitable spirit and sturdy legs running up the miles that aroused and inspired people to follow him like children following the Pied Piper of Hamelin.He lent an ear to the people,listening to their grievances,anxieties and fears and their pent-up fury at the horror of their daily frustrations. He had listened with sincere sympathy and a generous outlook.Civil Society groups joined him in an act of penance,for they too had failed to arouse the nation.Now there was hope in everyone’s face.The edifice of NAFRAT was to be pulled down.Karnataka elections were buoyed up to some extent by this tide of an awakened nation.
Then something quite different happened.Gandhi went on his periodic lectures to explain the meaning of it all to the world.The moribund organizations at home creakingly rose to their feet and began to push people back to assert their primacy.Parties began discussing seat-allotment and who might be the face of the opposition alliance.And the people who had gained courage and fighting spirit slowly lost them and returned to their private cocoons of self-interest.What had been THEIR struggle to liberate the country had become the heroic accomplishment of Rahul Gandhi and his minions.Thanks to the innate bourgeois propensity to seek and grab power,and the usual organized campaign to garner it for a few,a great movement that had poured out into channels that formed eventually a heaving tide thinned into a trickle and then lost itself in a desert.
Bharat Jodo was not taken into every nook and cranny of the country.It was turned into a symbol to be carried aloft all over the country to be worshipped like a graven image.People were expected to gawk at it and worship it.Some did too,but largest numbers slunk back into their homes. As people retired into the usual absorption in divergent private concerns to the abandonment of the public cause,the enemy found ample room to play upon those divergent private interests,hopes, fears and fancies.It was a past master in such arts.
Meanwhile the main actors basked in glory,tightened the loose ties in organization and went on to do shadow-boxing in a Parliament that had lost its influence if not its relevance.
Let us draw back a little for a panoramic view of the last decade.
Thanks to the gradual but unchecked decay of Congress rotten by corruption,lure of power and money,and mainly by precipitate loss of ideological commitment to the people,Congress had in the prelude to its fall a smart trouble-shooter who showed an unexpected leaning towards RSS just before retiring to the wings.
It had grown immense but flaccid, terrified by people’s support to Anna Hazare’s crusade against corruption.Remember the farce of two senior Ministers attending airport to whisk Baba Ramdev of Coronil fame away from the Anna Hazare jamboree and given the slip by the wary and agile Baba.
The BJP saw its opportunity at the people’s disgust at the slackness ,fuzziness and the torpor of the Congress,who unlike the springing panther that was its enemy dithered in taking right action at the appropriate moment.It acted and even some of its most forceful and indignant critics today had hailed its event as a new chapter in nation’s history.
To their disillusionment and growing horror,the energy of the newly anointed sacred king was directed to stripping the state of every trapping of democracy with cold and strenuous and disingenuous ruthlessness.Until today when every democratic institution of the state had been emaculated,including Parliament.The Election Commission is so subservient that it forgets that a Prime Minister campaigning in an election cannot claim privilege.It dares not call out his transgressions because it thinks and feels that he remains its boss.After all they had been picked to be at his service.A Supreme Court that in spite of its good intentions does not have the guts to halt the anti-secular blitz of the saffron party,so that the age-old symbol of communal unity and fraternity at Ajmere Sherif is on a knife edge today.As for other such institutions they have nearly fallen dead.
And the country has been living through a semi-fascist phase enforced both by the arm of the state and the trident of its stormtroopers patrolling the streets.The repeated lynchings and pogroms on Muslims and Christians have also struck terror in the hearts of ordinary Hindus.
This is just what they want.Prices of necessary goods have gone to the roof.The government vies with the corporates in snatching the last paisa saved by people out of their pockets.In this drought when money is so scarce that people are forced to grab at and jostle for every piddling pouch of cash thrown at them under fancifully named schemes.
Thus people are being made ready for full-fledged fascism,like the fabled rat that undergoes the cruel experiment of incremental increase of heat and thinks it is bearable after all until the fatal end when it finds it is too late to escape.
That is how people come to accept fascism.To make them conscious and active only a popular nation-wide movement where they feel that it is they themselves who are forging their freedom can at all work under conditions of incipient fascism. That is what the opposition seems afraid of.For they are not really sure they really want people to wake up to their power.Like the Hanuman of Hindu myths who was unaware of his invincible prowess.
Fascists in India have been working for this moment of transition for a hundred years.Over decades of trial and error,patiently bearing out setbacks and dead end marches,it has honed its skill at surviving and getting past obstacles and wearing down resistance.Once at the opportune moment it hopes to overturn the unholy imitation of colonial ideas of the state and replace Westminster model with the Manu Samhita.The outward appearances already have been given a Sankritised colour.They are biding their time for the auspicious moment.
Do the leaders and members of the opposition understand the catastrophic prospects?Do they hope to outgun the enemy with worn-out weaponry and conventional skills which slip and falter under the new circumstances?Can they see the precipice ahead and awaken the people’s power for which they actually nurse some fear and scorn in the recesses of their hearts?
Hiren Gohain is a political commentator
