DAWN - Opinion; 30 October, 2004

Published October 30, 2004

A turn in Indian politics

By Afzaal Mahmood

The defeat of BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra, India's wealthiest and second most populous state (100 million), is bound to have a national fallout, influencing the future course of the country's domestic politics.

In state elections held on October 13, the Congress-NCP (National Congress Party of Sharad Pawar) alliance won 141 of 288 seats compared to 117 of BJP-Shiv Sena. With 71 seats NCP has emerged as the single largest party, followed by the Congress (69), Bal Thackeray's Shiv Sena (62) and BJP (54).

Most of the remaining seats have gone to independents. The Congress-NCP win is all the more remarkable because it defied the anti-incumbent backlash and a minimum-scale rebellion in the Congress camp where Congressmen were contesting against the officially nominated candidates.

The Maharashtra election results show beyond any shadow of doubt that political emphasis is shifting from religious-based politics to social and economic issues.

The old slogans of communal hatred are losing their appeal in favour of livelihood issues like roads, water and electricity. The defeat of Shiv Sena, known for its demagoguery and rabidly anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan venom, is particularly significant in this connection.

The BJP's response to the electoral defeat in Maharashtra has been predictable. The hardliners in the BJP as well as their mentor, the RSS, have attributed the defeat of the party in the general election to its failure to fully implement the Hindutva agenda, as opposed to the former prime minister Vajpayee's "development" plank.

Consequently, the RSS favourite, Mr L. K. Advani, has been elected the new president of the BJP, his third stint in that capacity. Soon after his election, Mr Advani defended his party's association with the RSS and urged party cadres not to be apologetic about their beliefs.

It appears that the BJP has rejected Mr Vajpayee's analysis of the party's debacle in the April-May Lok Sabha elections. According to him, it was neither "over-confidence nor complacency" that led to the party's defeat. It was the "safronization" or the efforts to "Hinduize" the pluralistic way of living that was rejected by the people.

The Maharashtra defeat has uncovered the bitterness of the power struggle among the BJP's second-rung leaders who have been waiting to take over from Mr Vajpayee or Mr Advani. Both are in their late seventies and, therefore, unlikely to lead the BJP into the next general election

The BJP's ten-point Goa-charter is an attempt to placate its NDA allies as well as the RSS. It vows to restore the "primacy of ideology and idealism" at all levels in the party. But it appears that the BJP has not learnt any lesson from its defeat in the Lok Sabha polls.

The party has now evolved a two-fold political strategy. One, to sharpen Hindutva and the other is to change the image of the BJP from that of the party of the urban rich to that which cares for the poor and rural India.

The BJP's main rival, the Congress, has its own problems to tackle. It won fewer seats in the Maharashtra polls than its coalition partner NCP which wanted the post of chief minister, which the Congress was reluctant to part with.

The two alliance partners have now agreed on a compromise formula which was made possible in no small measure due to the tenacity and unity of purpose displayed by Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar.

However, a far more serious problem for the Congress is that in the coming state elections it will be pitted against its own allies and coalition partners in the Manmohan Singh government, which is the first coalition government the Congress has led.

Politics at the centre will be deeply influenced by the impending struggle for power in the states where assembly elections are due in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and Bihar in the coming 20 months or so.

At the moment, the main problem for the Congress-led government is to settle differences with its Communist coalition partners over some economic reforms which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh intends to implement.

The contentious issues include privatizing airports, raising the cap on foreign investment in the insurance and telecommunications industries and cutting the subsidized interest rates paid to pensioners through a provident fund.

In UP, the most populous state, because the Mulayam Singh government is dependent on Congress support, an election there cannot be deferred for long. The tussle in UP between Sonia Gandhi's' Congress and Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party(SP) is for the crucial Muslim vote.

It is interesting to recall that the last time the Congress won in UP was in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi, riding on a wave of sympathy vote, swept away all before him. Since then the Congress has barely won a dozen seats or even fewer out of 80 UP Lok Sabha seats.

