Author: Balbir K Punj
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 22, 2002
To repeat an old adage, those who
do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The Congress, which
had played a rabid communal card in Punjab in the Eigh-ties with disastrous
results for the country, is busy playing the same game again. However,
in the process, it has dropped the fig leaf of secularism and bared its
communal fangs, with the professional secularists looking the other way.
This time Punjab Chief Minister
Amarinder Singh displayed the bravado- arresting some 1,200 Akali activists,
preventing Mr Parkash Singh Badal from entering Amritsar and encouraging
Mr Badal's rival, Mr Gurcharan Singh Tohra, to emerge as an alternate centre
of power within the Akali establishment, all the while pretending that
he was only enforcing law and order and not interfering. Whether or not
the police really defied the sanctity of the temple, it was sent in to
meddle with what was a religious meeting of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak
Committee to elect its own executives. Several national newspapers described
the episode as the worst instance of Government interference in the SGPC
elections in the last 75 years.
There is no doubt that Mr Tohra,
a known extremist in Sikh politics, was adopted as the Congress's mascot
in its bid to subvert Akali politics. The party President's last minute,
well-publicised directive to her Chief Minister not to put his foot in
the Akali door notwithstanding, the Captain is now nursing his injured
toe. Since Ms Sonia Gandhi's word is law in Congress politics, the elaborate
battle plan to interfere in the SGPC elections could no longer be covered
up.
The directive itself was the fig
leaf; the battle plan needed time to prepare and the Chief Minister would
not have been as stupid as to conceal this intention from the party President.
The Sonia directive only served to keep her unsullied by the fallout of
the plan; that too was part of the plan itself.
No one who is aware of the history
of Congress actions in Punjab for the last several decades, can be fooled
by such directives from the party President to its Chief Minister while
the latter goes ahead with his well-laid siege of the Sikh temple elections.
Speaking of history, it was a repeat performance of the devious plan of
Indira Gandhi earlier to control Sikh politics through discrediting the
Akali leadership and setting up rivals.
The strong stand that the Akali
Dal took against the Emergency had convinced Indira Gandhi in the late
Seventies that she should break Sikh unity and plant her own puppet in
the SGPC. Soon after she returned to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi consciously
promoted a rabid, and till then unknown, 'Sant' Bhindranwale against Sant
Longowal and Mr Parkash Singh Badal. JS Bhindranwale even dared to enter
Delhi with his band of armed followers and the Centre did nothing to stop
him. In fact, Indira Gandhi's Home Minister Giani Zail Singh went so far
as to prostrate himself before the Sant. Bhindranwale did the job for which
he was sponsored and supported-breaking Akali unity. But he was nobody's
fool.
Indira Gandhi soon learnt that she
was feeding a Frankenstein's monster. The Sant became a law unto himself
and, to dislodge him, Indira Gandhi had to order Operation Blue Star, which
killed over 300 innocent pilgrims. In the last chapter of that drama, she
herself died a victim of her own excesses. Her eagerness to crush the Akali
Dal was survived by the virulent Sikh militancy in Punjab that took thousands
of innocent lives.
Paradoxically, not only was Indira
Gandhi hailed as the epitome of secularism but even eulogised by the secular-liberal
establishment. She declared India had a big enough Muslim population to
be represented at Islamic forums and sent her representative to attend
the Islamic countries' summit at Rabat in 1974. That did not seem to anger
the secular establishment. That the Organisation of Islamic Conference
did not accept India's application to be admitted is another matter. The
then Prime Minister could achieve her domestic agenda of projecting herself
as the champion of the minorities.
The last 40 years' history of the
Congress is full of instances of its communal approach, followed by a quiet
silence on the part of the secular-liberals who target the BJP specifically
for anything and everything. Rajiv Gandhi's infamous response to the Supreme
Court order imposing the obligation of maintenance on Muslim husbands vis-a-vis
their divorced wives, is by now part of history. At least some Muslim leaders
like Arif Mohammad Khan protested against the throwback to Islamic orthodoxy.
But, in the end, Rajiv Gandhi-supposedly
with his technocrat's outlook-let the liberal opinion within Islam die
down. Without losing time, he also sought to balance it with his great
solicitude for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and the whole drama of the Government-sponsored
shilanyas is too deeply etched in our memory to be forgotten. His aim was
to gain a toehold in the rising Ram Mandir movement as well as in Muslim
orthodoxy. However, he did not succeed.
Throughout the Nineties, the then
Congress Prime Minister PV Narasim-ha Rao, through his hatchet man Chandraswami,
sought to set up a rival organisation of Hindu Sants to divide the Ayodhya
movement. He also sought to float an organisation of Imams. This downright
communal agenda did not click. But the secular-liberal establishment had
no word of condemnation for the Government dabbling with essentially religious
organisations and trying to buy support among them by using public funds.
The experience with the interference
in Punjab clearly brought home one aspect of such meddling; it only leads
to competitive militancy among rival religious bodies. But the recent interference
in the SGPC elections shows that the Congress has, like the Bourbons, learnt
nothing and forgotten nothing.
When it comes to social reforms,
the Congress has been, from the days of the Khilafat movement, on the side
of orthodoxy for Muslims and forcible reforms for the Hindus. Jawaharlal
Nehru was insistent on Hindu code reform; he did not lift a finger when
it came to implementing the constitutional directive for a single civil
law of marriage and inheritance, lest some communities were affronted.
That communal distinction in applying
the same principles of liberalism and humanism persists to this day. The
culture is spread over the entire secular-liberal establishment. For instance,
State Governments have taken over and managed Hindu temples and institutions.
That is done in the name of proper management of their revenues and properties,
including the upkeep of the historic value of these temples. But just suggest
that similar takeovers should be imposed with regard to the properties
of mosques and churches, and you will have the secular-liberal establishment
barking at you and political parties staging dharnas and calling for bandhs.
Yet it is public knowledge that wakfs are generally mismanaged and their
property alienated.
Many people shed tears over the
conditions in the refugee camps of Ahmedabad recently; no one was available
to even write about the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, displaced from
their homes, deprived of their properties and now living as refugees in
their own country. None of these numerous secular-liberal establishments
or their academics in universities sheds a tear over the displaced Pandits.
In our country, there is a law against
communalism and against promoting communal hatred. Yet against the spirit
of the Constitution, intellectual ghetto-dwellers say that these laws apply
selectively. Some can get away with any wrong so long as their political
label and communal identity are of the right type; some cannot if their
label and identity happen to be Hindu. If this is not hypocrisy, then what
is?
