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Ayodhya Mayhem Machine As Mascot

By I.K.Shukla

India Thinkernet
30 January, 2004

Mr. Vajpayee has announced he would launch the poll drive for
Lok Sabha with Ayodhya Pranam (Salute to Ayodhya). This is
tantamount to declaring that the electorate has to vote
Hindu Terror back to power. If the past is any guide
Vajpayee has his party's collective reason to issue the
triumphalist threat. For, not just the minorities but many
more segments of society, sizeable and diverse, would
now deem they have been put on alert, and asked to vote
"sensibly". If they choose to ignore the ill-concealed
diktat, they better be prepared for the consequences.
Tough luck.

What this one statement (Nav Bharat Times, Jan.29) unambiguously
declares is the intent and the project that characterises
Hindutva. Less symbolically but far more substantively,
it is a declaration of war on Indian people, the
Constitution, the minorities, and the democratic polity.
The lines between majoritarianism, nationalism, and fascism
have been defiantly blurred and, quite logically.
Majoritarianism, at inception, tactically masquerades as
nationalism for general acceptance as something decent and
respectable, but morphs into fascism once it acquires power
and feels sure of its ground.

The separation of church and state is a construct too far
beyond the mental capacity of any sectarian aggression that
expropriates the state to its purposes. Hindutva cavemen
believe that it is the state that should prescribe, as in
the ages past, the religion of its subjects. They fancy
that they are kings, to luxuriate in predation and parasitism,
and citizens are mere subjects, born only to obey orders as
chattels and serfs. They have either never known or
deliberately dismissed the basic tenets of civics, let
alone democracy, pluralistic society, or egalitarian
dispensation.

The populace at large may be amazed that the PM has proclaimed
his tribal bigotry befitting a primitive chieftain of times
now unfit for display even in a museum. VHP has demanded that
Hindutva be on the poll agenda of BJP (Bhrashtachar/corruption
and Jighansa/desire to kill Party). That he has no shame or
remorse at the Babri Demolition of 1992, or the holocaust
that followed in its wake in Mumbai and several Indian cities,
and in Pakistan and Bangladesh, that he is cynical enough to
exploit the mayhem-muddied Mandir issue for a terrorist
organization like BJP to stay in power, betrays his unfitness
as PM of a nation so diverse and large as India, so segmented
and variegated as India.

What the announcement of Mandir (the Mayhem Machine) as mascot
amounts to is this: BJP will keep stealing from the national
coffer as its innumerable scams and humongous swindles attest,
thus it will keep the people poor and illiterate, homeless
and malnourished, indebted and starving; that it will
go on selling the national assets to foreign corporations
in the name of Liberalization and Privatization; that it
will be the surrogate and stooge of alien imperialists,
tyrannically repressing peoples' resistance at home
and militarily helping the neo-colonialists abroad in
subjugating and enslaving other countries and crushing
other peoples.

Too, Vapayee has signaled well in advance his tacit consent for
and implicit collaboration with all mayhem carried out by
Hindu terrorists against non-Hindus. This moral outrage
against the minorities has been granted absolution in the
name of Dharma by Vajpayee, the Brahmin, the RSS man, the
man with a ventriloquist's reputation. The violence against
Christians in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, is an intimation
of what is in store for the minorities in the election
season. It is he who offered a national debate on
Conversion, as anodyne for the violated and bruised minorities.
It is he who flew into a rage not at the hurt and humiliation
suffered by a church in Dangs, Gujarat, but at the debris
of shattered glass which once framed its windows.
A poetaster's aesthetic feathers had been ruffled, his
humanity had remained unstirred, somnolent.

His declaration of Ayodhya Salute is a violation of the
principles informing the Constitution. Unless the judiciary
declares his extremist sectarian bias mala fide and ultra
vires, unless the Election Commission quashes the sops and
largesse he has showered after the date of, and the decision
to go to, polls were announced, not only would he be setting
an ugly precedent, he will have impugned and impaired the
sanctity of the democratic process that has somehow anchored
India in trying conditions. It is in the abyss of anomie
that Vajpayee has daringly dumped India with this declaration
of Ayodhya as his mascot. He, in effect, has roared he
would keep the communal cauldron boiling. It brings
electoral victories to the votaries of death and darkness.
For this trangression, he should be declared unqualified to
contest the elections.

It is a provocative declaration. To counter this open call to
arms and this savage glob of contempt for the minorities and
our democratic process, strategies to be devised by those
directly threatened and direly affected, may not all be
uniformly polite and rigorously decent. Nor was Vajpayee
polite or decent thundering his Ayodhya Salute to inaugurate
Hindu fascism's parliamentary stumping. Has he "concluded he
can get away with a rape-and-pillage approach and still win
a second term"? The words in quotes (of Mark Hertsgaard,
The Nation, Feb.9, 04) refer to Bush, "the natural ally",
discovered and so anointed recently by saffron-soaked
New Delhi. They so aptly apply to pal Atal too.

Unless Vajpayee and his cohorts are stopped in their tracks,
Hindu fascism as politico-religious fever will have struck
and spread over India. Imperialism which has always been
chummy with and supportive of its fascist kin will play
its historical role in degrading the people, dividing the
society, and destroying the nation. A neo-imperial aggressor
on the prowl will find in Asia willing and ardent coolies
and camp followers, this time swathed in saffron. This will
guarantee longevity to a hydra-headed tyranny that will
hoarsely call itself Cultural Nationalism, the new fangled
name of old fashioned fascism.