By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, May 31 1998 (IPS)

India’s new government, a shaky coalition of many more than a dozen regional parties, led by the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) means business.

Its decision, apparently taken within the first week of its existence, to test its nuclear arsenal, was not just a statement to the world. It was directed more to audiences at home.

Ultra-nationalism has always been the BJP’s main electoral plank. The bomb is supposed to have restored the ation’s lost pride. It was also meant to provide the government with the legitimacy to force its political agenda on to Indian society.

Nationalism, as perceived by the ideologues of the BJP, obviously has its distinct cultural dimensions. Their perceptions of what constitutes Indian culture have often been explained by its mother-organisation, the RSS, a cultural organisation that imparts para-military training to its members.

Their cultural blue-print has been ready for years. The BJP government is finally in power and is eager to enforce it. In their manifesto they stress their commitment to a normative moral order and insist that a moral code is needed to implement it.

In fact the BJP and its allies are in a tremendous hurry and are wasting little time. In 1996, the BJP formed a government of 13 days that had to resign the first time it faced Parliament. Yet, in those two weeks, Sushma Swaraj, the minister in charge for Information and Broadcasting had made her annoyance with female news readers of the official TV channels public.

These ladies she felt, showed too much in a blasphemous affront to India’s cultural values. So they were told to discard their sleeveless blouses, raise their reasonable neck-lines and make sure that their sarees covered their torsos if they wanted to keep their jobs.

An FM radio programme, sponsored by a non-governmental organisation (NGO) also sent the minister into a rage. Targeted at youth, this programme dealing with sexual health had a 24-hour hot-line receiving queries.

These queries were addressed in the programme in a non- judgemental way. The outraged minister ordered the programme off the air because it allegedly threatened the ethos of the ageless Indian culture where sex outside the marriage bond was immoral. Divorce was rare, and homosexuality was in the closet and considered immoral and criminal.

The programme was deemed obscene because it went into biological detail when answering a query about pain and irritation in the female genitalia. It also was held guilty of over stepping moral boundaries when it addressed questions regarding anal sex, homosexuality, masturbation, the effectiveness of Ayurvedic pills against AIDS, or the emotional effect on a girl of an incident concerning sex during childhood.

Two years later the BJP is back in power and as eager to take off from where it let off. The enthusiasm of the BJP and its allies to enforce their culture is marked by its mindlessness.

M.F. Hussain, India’s most famous painter, has been trgeted again. He has been the favourite whipping-boy of the “Hindu” culture oice. In New Delhi last month, an exhibition on the theme of radical art that included his work was disrupted by political cadre and forced to close.

His apartment in Bombay was broken into and ransacked. This was a part of a continuing crusade against the artist. Earlier, his paintings at Museums have been destroyed and burnt and galleries that sell his work have been attacked.

The charge against Hussain is that he portrays Hindu goddesses obscenely because sometimes he paints them nude. That Hussain is a Muslim and a part of India’s largest religious minority is the main reason why his art is now considered a conspiracy against Indian culture.

Some of the paintings under attack were painted 40 years ago. Hussain himself has been deeply influenced by Indian iconography and his paintings were often commissioned for and used in Hindu religious celebrations.

Now, even Hussain’s right to paint Hindu deities is being questioned because he is a Muslim. Indian art has never equated nudity with obscenity. In innumerable superb artistic representations, goddesses show far more than the sedate lady newscasters on TV.

Enforcement of a moral code is now assumed to be a legitimate political duty. Bombay, the entertainment capital of India, is ruled by the Si Sena, the closest political ally of the BJP.

Its minister for culture has instituted a Script and Stage Performances Scrutiny Board to approve all lyrics and scripts for public performances. Its duties do not stop there.

Cadres of the party as well as members of the Board are now going to monitor not just the performances but also the audiences, particularly at rock shows. They are supposed to see that audiences do not behave in a “vulgar” manner by hugging or kissing and to ensure that none of the members in the audience take off their shirts and dance wildly. Shirtless Indians too, supposedly, have no part in the ageless Indian culture.

A leading media supporter of the BJP defends editorially in the widely-read weekly ‘India Today’, the right of Information Minister Swaraj to play the moral custodian for the nation, particularly at a time of moral anarchy when marriage, single parent-hood, cohabitation and homosexuality are equal options. He is absolutely sure that India needs to recover her ethical composure. The question, according to him, is not why but how.

Vinod Khanna, a film actor-turned-member of Parliament for the BJP, at a celebrity fund raiser for an AIDS NGO attended among others by Hollywood star Richard Gere, suggested publicy that HIV testing should be mandatory and that those testing positive should be made to wear badges.

Elsewhere Minister Swaraj was asked how the threat of AIDS could be dealt with if she refused to let the government media propagate the use of condoms for safe-sex. She suggested that the media should be propagating the idea that people restrict themselves to one life-partner instead.

This information minister obviously has no use for the frightening statistics regarding the HIV transmission in India.

Maybe she considers such information irrelevant. After all, what really matters is that India now has a nuclear bomb and therefore is a world power. Who cares about the much deadlier bomb ticking away relentlessly within the nation!

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