The poor showing of the BJP in the April-May general elections, followed by Shiv Sena-BJP defeat in the Maharashtra poll, should not lead any one to conclude that political emphasis in India has irrevocably shifted from religious-based politics to social and economic issues.

The Sangh Parivar is down but not quite out and unless the Congress and its allies fully utilize their electoral victory in countering communalism, it will again become active and pervasive.

As a matter of fact, the danger is that, in order to regain its lost influence, the BJP, under new leadership, may now focus on a redefinition of Hindu interests and Hindutva. As a part of this strategy, the BJP is likely to embark on mass campaigns on several issues which would serve to polarize society along communal lines.

One of the campaigns will be against reservations for Muslims, as announced by the Andhra Pradesh government but stayed by the courts. It may be recalled that in the 1991 general election, the BJP made considerable electoral gains by openly playing the Hindu vote-bank card.

The Sangh Parivar, besides reviving the Ram Janambhoomi movement, is likely to invent new sites of agitation and mobilization which will certainly disturb communal harmony and peace in India.

As the demolition of the Babri mosque showed, religious mobilization through emotive issues has yielded maximum dividends and the BJP's new leadership may opt to follow this strategy yet again.

Although the RSS and the hard-liners in the BJP appear to be convinced that polarizing the electorate along communal lines will bring electoral gains, the moderates argue that the party would lose further ground if it does not learn a lesson from its defeat in the general election. If the BJP wants to remain relevant in Indian politics, it has to reinvent itself to suit the needs of present-day India.

Hindutva once paid dividends because it was the need of the moment. As that moment has passed, Hindutva will no longer work. This was clearly shown by the party's poor performance in the general election and the Maharashtra poll. Whether the post-Vajpayee leadership follow the Hindutva line or attend to the task of making the BJP a normal, right-wing political party remains to be seen.

The writer is a former ambassador.

What if it's Kerry's war?

By Jim Hoagland

In less than a week, Iraq could be John Kerry's war. If the Democrats win on November 2, the president-elect must immediately focus on what a US military withdrawal from Iraq would mean for the Middle East and for the United States.

Until then Kerry will have had little time, or incentive, to conceive of failure in Iraq as anything other than a vote-attracting cudgel to swing at George W. Bush. If Kerry and his team have done much deep thinking on Iraq - particularly on a comprehensive strategy that takes into account the possibility of U.S. failure there - that thinking has not emerged in their campaign prescriptions.

Like Wagner's music, the absence of clear commitments at this stage may not be as bad - or in this case as damaging - as it sounds. The Democratic challenger is not handcuffed to specific actions in Iraq as he is on health care or on naming Supreme Court justices. Kerry has room to jettison implausible campaign promises as Iraqi and international realities assert themselves.

But he must quickly fill the policy vacuum that he will then have created. He and Bush must immediately engage in a transition that allows Kerry to deal with Iraq and the struggle against terrorist networks. And Kerry - a process guy in the jargon of Washington - must above all keep his eye on context in the time of transition.

It is the urgency of the post-election situation, not the certainty of a Kerry victory, that triggers these comments now. Democrats will quickly rediscover the dangers of answered prayers if Kerry wins a race that is deadlocked as I write.

A change at the White House in wartime would produce a dislocation that needs to be anticipated and compensated for by Kerry. Many of Kerry's supporters seem to dismiss his pledges to fight on in Iraq - only better than Bush - as campaign rhetoric that masks an intention to withdraw U.S. troops swiftly.

Iraq is, in this view, to be written off as "Bush's war," a conflict begun on the basis of deliberate lies and undertaken for nefarious purposes that can now be abandoned.

Kerry has come close to making that case part of his campaign. But he adds that, having invaded Iraq, the United States cannot now cut and run. Defeat is not an option, he says in an echo of Bush's position.

But Kerry's repeated denunciations of Iraq as the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time weaken the moral and perhaps even the legal base for ordering Americans to continue to fight there if he becomes president. He will have to act quickly to clarify the whys and hows, as well as the shape, of continued U.S. involvement.

