The Taliban is already
amidst us in India
They will not come from Pakistan; they are here in the form of Narendra Modi
and his zealots
BY JYOTIRMAYA SHARMA
The Supreme Court has asked the SIT to probe Narendra Modi’s
role in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002. But that will not still the
chorus for Modi as a future national leader of the BJP. As it is, the timing and
context of the Modi-for-PM demand is curious.
In part it is admission that the BJP-led NDA will have to wait a
few more years before making a bid for power.
But it also implies that the prime-minister-in-eternal
anticipation and perpetual desperation, Lal Krishna Advani, has failed to
capture the imagination of even his own flock.
Other than the obvious reasons, there is an obvious tactic at
play here: the BJP hopes that Modi’s name as a future leader would actually help
win some votes in these elections. It is an appeal to the highly voluble, if not
sizeable, number of the Indian middle class which has not merely discovered the
simple joys of voting but has the temerity to now reclaim the public space they
have for so long spurned with mighty disdain.
It has two things in common with Modi. The first is a certain
brand of vulgar impatience and haste, a hallmark of the mob as well as the
tyrant, born of a sense of self-proclaimed purity and righteousness. The other
is a misplaced sense of aspiring for such indeterminate goals such as ‘progress’
and ‘development’, a chimera that leaves everyone out of the equation other than
the sort of worthies who stood on a stage and argued for Modi’s elevation as
prime minister.
Ethical
There is then little difference between the two Aruns, Shourie
and Jaitley, and Ambani, Mittal and Tata: they feel emboldened enough to suggest
who the next prime minister ought to be without a care in the world for the
democratic process to decide on such weighty issues. The message from them is:
we know what is good for you. We represent the country because we produce wealth
or facilitate in its production.
Apart from the cheerleaders for Modi, it would be instructive to
look at the man himself in terms of three statements made recently. In the
absurd debate regarding whether Manmohan Singh is a weak prime minister, Modi
came up with a priceless statement. He dared the prime minister to hang Afzal
Guru in order to prove his strength and establish his machismo.
There was a time when Gandhi shook a mighty empire through
non-violence and yet never abandoned fundamental moral principles in order to
take on the British. He broke laws that were unjust but understood the
importance of laws as a guiding framework for any civilised society. Killing
someone just to prove an imaginary idea of strength had no place in his moral
universe.
Modi represents an alternative ‘morality’ which seeks to
justify, albeit covertly, encounter killings in the name of swiftness and
expediency. This haste too is born of a disdain for constitutional and legal
procedures as well as from the self-appointed role of judging who the ‘enemy’ is
and finding effective ways of dealing with such real and mythical enemies. It is
a mechanical world of action and, in this instance, unequal and opposite
reaction, untouched by norms of ethics and morality.
Modi’s disdain for the old and for children also springs from a
corpus of ideas that are far removed from any acceptable version of the Indian
ethos. The polarities represented by the ‘budhiya’ and the ‘gudiya’
remark comes from a 19th century European set of ideas that celebrated the
useful, able-bodied, young, masculine, virile individual who could work in
factories, contribute to development and progress.
This view found the old and the very young to be a burden on
society, a universe far removed from a world that venerated a Vyasa, a Vasistha
and a Bhisma and found merit in the lives of a Dhruva and Prahlad. In this
sense, Modi is a worthy inheritor of Golwalkar’s mantle and the only hope for
the RSS. It was, after all, Golwalkar who categorically suggested that once an
RSS worker grew old and infirm and ceased to be useful to the organisation the
best course left for him was to sit by the wayside, beg to keep body alive and
die. It is another matter that an old and infirm Golwalkar was looked after by
the same organisation and his health became a priority for the RSS in the last
years of his life. This accent on youth and machismo was also the very stuff
that Hitler’s version of a fascist movement found its sustenance from and
thrived on, peddling this skewed idea.
Barbarism
Lastly, Modi’s recent statement that he is ready to be hanged in
public if charges against him regarding his complicity in the post-Godhra riots
were to be proved is enormously important and is to be taken seriously.
Mussolini, the Italian fascist, was summarily executed by communist partisans
and hung upside down. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were then hung on
meathooks from the roof of a petrol station and stoned by civilians. In this
country, till such time that civilised values are still in place, people are not
hanged in public.
There is a rule of law, however flawed, that takes care of
crimes and doles out punishment that affords a degree of dignity to even
criminals.
Medieval forms of justice are no more in vogue in this country
and will not be so till such time that the Indian people actually commit the
grave error of allowing an authoritarian individual like Modi to assume the
office of prime minister.
Parallel
Let us recap the three statements Modi has made in the past few
months. These were about hanging a man pronounced guilty as a sign of strength,
about old women and little girls playing with dolls and about himself being
hanged in public.
There is an uncanny resemblance in all the three to what we have
known all along as the Taliban’s preferred way of meting out justice. We frown
on these kind of barbaric acts and the sangh parivar often implies that there is
a relation between these forms of barbarism and the religious affiliation of
those who indulge in these acts.
In rightly expressing our moral indignation against the Taliban,
we forget that the Taliban will not enter this country through our northern
borders but is already present in an indigenous version in the form of Modi and
his supporters.
The Taliban of today is only a mirror image of the irrational
and mindless rage of Aswatthama, the son of Drona, in the epic, Mahabharata.
Modi is the inheritor of Aswatthama’s rage. In the epic, Aswatthama had to
ultimately pay for his deeds. But before that he wreaked destruction and brought
sorrow to countless people. Is Modi’s future and fate the same as that of
Drona’s misguided son? n
(Jyotirmaya Sharma is a professor of political science at
the University of Hyderabad. This article was published in the epaper, Mail
Today, on April 28, 2009.)
Courtesy: Mail Today; www.mailtoday.in
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