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PRIME Minister Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) share more than the same ideology. They share the same outfitters: short-sleeved kurtas for Modi; khaki schoolboy shorts for the RSS pracharaks (party volunteers).
To see Shri Modi stand in an RSS parade giving the characteristic RSS salute — his right arm parallel to his waist — is to plumb the depth of his spiritual affiliation. To learn that he, with members of his BJP cabinet, recently subjected themselves to an audit of their government’s performance by the RSS high command is to be reminded that politics on both sides of the border is no more than a dextrous display of shadow puppetry.
At the end of the BJP-RSS conclave in New Delhi, the BJP’s joint general secretary D. Hosabole declared: “The RSS thinks the government is working in the right direction. They are sincere. The RSS is satisfied.”
The Congress party immediately cried foul. Its leader Manish Tewari called the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat “the real boss of the government of India”, forgetting that a similar taunt had been levelled against the Congress president Mrs Sonia Gandhi during Dr Manmohan Singh’s government. Perhaps what offended the Congress was the brazen way the BJP had exposed an overlap between driving ideology and driven governance.
The paint on our national canvas has begun to run.
It has existed always. The Congress party has forgotten its own history. During the struggle for independence, Mahatma Gandhi, despite not being (in the Quaid’s telling phrase) “even a two-anna member of Congress”, exercised command invisibly over a submissive Nehru and the quiescent Congress leadership. Almost 70 years later, Dr Manmohan Singh throughout his 10-year prime minister-ship was never allowed to forget who was ‘the real boss’.
Anyone rummaging through the annals of political history will find other parallels: the British Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress which held decisive bloc votes in its grubby hands; the British Conservative Party and the 1922 Committee which could and did remove prime ministers as powerful as Mrs Margaret Thatcher; the Communist Party of China and the formidable Deng Xiaoping who, though never head of China’s government or even general secretary of the party, nevertheless as China’s ‘paramount leader’ guided its modernisation programme uninterruptedly for 14 years.
Closer to home, the paint on our national canvas has begun to run, smudging the polychrome of civilian responsibility into the monochrome of military control. We know how the style of military interventions has changed since 1958. Then, Ayub Khan left no doubt in any Pakistani’s mind that he as C-in-C was alone in command. In 1969, Yahya Khan took over and nominally shared authority with the air chief and the naval chief. In 1977, Gen Ziaul Haq’s coup pushed him into a peak of singular dominance. In 1999, Gen Musharraf as chief executive chose to treat Pakistan as if it was a hansom cab, driving it from the back, but never letting go of its reins. (He moved later to the front seat as president in 2001.)
Today, Gen Raheel Sharif holds both the reins of effective governance and the whip of accountability. When he talks, even the prime minister listens. That he chooses to make public statements sparingly is a measure of his sagacity and a sensible awareness of the limits of his now reinforced constitutional position. He uses his army only where it is expected to and is equipped to fight. He leaves baser local skirmishes for the Pakistan Rangers to handle.
By one reckoning, he is scheduled to retire in November 2016. Unlike the former Indian COAS Gen V.K. Singh (now BJP’s minister of state for external affairs), he is unlikely to fudge his birth date by a year simply to stay on. Gen Sharif will not ask for an extension. He will wait for it to be offered to him and then, like Julius Caesar, be “very loath to lay his fingers off it”.
The bushfire of accountability started by Gen Raheel Sharif may well consume a number of prominent figures who do not live in cantonments before it reaches its farthest extremity — another apparently less honest Sharif. There could be nothing more damaging to the general’s credibility and to the swagger stick he wields than to leave such an operation half-done, to see flagrant crime and corruption go unpunished, to admit to fellow Pakistanis that the only justice they can expect, the only equality they can hope for, the only true democracy they should look forward to will be, in Martin Luther King’s words, “the democracy of death”.
Even Dr King’s compelling oratory occasionally needed the crutch of another man’s words to articulate his simmering remonstrance. Using James R. Lowell’s poetry, he bemoaned, as every pillaged impoverished Pakistani does today, a state which sees “Truth forever on the scaffold/ Wrong forever on the throne.”
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2015
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