The "wrong war" statements not only will discourage countries such as France and Germany from providing the international troops promised by Kerry but will also subject present coalition members such as Poland and South Korea to intensified pressures at home to withdraw.

By Inauguration Day, Kerry's international options may be shrinking, not expanding. (So may those of a re-elected Bush.) The victor - be it Bush or Kerry - should drop the intellectual pretence that the United States cannot lose in Iraq.

At some point in any war the damage done to a democratic society at home so exceeds the benefits that can be gained abroad that people say "enough." It happened in Vietnam, and it happened in Europe's colonial wars in Africa and Asia.

We are not at that point in Iraq. But America's strategic impatience with having to confront daily the cruelty and horror of the conflict there is on the rise and cannot be neglected.

Only by contemplating and articulating in realistic detail the strategic consequences of a U.S. withdrawal under fire can the next president meet the challenge of that impatience. -Dawn/Washington Post Service

Is Hindutva phase over?

By Kuldip Nayar

I cannot make out why the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is seen to be going back to its Hindutva agenda. The party never departed from it. Whether it was the demolition of the Babri masjid or the massacre in Gujarat, the message was the same: Hindu fanaticism would not allow pluralism to flourish in India.

Liberals like Chandarababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam and George Fernandes of the Samata Party must have been conscious of it. But since they wanted to enjoy power, they had to hug the BJP.

One got from New Delhi all the food grains and funds it could for Andhra Pradesh. The other became defence minister. Ram Vilas Paswan and Ajit Singh, who cried themselves hoarse in the name of secularism, too joined hands with the ruling BJP because it meant cabinet berths.

The Hindu intelligentsia generally saw with dismay what the BJP was doing to education, information and culture to further parochialism. But the party meant power those days - and a source of patronage. Some of the top intellectuals could no resist the temptation.

Even Hindutva was rationalized. The media gave all the attention to the BJP's philosophy as if it was an ideology like capitalism and communism. Never was the party's fascist face exposed, not even the pogrom of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who was singled out for attack but not the entire leadership which only shrugged shoulders by describing the carnage as shameful.

By visiting the RSS headquarters, L.K. Advani, soon after becoming the BJP chief, has done nothing new to evoke comments like "the return of Hindutva." The BJP was always in spirit at Nagpur and guided from there.

RSS pracharaks (preachers) were members of parliament on the BJP ticket. A few were even ministers. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee would take pride in saying abroad that he was a swayamsevak.

Advani may have tried to add a bit of drama by taking along Varun, Sanjay Gandhi's son, to the RSS headquarters. But it does not mean anything. The Nehru dynasty counts, but not if it professes a wrong ideology. Nehru's sway was because of his secular and liberal views.

The RSS remains couched in its middle age thinking which takes pride in the pre-eminence of one religion. RSS chief Sudarshan wants the Buddhists, the Sikhs and Jains to come back to the fold of Hinduism.

But he does not say a word about the plight of dalits who are Hindus. They constitute some 20 per cent of the Hindu population and face the same type of discrimination and scorn which they did hundreds of years ago.

In the RSS scheme of things, prejudice against Muslims - 14 per cent of the electorate, - does not lessen a bit. Urdu is hated because it is linked with Muslims. The RSS chief is critical of the two lakh jobs the BJP had promised the Urdu teachers during the Lok Sabha polls.

"Did it ever occur to them that Urdu is the language promoting vivisection of the country," says Sudarshan. One thing basic about fanatics is that they live in a world of their own and do not mind derision of the public.

Advani tells all about the BJP's new policy - and thinking - after talking to the RSS chief for an hour and a half. He says the BJP will be back in line with the Sangh ideology. Where did it go in the first instance? It has been through and through the Hindutva standard-bearer.

The BJP has not changed. The so-called secular middle class has. First it was aligning with the party. Now it is discarding the saffron cover to be acceptable to the powers that be. It knows how to move with times.

The Congress does not trust it but enjoys the sight of its kowtowing. The party knows that its frontrunners are great fixers. It likes their resourcefulness. What the Congress does not seem to realize is that they are forced to approach the party because there is a renewed faith in secularism throughout the country.

