The Hindu Business Line : Correcting a skewed behaviour pattern

There has been a noticeable tendency on the part of a section of political rivals, intellectuals and media pundits to pooh-pooh the significance of the hat trick performed by the Chief Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, in propelling the BJP to power for the third time in a row in the teeth of dampening predictions by wishful Cassandras.

“Fascists also sometimes win elections and come back to power more than once,” said one Congress party luminary. “It only shows communalists can be fought only ideologically and not electorally”, declared a leading figure of the Left.

Reading between the lines, their core assumption is that the mass of voters of Gujarat was a bunch of fools, who were carried away by Mr Modi’s sparkling oratory and had fallen a prey to the communal polarisation of the State that he had deftly brought about.

In short, the preponderant population of benighted Gujarat consists of bigoted breeds of human beings given to Hindutva-inspired outrages.

Confusion worse confounded

This is nothing but a deplorable display of the utter contempt which proponents of this thesis have for the democratic verdict handed by an electorate as enlightened and enterprising as that of Gujarat. Actually, by voting as they did, the voters of that State have placed before the nation a few object lessons. Understanding them in the true sense demands a strenuous and painful effort to clear mental cobwebs accumulated over years. The abandon with which labels such as secularism and communalism are affixed has become the biggest stumbling block to clarity of thinking and correct analysis of any situation involving religious groups. The direction taken by political discourse, public perception and official orthodoxy since Independence has further confounded the confusion.

Let there be no squeamishness in stating it: India is a country in which Hindus constitute 80 per cent of the population, and yet, there is a feeling gaining ground among them that they are coming to grief at the hands of their own co-religionists in the political class, power structure or purportedly ‘secular’ intellectual circles.

Any show by the members of that faith of pride at being a Hindu, or at the incomparable grandeur of the literary and cultural heritage of 10 millennia, or at the magnificent treasures of wisdom left by the sages, seers and heroes, and any spirited espousal of their values, tenets, and traditions, or any protest at the belittlement of their legacy is immediately denounced as communal.

A pattern has come to be established whereby anyone can get away with any kind of insult or abuse at the Hindus and all that they respect or hold dear. Practitioners of the Indian version of secularism greet with silence and composure murderous fatwas, bloody riots or physical violence against the exercise by Salman Rushdie, Tasleema Nasreen or the Danish cartoonist his or her literary or artistic freedom. There is certainly need to correct this skewed behaviour pattern.

B. S. RAGHAVAN