POLITICS-INDIA: Pro-Hindu Ruling Party Back to Hardline Politics

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 1 2002 (IPS) - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced Monday a new Cabinet that reflects the increasingly hardline stance of his pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the 23-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that rules the central government.

In the most significant change, India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh has been given the finance portfolio in a swap with Yashwant Sinha, who relinquishes the finance ministry to become the new external affairs minister.

Many saw in the mid-term reshuffle the waning personal influence of Vajpayee, a genial, elderly statesman whose health has recently been the subject of intense speculation in the local as well as the international media, including in the influential ‘Time’ magazine.

In recent times, Vajpayee has been under pressure from fundamentalist elements in his party for not doing enough to promote their interest on one side, and on another by ‘secular’ political parties such as the powerful Congress party that leads the national opposition but rules 14 major states directly.

Vajpayee set the tone for the mid-term reshuffle on Saturday when he elevated as deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani, who continues to holds the home portfolio and is widely regarded as India’s second most powerful man.

Advani was born in the Pakistani port city of Karachi but his family fled to India following the 1947 decolonisation of British India and its partition into Islamic Pakistan and officially secular but Hindu-majority India.

Many credit Advani with converting the BJP, a marginal political entity at the beginning of the 90s, into India’s most powerful political party by personally leading a nationwide Hindu-revivalist campaign centred around the demolition of the 6th century Babri Masjid at Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state.

The campaign as well as the actual demolition of the massive, tri-domed structure in December 1992 led to waves of communal clashes across northern India, in which thousands of people died or became homeless while the BJP went on to become the leader of a disparate national coalition in 1998.

Thanks to opposition by secular partners in the coalition and a court stay on construction at the site where the mosque stood, the BJP has, so far, failed to erect a grand temple there dedicated to the Hindu warrior deity Rama.

Having suffered a series of electoral reverses in provincial elections to major states, including in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP has decided to revive its campaign of building a temple at the disputed site regardless of the court stay and the opinion of its partners.

Last week, the BJP appointed as its chief in Uttar Pradesh, a sprawling state with 170 million people, Vinay Katiyar who, along with Advani, led the actual demolition of the Babri Masjid and who has sworn to continue demolishing mosques built by mediaeval Muslim invaders.

On taking office, Katiyar, who has loudly attributed the BJP’s flagging popularity to tardiness in fulfilling the temple-building agenda, announced that he would now pursue the temple agenda regardless of court rulings. This sows the seeds for further strife in the state.

Already the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati, whose minority Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) or People’s Socialist Party is supported by the BJP, has warned that she would not allow “any party or person to take any action at Ayodhya or other religious places and jeopardise communal harmony”.

Another BJP leader who took part in the Ayodhya campaign and has been close to Advani is Narendra Modi, chief minister of western Gujarat state, where a pogrom against Muslims in March and April left more than a thousand people dead and 150,000 homeless.

The pogrom was carried out as reprisal for the Feb. 27 torching of a train carrying Hindus returning to Gujarat from Ayodhya, travelling after their participation in consecration rituals for the building of the temple to Rama.

The BJP resisted demands by opposition parties as well as its own partners to sack Modi for the violence in which there was open state complicity, according to several top voluntary human rights organisations as well as the independent National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).

Other changes made in the BJP ahead of the Cabinet reshuffle included the appointment as party president at the national level, Venkaiah Naidu, a man regarded as close to Advani and who shares his hawkish views.

According to political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan, taken together, these changes at the party and government level mark a return of the BJP from a comparatively “liberal image” to its original “pro-Hindu nationalistic agenda” — and are a preparation for general elections due in 2004.

Vajpayee himself declared that the changes that are being made with the “singular purpose of strengthening the party and make the functioning of the government smoother.”

But many saw in the changes a diminution of Vajpayee’s grip over the government and the party and that of his aides in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), essentially a powerful cabal led by principal secretary and national security advisor, Brajesh Mishra, and against which resentment has been building.

Commented C R Irani, editor of the ‘Statesman’ newspaper in a front-page editorial Monday: “Advani’s position (as deputy prime minister) cannot be merely to replace the PMO. He will be expected to act in the absence of the prime minister for any reason and this is a further argument for winding up the PMO, which these past many years has wrought havoc on the premise that it is accountable to no one but the Prime Minister.”

When the BJP first came to power in 1998, Vajpayee was seen as its ‘moderate face; and one acceptable to partners in the NDA coalition uncomfortable with the BJP’s overt communalism as represented by Advani and other hardline leaders.

But over time, the protests have grown feeble against the BJP’s pursuit of its Hindutva (Hindu fundamentalist) agenda, such as changes made to school textbooks glorifying the Hindu religion and refusal to interfere in attacks on minority groups such as Christians and Muslims.

According to the ‘Times of India’ newspaper, the BJP’s allies are now acquiescing in the party’s plan to revert to its original ‘Hindutva’ stance.

“In other words, the allies have given in knowing where the BJP is headed,” the paper commented in an editorial. “Whether the allies will go all the way and fight the next elections under Mr Advani’s stewardship is anybody’s guess,” it speculated.