The Hindu Business Line : Past and future

IT IS said that every saint has a past and every sinner a future. This essentially means that every human being has a "good" and "bad" aspect of life. Alternatively, no person's life can be only "good" or only "bad". Assuming that a nation has a life of its own (which has a beginning and an end), does this also apply to its history?

These thoughts have arisen in the mind following the remark of the Congress(I) spokesman, Mr Jaipal Reddy, that "the BJP represents the irretrievable past and the Congress represents the irreversible future". Implicit in this statement is the value judgement that the BJP is not the party of the future — and progress — while the Congress most certainly is. Is this formulation correct? The first point needs to be made that Mr Reddy is partisan in his view by virtue of the fact that he represents the Congress. Naturally, even if there were good points about the BJP (and bad points about the Congress), he is not expected to highlight them, particularly when both the parties are on the verge of testing their electoral support in a number of State Assemblies.

What does the BJP essentially represent? To answer this question, one has to examine the ideology of the Sangh Parivar, of which the BJP is the political wing. Very briefly, this ideology is a many-faceted one, the core of which is the preservation and propagation of what may be defined as the "cultural nationalism" of the peoples of the subcontinent, its roots going back to an0cient times, that is, much before the Islamic incursion from the north-west. Since the focal point of the Parivar's ideology lies in the pre-Islamic phase of Indian civilisation, it is hardly surprising that the colour saffron has come to be associated with it.

On the other hand, the Congress Party's political and social philosophy is rooted in the late 19th Century, which was a time of violent churning among the elite, the objective being to give shape to the "progressive" strands of Indian society. In view of this, is Mr Reddy correct in describing the BJP as standing for an "irretrievable past" and the Congress for an "irreversible future"? Clearly, if the BJP has anything to do with Indian "culture" (even if only the "saffron" aspect of it), it cannot but be relevant to Indian political and social life today because a nation cannot live without having a cultural identity.

The "irretrievable past" is the very foundation of the present and the future, the inference being that without the past (and those who represent it, in Mr Reddy's view), the present and future would be very unstable indeed. As for the Congress Party, there is little doubt that its philosophy of political and economic progress led to the birth of Free India in 1947, acquiring for itself the mantle Party of the Future.

The problem is that, unless the Congress (as it is today) undergoes a fundamental change in its political and economic profile, it can hardly describe itself as the party of the "irreversible future". This, in fact, is crucial for the country because there is no other political party on the horizon that can effectively provide a stable leadership for the Government at New Delhi and at the same time project an image not tainted by any special hue.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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