Both the general election and the state polls in Maharashtra have shown that the parivar brand of Hinduism does not sell. On the other hand, the Gujarat happenings have consolidated the Muslim support behind the Congress.

The demolition of the Babri masjid intensified the Muslim hatred against the BJP. But they stayed distant from the Congress at that time because its Prime Minister Narasimha Rao looked a conniver in their eyes.

The BJP should know that it got credibility after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination only when Jayaprakash Narayan, a Gandhian, took it under his wings to fight Mrs Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism.

He had doubts about its credentials but had no option except to trust it because his fight was to save democracy. The old Jana Sangh reaped advantage because it too looked accepting Janata Party's ethos.

The BJP cadre may feel happy that Advani who built the party from scratch in 1979 is again at the helm of the party's affairs. But the scenario was different then. Once the Janata Party disintegrated, the BJP was the only all-India option available in the Hindi belt.

The BJP harnessed the discontent over mis performance of the Congress. Regional parties were keen to share power at the centre. The BJP took the initiative something which the Congress refused to do. The BJP also looked cleaner when it was out of power but once in government, its ministers were found as corrupt as ministers in the earlier regimes.

The BJP's problems may not lessen even when it has a youthful head as its president. It is true that the 50 per cent of the one billion population in India is under the age of 25.

But it is equally true that young boys and girls are more interested in their career than in the BJP's ideology. Many of them have taken to modern ideas and culture and find Hindutva outmoded. The revival of Ram Mandir movement will disgust the youth.

It is possible that Avani may enforce discipline within the party. Vankaiah Naidu, as BJP president, could not stop Uma Bharti from her tricolour yatra - a farce - nor could he dissuade Pramod Mahajan, one of the general-secretaries, from becoming part and parcel of the Shiv Sena which said that it did not want north Indians and Muslims in Maharashtra.

However, the exit of Naidu may revive the old allegation that the BJP is a north Indian party. Whatever it has built in Karnataka - the only state in the south - is in danger.

I wonder if Advani can stop the party's downhill journey. The BJP has to consider its policy de novo. By inducting a Muslim here and a Sikh there, the party cannot become acceptable.

The BJP would have to prove that its nationalism is not a cover for Hindu chauvinism. Advani does not fill the bill, nor does his attack on liberalism help in any way. The new climate in the country suggests that the people are distancing themselves from extremists and fanatics.

The country is back on the road to secularism. The BJP will have a hard time to recover from the reverses it has suffered in the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra elections. Advani's claim to come back to power soon seems only wishful thinking or a straw to which his party men can cling in the sea of disappointments.

The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.

Why non-proliferation has failed

By Mirza Aslam Beg

A nation's response to intimidations and threats depends upon its national character. Responses are determined by the psycho-social realities, which generate resilience to withstand the challenges. Iran possesses an inherent capability to face and absorb the multi-directional onslaught of threats to its integrity and sovereignty.

Such are the nuclear security concerns of Iran, that it has rejected the European offer for trade concessions for abandoning the enrichment of uranium. The threat of sanctions and embargoes will meet the same fate as the lucrative offers of the European Three.

Could Iran be subjected to the same fate as Osirik - the Iraqi nuclear facility - met in 1981 at the hands of Israel? Certainly not because Iran would be reacting quite differently from what may be expected as it is prepared to face even an all-out war.

Implicit is the assumption that Iran is fully cognizant of the threat to its security and is not likely to barter away its interests for any temporary gains. Iran is prepared to consider the request to suspend uranium enrichment only with the proviso that it does not "contradict the Islamic Republic's criteria" as expressed by Hassan Rohani, the nuclear negotiator. It unequivocally implies that Iran will not compromise on abandoning its programme of enrichment of Uranium, for peaceful purposes.

In 1979, Iran faced aggression by Iraq. The United States, in particular, wanted to destroy the 'axis of evil' and hard liners like Henry Kissinger wished "both [Iran and Iraq] kill each other" to serve the geo-political security interests of Israel.

