Rise and fall of secular hubris: Daily Pioneer - Balbir K Punj, Feb -2- 2003

The concluding fortnight of 2002 was remarkable, with the pseudo-secularists in retreat. Whether that is a retreat without remorse or whether they will have a rethink their actions so far will perhaps be known by the coming summer. Right now, there is largely silence on the part of the Congress, the chief victim of this process. The party observed quietly the 117th year of its foundation and all that its President was willing to say was a one-liner: Though her party is disappointed at the Gujarat election results, it is ready to face future electoral challenges.

Ms Sonia Gandhi's silence is understandable. Her leadership of the Congress is now under scrutiny in her own party -for the first time since she won a resounding victory over the Sharad Pawar-PA Sangma combine in the Congress. It was presumed that her subsequent ability to lead a party, defeated in 1998 and 1999, to victory in 15 State elections sealed her triumph, making the Leader of the Opposition is a prospective candidate for Prime Minister in any future electoral battle at the national level. The lingering doubts about her foreign origin no longer mattered, it seemed.

The Gujarat election results have changed all that. That her party made Hindutva the election issue in Gujarat and sought to oppose it in an environment where the majority community was the victim of a series of conspiracies and terrorist attacks sponsored by a foreign power with local links-culminating in the killing of over 40 innocent pilgrims in a temple-demonstrated a poverty of political foresight. The Congress has now realised that it had miscalculated popular feelings. More important at a time nationalist sentiment is at the top, the issue of the foreign origin of the President of the Congress makes her a big liability.

This is evident in the reports and commentaries of champions of "secularism" in the national media themselves. A recent article by a 'secular' journalist reveals that "there has also been a growing demand among Congressmen to initiate Priyanka Gandhi in to active politics". This is seen as a step to strengthen and energise the party. But reading between the lines, it simply means that Congressmen have begun to feel the present leadership could be a liability if cultural nationalism becomes a central issue. The dilemma the Congress faces is that-hoping to retain its minority vote bank-it is unable to call a spade a spade and ask the minority not to provide an infrastructure of support to terrorists pushed into the country from outside.

The Government has recently come out with the information that over 9,000 Pakistani visitors have overstayed in India and some 3,000 of them are not traceable. Also, 90 per cent of them have given false addresses of their supposed relatives in India. This means that several thousand Pakistanis are hiding within India and somebody is providing them shelter. If our people put two and two together, how can they be blamed for opposing "secularism"? In Gujarat, the people defined true secularism as appeasement of none. If that definition travels throughout India, the champions of appeasement might find themselves at sea the way they did in Gujarat.

Many newspaper and TV commentators have begun to foresee this development. After all, their pontifications on Gujarat proved to be far from reality. They are now comparing the anger against Sikhs that overflowed in 1984 after the killing of Indira Gandhi-of which the Congress was the unintended beneficiary-and the developing situation in India post-Godhra, post-Akshardham, post-Raghunath temple and post-God knows what is in store for this country in the months ahead.

Look at the barbarous beheading of three girls in Jammu & Kashmir for not wearing the burqa. Look at the shooting down of children in the same area. Look at the protest that flared up in Srinagar after terrorists who planned the attack on Parliament, with an intent to hold the Government and Members of Parliament hostages, were sentenced to death. But there is no demonstration against terrorists who behead innocent girls and shoot innocent children. What is the issue then, more so in the worldwide environment where a web of terror is drawn in the name of one religion dripping with hatred?

The secular cabal criticises the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government for linking up with the international coalition against terrorism. It is organising non-cooperation against the country's Defence Minister when things are near-boiling point on the borders. What should the electorate think of a political party that seeks to benefit from these activities?

In the current scenario, the BJP does not have to make terrorism against the Hindus an electoral plank. People are already aware that is the central issue in the coming months, till there is credible evidence that this terrorism and appeasement that provides the breeding ground for cross border terrorists are eradicated. There are hundreds of temples in the country with throngs of devotees who are sitting ducks for terrorists. Would the Congress, for instance, launch a movement to seek expulsion of Pakistanis hiding in the country?

Probably the Congress will refuse to learn from the experience of the last few months. Mr Ashok Gehlot, the Congress Chief Minister of Rajasthan, accuses the Prime Minister of "playing the politics of corpses" in Gujarat. Who really did that? Mr Gehlot is closing his eyes to the terrorists and their breeding ground that littered the Akshardham and Raghunath temples, the J&K Assembly building and Parliament with corpses. And yet he condemns the Prime Minister for making these killings a central issue of the country's political life. Even after the people have given Mr Gehlot and his party a stunning reply by choosing to side with those who fight terrorism, it does not appeal to the Congress that the fight against terrorism is the central issue of the day. Does not the party read the writing on the wall when Islamic terror litters a church in Pakistan with corpses on a Christmas and no Muslim organisation comes out with a protest procession against the dastardly act?

The BJP has protested not against the reports of the carnage at Ahmedabad and Baroda, but at the lack of balance in these. It has protested against the silence on the steps taken to prevent these riots, whether these were effective or not, and the deliberate planting of reports that the burning of the railway coach in Godhra was the handiwork of the VHP to incite Hindus to create communal riots. Some of the incidents reported by the media proved to be mere figments of the imagination when the so-called victims themselves denied their contents.

The hyperbole in the reports was often evident when they described as facts what was by any rational thinking impossible even in a riot situation. The criticism was not against the reporting of Hindu rioters attacking Muslims. It was against the missing of the vital fact that the police gunned down hundreds of Hindus while trying to prevent rioting. The general impression the journalists gave was that, instead of being reporters of facts as they saw them, they were partisan in the unfolding events who intended to see only one side of the story.

Even at Akshardham, there was no investigative report on over 40 Hindu devotees who were killed. No one went to their homes to record what their people were feeling. No one attempted to find out who were the local contacts of the terrorists and who were leading the killers to the temple and who supplied the vital information that helped execute the killing. If journalists become partisan and purveyors of a certain ideology, they can no longer count themselves as objective foot soldiers of the press.