BJP etc: The death of ideology

Power is the sole purpose of politics in India. Without power, parties crumble. The implosion ripping the BJP apart shows how comprehensive the crumbling can be. It is easy to say that BJP’s self-destruct is its internal affair. But there are two reasons why it should be every Indian’s affair.

First, the BJP was the only national formation that rose to challenge the Congress which inherited its all-India mantle from the independence movement. For our nascent democracy, the two-party choice was bad enough given the country’s size and diversity. It grew worse when one of them developed into a family oligarchy and the other pursued a communal divide-and-rule policy. The worst may happen now if the challenger leaves the arena and the voter is left with a choice of one. That will put us on par not with China but North Korea, for though China has a one-party system, it has no family rule.

We would not have come to this pass if the Congress had accepted Mahatma Gandhi’s advice and disbanded itself upon the attainment of independence. That would have facilitated Jawaharlal Nehru leading a progressive centrist party and Sardar Patel a conservative platform. Trade unionists and sundry radicals would have found their own left-of-centre perch in such a dispensation, giving democracy a natural environment to grow.

But Nehru saw himself as the one-size-fits-all prime minister, not challengeable by competitors. So he kept potential challengers like the Sardar under his wing and never allowed brother progressives like Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia, Narendra Deva to grow under his banyan tree. These great national leaders got frustrated and withered away. It is specious to blame Nehru for the partition of India as Jaswant Singh has made fashionable. With greater justification, he can be held responsible for thwarting the development of a progressive party in India and thereby making Indian democracy lopsided.

The second reason we should be concerned about the BJP’s plight is that it underlines the collapse of ideology in Indian politics. The Congress never had one. Nehruvian socialism was not an ideology, but a policy. Even that was abandoned in due course. The Communists held on for a while, but the temptations of parliamentary politics finally overwhelmed them. Today the Politburo is thunderously ideological but in Bengal and Kerala where the comrades practise what they do not preach, communism has gone five-star, indistinguishable from capitalism.

The BJP, too, fell victim to the politics of power and corruption. Consider Karnataka. When the BJP won the last state elections, it showed no qualms in taking renegades from other parties and rewarding them with ministerships. No trace of ideology here, unless “Anything-for-Power” is recognised as an ideology.

To its credit, the BJP has understood that the hardline Hindutva ideology that gave it an initial momentum is no longer viable. It has acknowledged Narendra Modi and the Gandhi boy from UP (who wanted to cut off the hands of other religionists) as major vote losers for the party. The obvious solution is for the leadership to boldly adopt an inclusive ideology treating all Indian citizens as equal. But they have neither the guts nor the vision to do so. What they have is the even more defeatist idea of the RSS “taking over” the BJP. Interestingly this idea came from Arun Shourie, the man who had caused haemorrhage in the first place by projecting Narendra Modi as the next Prime Minister. With leaders like this, BJP needs no ememies. If the party does not survive such negative thinking, it will only vindicate P.V. Narasimha Rao’s pragmatism as expressed in his novel, The Insider: “Elections in India are a choice, not of the best, but of the least worthless”.

BJP’s gift to Jinnah: A new life

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Follies never cease. With great brouhaha, the BJP has given new life to its public enemy, Jinnah. In a double whammy, the BJP’s fanatic wing has given a marketing boost to the Jinnah book by banning it in Gujarat. Now it will sell like hot Satanic Verses.

All monolithic organisations feed on their collective myths. For the BJP-RSS ideology, survival depends on establishing Jinnah and Pakistan as evils. To allow any dilution of this doctrine will be like the Vatican allowing Catholics to question the infallibility of the Pope or, for that matter, the Congress Party allowing its members to question the infallibility of Sonia Gandhi. Certain divinities must remain divinities. Or they’ll collapse.

Actually, Jaswant Singh is no sinner. He is essentially a soldier, not a scholar or a writer. What is said to be extensive research did not help him to say anything new. He merely restated what has been said repeatedly by different types of experts since 1947.

H.M Seervai, the celebrated authority on constitutional law, said in no uncertain terms that Jinnah never wanted the partition of India. Pothan Joseph, the famous editor who worked closely with Jinnah first in the Bombay Chronicle and later in Dawn in Delhi, said that Jinnah used the Pakistan/partition idea only as a bargaining point. Poonen Abraham, senior editor at Dawn, said pointblank: “ I hold the Congress responsible for partition. A little bit of giving in to the Muslims would have won them”. Punishing Jaswant Singh for saying what is already on record is like punishing a schoolboy for saying that Aryans came to India from the Caucuses region.

