Source : India MediaMy response to the Nalin Mehta blog in TOI. The blog is pasted after my response.
Dear Nalin,
It is naïve to explain away the BJP’s surge in polarized UP by saying that the young voters of today “vote for what suits them best materially in a given local context”. More than a negative vote for the Samajwadi Party, it was a positive vote for whatever the BJP stands for today. The BJP had its way, the opposition didn’t.
BJP’s Hindutva credentials were never in doubt as far as the media and the people were concerned. The BJP itself was perhaps in doubt. Why else did it shy away from naming a CM candidate who would carry the Hindutva flag with pride? Was the BJP worried that it wouldn’t get into triple figures if it had announced the Mahant as the CM face before the polls? None of us know the answer. It was not an “audacious” gamble on BJP’s part. In fact I don’t think the truth has really come out on whether the Modi-Amit Shah combine chose the Mahant or the latter thrust himself upon them.
I am at my wit’s end trying to digest your assertion that Hindutva and development go hand in hand. Hindu-ness is not Hindutva. Doing dirty things to Muslims, as the good old Mahant was fond of saying in the past while addressing protagonists of his ilk is not Hindu-ness. It is Hindutva. I suppose you know that?
A worrisome aspect of political commentators these days is the arrogance with which they talk about stuff they hardly saw first-hand. Caste is not talcum powder for any political outfit to rub off whenever it chooses. It is again naïve to believe that the BJP did not include caste as a criterion for giving tickets. LoL. Homogeneity by definition does away with the need for appeasement and you are right: homogeneity is the message the BJP wants to give to the entire country by 2019. Keep only Hindus in the picture, there’s no question of appeasement at all!
See, even you weren’t able to digest the Hindutva pill all the way. The liberal in you, however small, must have pricked you into saying that Hindutva can do anything “but within the bounds of constitutionality”. You are certainly able to see the possibility of Hindutva cocking a snook at the constitution if it so wishes. Yet.
It must have taken something for you to step out of the confines of dignity to brashly define Muslims as the ”mullah constituency”. But then that is the influence of Hindutva! You seem to be, if I am not wrong, of the view that whoever woos a community on religious lines is secular. So, if Mayawati is secular because she woos Muslims, the BJP is secular too for wooing Hindus! Or what!
I am compelled by your impetuous anger against Muslims and Muslim appeasers to quote the entire paragraph which encapsulates your feelings about them:
“From the notorious Shah Bano case in the1980s to the promotion of stereotyped meat-trader-musclemen candidates in 2017, nothing has been more damaging to the cause of secularism than repeated cynical manipulations of the Muslim vote by avowedly secular leaders themselves. From Azam Khan to clerics whose only aim is to protect a more obscurantist view of the shariah than practised in many Muslim countries witness the debate on triple talaq secularism has long been an empty slogan.
Its degeneration from its lofty origins as a principle to defend cultural plurality , to a fig leaf that ended up protecting the backward-looking Muslim religious right, damaged its legitimacy . Little wonder then that invocations to secularism, like critiques of demonetisation before it, may excite well-heeled drawing rooms in Delhi but elicit little enthusiasm where it matters: on the political streets.”
I leave it to you to explain to your worthy readers, when you are of a calmer mind, what exactly, if at all, you mean by what you wrote. I, for one, a measely liberal, could not make head or tail out of it other than recognize the bile for what it is – bile.
In a couple of more paragraphs you have painted the Mahant not as a poisonous anti-Muslim rabble rouser that he was but as a custodian of common sense and with keen administrative sense to boot. The clue that swayed you, perhaps, is his parliamentary record that includes a question on Bhojpuri. As I gather, the Mahant seems to have kept a tight leash on his anti-Muslim tongue when in the haloed hall of the Lok Sabha. Till date.
As all good things have to come to an end, so does your write-up, concluding with the condition : “…As long as he can keep polarisation from spiralling into violence…” That, I suppose, presupposes the fact that the BJP polarized UP in the run-up to the elections and secondly, that polarization can undauntedly lead to violence. If I got it right, then non-violent polarization is quite okay, isn’t it?
Nobody would have grudged you, Nalin, embracing Hindutva, but it needn’t have been at the cost of abusing liberals! Unless you were prompted to do so.