Caste, communalism and coup

Jawed Naqvi, Delhi,

There were at least two occasions in recent memory when the exultation on Indian TV channels was telling.Gen Musharraf staged a military coup in Pakistan and at about the  same time, in India, then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was heading for the majestic British-built presidential palace for a swearing-in ceremony of his newly elected government.

More recently, as India's independent election commission announced the dates for the next parliamentary polls in April, a fractious and querulous coalition government in Pakistan was making a largely atavistic deal with Taliban fanatics in the scenic Swat valley.

This week the boot was on the other foot. As much of Pakistan united in a largely peaceful national campaign to clean up the all-encompassing mess dumped in its judicial and political arteries by the last round of military rule, news headlines in India were riveted to its own variant of atavism.

Although caste-based politics and communal mobilisation had a start before Indian independence, their resurgent manifestation as a popular ploy in the country's democratic journey deserves closer scrutiny. Much outrage was expressed in Wednesday's papers over Varun Gandhi's abusive election campaign, in which he threatened to chop the hands of Indian Muslims and send them to Pakistan. (It was a string of filthy speeches but enough for TV channels to seek an improvement in their TRP ratings. Put it to the fallout of global recession!)

Varun Gandhi is Rahul Gandhi's younger first cousin, both being grandsons of Indira Gandhi, and great grandsons of Jawaharlal Nehru himself. Indian newspapers found it  particularly scandalous that the scion of the house of Nehru, the erudite, liberal and secular founder leader of Indian democracy could indulge in dirty street slang. For a
knockout blow he even abused Mahatma Gandhi, who though unrelated to India's ruling Gandhi clan, has served as an ageless mascot for a host of parties.

It would make sense to berate a young first-time candidate in the fray for straying from the line. But that is putting it mildly. What the Indian media will not discuss is that the young Gandhi is a product of decades of the communalisation that has given India many a popular government both at the centre and in the states. Their coyness is nothing but a sleight of hand, for it fortifies the very tendencies that the media and indeed a section of the middle classes appear to want to reject.

For months if not years Varun Gandhi has been spewing communal venom in his columns through the rightwing journal, Organiser. Every significant Hindu leader has patronised the journal, which is treated with reverence reserved for a party mouthpiece. 

Of course, that is where the sleight of hand comes in. The question that will not be asked is whether and why Atal Behari Vajpayee, before India's opinion makers anointed him as a moderate leader and before he began to compare himself with Nehru, gave exactly the same speech as his younger party colleague did the other day.When did Vajpayee, whose Enoch Powell-like "rivers of blood" speech in Assam led to the infamous Nellie massacre of Muslim women and children by enraged Hindus in 1983, become a moderate leader?