DECCAN HERALD
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Friday, June 7, 2002
THEOCRATISING AND MILITARISING THE STATE
BJP?s baneful agenda
By KANCHA ILAIAH
The way in which the Bharatiya Janata Party executed its agenda in Gujarat and now moving on to wage war with Pakistan will have deeper implications to Indian State and civil society. It is not merely the problem of communalism versus secularism and war versus peace. The whole pre and post Gujarat process points to a direction of the Indian State slowly but surely getting theocratised and militarised. BJP as a political party has an ideological allegiance to religion and war, and not to economy and development. It is also planning to make the Indian State a war-mongering one. Ever since it came to power it has been projecting Pakistan as the Islamic enemy that needs to be crushed. BJP views the Indian State as Hindu State and thinks that all tensions between India and Pakistan are also tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Within the nation, communal carnages of Gujarat type and Kautilyan-type wars on the borders do not end terrorism but will only generate more and more terrorist organisations.
To theocratise the civil society, the BJP resorted to act of vandalism and pulled down the Babri Masjid in 1992. Before that event there was hardly any presence of Islamic terrorist groups in India. By destroying Babri Masjid the BJP and Sangh Parivar organisations set an agenda of religious civil war. If minority social forces like Muslims are pushed to the wall, they will choose guerrilla methods to fight back. With Gujarat kind of brutality every Muslim thinks of turning to terrorism.
Destroying democracy
Secondly, to threaten the whole Muslim world the BJP government took the initiative of producing a nuclear bomb. Out of mere fear Pakistan produced a counter bomb. Pakistan, an already weakened theocratic State, was responding in panic to India?s act. Buddha, Gandhi and Ambedkar ? three great champions of peace ? taught us not become the source of terrorism, communalism and war. But the theocratic, communal, casteist and war-mongering Hindutva thinkers like Kautiya, Golwalkar and Hegdevar taught the opposite. BJP is following the latter.
Over a period of time, the BJP quite decisively worked out the methods of deconstruction of democratic institutions and in the process, the central administrative structure began to be theocratised quite definitely. Theocratisation of the bureaucracy is only the tip of the iceberg. Once the Prime Minister?s office and the key ministries were in the hands of religious ideologues like Vajpayee, Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharati and so on, no ally could stop the process of theocratisation of the State. Above all, behind the curtain of the cabinet the RSS sanchalks, sadhus and sanyasis are now in a position to handle the affairs of the State. BJP?s idea is to take the Indian State back to pre-British stage with a cult-based spiritual ideology.
Primitive order
No Islamic theocratic State will be a match to the Hindu brahminic theocracy which has the political culture of Kautilyan craftsmanship at the back of its operations. The brahminic theocracy is more retrograde because it sustains on social hierarchy and dehumanisation of working castes/classes. It does not allow social mobility within civil society. It does not even believe in cohesion of society as the Islamic societies do.
The BJP as modern political party does not believe in dismantling the caste system and establishing harmonious relations among religions. Nor does it want to modernise the State and civil society. It wants to theocratise all structures so that the social changes that had been brought about by the modern democratic State should be set back to primitive order. When the Central government and the national executive headed by the Prime Minister justified the planned carnage in Gujjarat where people were burnt alive, women raped, fetuses removing from the wombs of women, and property looted with the total connivance of its own wing within the federal structure, the system had shown definite signs of theocratisation. When the federal government justified a genocide of the kind that took place in Gujarat, because the victims belonged to a minority religion, it can also justify similar attacks on Dalits. The justification of the federal government is more dangerous than the act of brutality in a State or in a region.
A deliberately constructed cause of building a temple in the place of a demolished masjid became the cause of all our problems. This cause is a commonly agreed cause of the nation?s Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Gujarat. This cause is related to the constitutional right of Muslims for the protection of their identity and their institutions. This in essence means the federal government itself does not recognise the constitutional line drawn on January 26, 1950. The constitutional line is that the pre-republic issues that have the nature of tearing that republic apart should never be brought into play after that date. That is where the BJP as political party does not have faith in this Constitution. This is the reason why it does not publicly talk of equal rights of all citizens including that of Dalits-Bahujans in all spheres of life. Such an affirmation of equal rights of all citizens goes against the Hindutva ethic.
In this ideological framework, leave alone the minorities, even Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBCs who are asking for equality will be the definite target in any brahminic scheme of things. Because, the enmity between capital owning/rich castes and classes and lower castes is as serious as that of the Gujarati Hindu capitalists/businessmen and Muslims. If it gets expressed between parivar forces and Muslims today (it got expressed between parivar forces and Christians earlier) in Gujarat, it will get expressed as against Dalits and OBCs elsewhere tomorrow. The State run by the BJP shall justify them as easily as it justified the attacks on minorities. This is the basic characteristic of Hindu theocracy.
The Congress corrupted the institutions, committed crimes like that of 1984, twisted the arms of opposition parties and committed many other political sins like imposition of emergency, but all those are not as dangerous as theocratising the State which moves in the direction of dismantling democracy itself. This was the essential difference between post-independence Pakistan and the Congress-ruled India.
Congress and BJP
But the BJP-ruled India sets many things into motion that compete with Pakistan. One among them is theocratising the Indian State in competition with the Islamic theocracy that exists in Pakistan. The difference between the Congress and the BJP is that for the Congress, Pakistan was an inimical State but it never treated Pakistani people as its enemies. The BJP, on the other hand, treats the Pakistani people as its enemies.
The Congress never tried to emulate Pakistan in terms of State pattern. At times it tried to emulate the Soviet Union, at times the Euro-American States. But the BJP, as a theocratic (not merely communal) party, lives with an enemy image of Pakistani people, as they belong to an enemy religion, but it is in love with the mode of theocratic State that the Pakistani rulers built with a blind vision of Islamism. The BJP?s whole ideology is constructed around anti-Islam. The minority-centred political vision of the BJP sees a solution in theocratisation of Indian State in Hindu mode. But unlike a Muslim theocratic State a Hindu theocratic State means that it is essentially a caste hegemonic State.
Hidden agenda
For a Hindu theocratic State the hidden agenda is to demolish the hopes of Dalit-Bahujans. Given the organised structure of Muslims and Christians, who are their open enemies, they can find defense mechanisms. Where is such a defense mechanism for Dalit-Bahujans? In fact, the greatest sufferers in a Hindu theocratic State would be Dalit-Bahujans. While working in friendly alliance with the BJP, Kanshi Ram and Mayavati should understand this direction of the BJP.
The way the BJP handled the Ram temple is essentially theocratic and the way it is handling the terrorism question is war-mongering. It never handled national issues from the point of view of constitutional legality. That itself is strong indication of theocratic and war-mongering thinking of the social forces sitting at the top of the government. Even in handling the Ayodhya issue the central leadership used the Supreme Court?s direction as a necessary evil. During that period, the State and the larger civil society were essentially treated as Hindu.
At every stage, that definite line between secular State and the Hindu religious community was/is rubbed off. In the context of Ayodhya, the way the Sankaracharyas, sadhus and sanyasis used the chambers of the ministers of the federal government is more than enough indication of theocratisation of the Indian State. In the context of Kashmir, the way the Sangh Parivar forces are talking the language of ?two eyes for one eye? and ?jaw for a tooth? shall prove to be most dangerous for the whole nation.
They would like to handle the question of Kashmir and Muslims from a position of Hindu hegemony. Communal carnages inside India and nuclear war with neighbours will lead to the end of India as much as the end of Pakistan. We must be aware of this danger in the near future.
© Copyright, 1999 The Printers (Mysore)Ltd.
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