Iran's neighbours, Pakistan and the rest of the world, abandoned it to its fate. Iran fought back single-handedly and after eight years of struggle, resulting in millions of dead and wounded, succeeded in crossing the Shatt-al-Arab.

As it deployed its forces in the Faw peninsula, poised for offensive towards Basra, Saddam Hussein struck with chemical weapons - the weapons of mass destruction supplied by the 'civilized world'.

In one single attack, 15,000 Iranian troops died or were wounded. The offensive towards Basra was halted, because Iran had no capability to defend itself against weapons of mass destruction and called for ceasefire.

Today Iran is fully capable of answering the threats and cannot be coerced into submission. The reasons are obvious, as can be concluded from the following: * Iran has very little trust in the United Nations, United States or Europe and their guarantees. The bitter memories of the unjust war of 1979 and the use of weapons of mass destruction of 1987 are still fresh in their memory. This has persuaded them to go nuclear.

* Forced Isolation, mutual distrust, continued disrespect for Iranian dignity by calling it a "rogue state and axis of evil" and threats from nuclear capable Israel, has prompted Iran to acquire weapons of mass destruction, to correct the imbalance.

It is immaterial, whether they are helped by Indian scientists or Pakistanis or any other, because, a nation with determination, will in any case acquire the capability. Pakistan did it in a short period of 10 years. Iran may well have succeeded in acquiring the nuclear capability by now.

* Iranians have also developed missiles, as means of delivery to engage targets in Israel, thus putting pressure on Israel to refrain from attacking Iranian nuclear installations. Thus the nuclear imbalance seems to have been corrected in the Middle Eastern region.

At this point in time, Iran and Israel, now appear to be where Pakistan and India stood during the 1990 nuclear standoff. Fear of retaliation now deters Israel, that is "mindful of the consequences of attack on Iranian nuclear installations."

* Iran's nuclear capability is Israel-specific, same as Pakistan's capability is India-specific. It deters the friends of Israel also, who, under the present circumstances, do not have the physical capability to attack Iran, because of over-stretched resources and commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Air power alone can cause only collateral damage, but cannot help win a war.

* Iranian national security adviser and nuclear negotiator, Hussain Monsavian says: "Mistrust is bilateral. If the Americans and the Europeans do not trust Iran, we cannot trust them either."

The mistrust is likely to increase further and add to the prevailing tension, because, the American strategy of engagement suggests military options without bombing Iran, in order to step up pressure, creatively to contain and deter Iran.

"Steps could include increasing US military presence around Iran; reinforcing the region's protection against missiles extending an explicit nuclear umbrella to those threatened by Tehran; transferring more advanced weapons to the states around Iran; and so on. All these measures, as a package, could show Tehran that Iranians will be less secure if it pursues nuclear weapons".

It will be unwise to impose sanctions on Iran, because the developed world cannot afford to lose 2.5 million barrel a day supply of oil. In a situation of war the Gulf of Hurmuz may also be closed, creating a serious energy security crisis, for the world at large, buying oil at over US$ 55 a barrel.

An elegy should be written on the nuclear non-proliferation regime as it has proved a lamentable effort in achieving its objectives. It failed in its purpose because its rules of business are discriminatory.

Pakistan corrected the nuclear imbalance in South Asia as a national security imperative. Iran is attempting to do the same in the Middle Eastern region. South Korea, perhaps, is not far behind in correcting the balance in the Far Eastern region, with its nuclear programme far more advanced than that of Iran.

It is therefore, not difficult to discern and identify the "nuclear fault-line", extending from Israel to Iran, Pakistan to India and South Korea to North Korea. How, the new balance of terror will be managed from the Pacific to the Mediterranean is a task for those who have to frame the rules of business for the non-proliferation regime of the twenty-first century.

Iran possibly cannot renege on demands of national security because of mutual distrust, threats of war, sanctions, forced isolation, discrimination and the humiliation of being labelled "axis of evil and rogue state".

The writer is a former chief of the army staff.

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