The silly controversy over the Jaswant Singh book will have one salutary effect: It will kindle new interest in Mohammed Ali Jinnah. That will be salutary because, by any standard, this was a remarkable man worth studying and understanding.



The most remarkable thing about him is that, while he had not really envisaged a divided India, the Pakistan that finally came into being was not something he approved. His inaugural address in the new Pakistan legislature clearly called for a secular state where citizens would not be defined by their religion. Obviously, this was not what the zealots behind the Muslim League wanted to hear. It is not idle to speculate that Jinnah was lucky to die of TB and lung cancer a year after Pakistan was born, otherwise he might have been assassinated as his conscience-keeper and Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan was in 1951.

Jinnah was not only secular, but also a gentleman with a keen sense of what was proper. He was the Chairman of the Board of Bombay Chronicle and Pothan Joseph records: “He never gave us the impression that we were employees….As an employer Jinnah was exacting but he had the gift of stimulating in those who served him a sense of pride. They could rely on him for a square deal”. Joseph should know. He worked for 36 employers and left 35 of them for lack of square deals.

Let Joseph also throw light on Jinnah’s human side. Joseph had joined Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram as a stay-in guest for a programme of detoxification. He took it for three weeks, then escaped. On a subsequent occasion, Jinnah also took up with Joseph the question of drinking. Unlike Gandhiji who stuck to goat milk, Jinnah enjoyed his whisky till almost the end of his life. So Joseph felt emboldened to say: “ Mr Jinnah, your parents were thoughtful enough to put gin in your name. I have to fend for myself”.

May Jaswant Singh feel inspired to put more spirit into his second edition.
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Bush is not Clinton; Singh is not Sen

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George Bush for Bharat Ratna! The Congress Party's official spokesman floated this balloon publicly in Delhi, so it may well come true. It may be the Congress's idea of honouring Bush. But it will also dishonour the people of India in the eyes of the world. What's more, it will dishonour the people of the United States who have persistently declared their strong disapproval of the man. How cut off from public opinion can the Congress be.

Fortunately, G.B. himself is saying nothing, doing nothing these days. That's not the American style. Bill Clinton is still in the centre of things. Jimmy Carter even got a Nobel Prize for his global activities.

What ex-Presidents usually do is write their memoirs. Clinton wrote a rather indifferent one, but got 10 to 12 million dollars for his effort. Then he hit the highly paying speech circuit. For one of those "leadership summits" in Delhi he was paid $150,000 by an Indian publishing group. Ronald Reagan made $2 million from a single speaking tour of Japan.

In America there are professional agents who arrange these book and speech deals. They have assessed that there is no demand for Bush in these fields. Remember, on retirement his most memorable statement was that when he looked into the mirror the next morning, he was going to like what he saw. Who wants to hear or read such self-justifying drivel? (Except Congress patriots in Delhi.)

Not that Bush is going to be hard up. He is a wealthy man anyway. George Washington was wealthy enough to decline his annual salary of $25,000 (600,000 in today's terms). John Kennedy donated all his remuneration to charities.

But being able to earn well after retirement is nowadays a matter of prestige. Bush can still make a few millions through what is called private equity consultancy. This is a system by which crony capitalists pay politicians sumptuously for opening doors and providing connections. Henry Kissinger is still making good money through this route.

Indian politicians are denied any of these recognised means of making money. That may be why kickbacks have become their preferred route. That may also be why none of them retires. The only Prime Minister after Nehru who tried to become an author was P.V.Narasimha Rao. But he made no great impact with his "Insider" tales. The likes of Morarji Desai wrote empty memoirs which people did not even become aware of.

This may be linked to the generally uneducated status of our politicians. Even in the Nehru family, Jawaharlal was an exception. From Motilal to Indira to Rajiv to Sanjay, nobody finished a university course and nobody was intellectually inclined. Narasimha Rao was a scholar. But the politician in him crippled the intellectual in him.

Manmohan Singh, highly educated and highly intellectual, has the capacity to write a few books that would be valuable historically. But he won't. The politician in him has grown so much that he wouldn't dream of rocking any boat, let alone Soniaji's. Our only hopes lie with the Amartya Sens who are free of political dependence and therefore give us some food for our souls.