By M D NALAPAT
It was expected that the Modi government would during its term rectify some of the injustices done to the majority community during the Sonia-Manmohan decade.
Prime Minister
Narendra Damodardas Modi has asked the electorate to give him time “till
2022” in order to complete the tasks he had promised during the 2014
Lok Sabha campaign to fulfil. The coming elections will show whether
enough voters are willing to cut enough slack for him to ensure a second
term. The chemistry of the 2019 campaign will be very different from
2014, hence any effort by the BJP to repeat the arguments of that
contest may prove unproductive. In particular, given the fact that no
UPA VVIP has been prosecuted for the misdeeds claimed by the BJP to have
been committed against them, an anti-corruption plank may backfire, as
seems to be happening now. The three-fourths reduction in the Lok Sabha
tally of the Congress party was caused by voter revulsion at the
perception of pervasive graft during the UPA as also the skewed notion
of “secularism” of the Manmohan Singh government, which—especially under
Home Ministers Sushilkumar Shinde and Chidambaram—regarded
manifestations of religious or exclusivist sentiment as “communal” only
when originating from those who were Hindu. Fanatics in other
numerically large communities in India were given a free pass, and
although some of the self-declared leaders of these communities were
frankly communal, and indeed preached religious supremacy, regarding
only their particular faith (or its variant) as consequential and the
rest as dross, such elements were coddled and encouraged, as long as
they were not Hindu. Should the BJP cross the safe margin of 230 seats
in 2019, it will not be because of the issue of development, but because
of the continuing apprehension amongst several within the Hindu
community that decades of second-class citizenship will return, should
the Congress Party and others wedded to “Nehruvian secularism” reclaim
the portals of governance.
Hindu backing for the Narendra Modi
government would come despite very little being done during 2014-2018 to
rectify some of the injustices done to elements of the majority
community during the Sonia-Manmohan decade, such as the placing of
responsibility by the RTE for the education of the underprivileged only
on schools run by Hindus, rather than on all citizens of India. The
consequence, whether intended or not, is to make it much more difficult
for Hindus to run schools than is the case with Muslims or Christians.
During their centuries of dominance, the Mughal Empire reduced the
number of Hindu places of worship substantially, a process that got
delayed in the Kashmir valley, where widespread destruction of Hindu
places of worship had to wait till the 1990s. The British Raj wisely
avoided direct control over mosques while building magnificent churches
across India. The colonial masters took control of numerous Hindu
temples, whether large, medium or in the case of some, small. The
British expropriated almost all temple lands and assets in the process.
It was expected that the Modi government would during its present term
ensure a rectification of this historical injustice, but this seems to
be among the many steps that may need to wait till the promised year of
2022 for fulfilment. And as for an issue that rests at the core of
historical fault lines that saw an overtly religious state break away
from secular India in 1947, this columnist has long been clear that only
a historical act of grace on the part of India’s large and vibrant
Muslim community would ensure that efforts at creating flames of
communal hatred within the Hindu community fail in future. This is the
transfer of just three sites, the Ram Janmabhumi, the Krishna Janmasthan
and the Varanasi temple, all three of which existed but were taken down
subsequently.
Society is a living organism, and it is
far from being a done deal that India will in a brief while get
transformed into the third biggest economy on the globe. A liberal
culture that celebrates diversity, that assures freedom in matters of
diet, dress, beliefs, speech and lifestyle, is essential within the
country. As is the spread among the general population of the
international link language (English) in an interconnected world where
opportunities may be almost as plentiful abroad as at home. Those who
seek to impose curbs on such freedoms are obstacles to the future of
India, while believing themselves to be saviours. On another point, a
supreme act of gracious benevolence (a quality repeatedly mentioned in
the Quran) on the part of the Muslim community with respect to the three
sites mentioned earlier would block into insignificance any effort to
create the deadly hatreds causing communal carnage. It was expected that
the Supreme Court of India would by this time render a final verdict on
the Ram Janmabhumi case, but such hopes are declining by the day. If
not courts or governments, the vibrant Muslim community in India needs
to take the lead in ensuring that a gesture of surpassing nobility be
made by one community to another in a land that is the home of both.
There have been newspaper reports that Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Iraq has
declared that the Shia Wakf Board should not hand over the land claimed
to be in its possession at Ayodhya, “as the mosque belongs to the
Almighty”. Such reports seem improbable, for as the Ayatollah knows, not
just mosques but the entire universe belongs to the Almighty. Any
reading of the Quran would show the beneficence and compassion that
suffuses its words, and it is precisely such a spirit and not
exclusivism and anger that is needed to ensure that India achieve the
social cohesion and stability essential for sustained double digit
growth. A Ram Janmabhumi complex and a Krishna Janmasthan would open
their doors to all, welcoming not just citizens of India but every human
being on the planet, the way other great locations of reverence do,
including the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. Hopefully this will happen by
2022.
Hopefully, so will other requisites for
development, such as lower taxes and regulations. As well as a GST that
has a single low rate, excludes any unit that has a turnover below US$1
million, and which is simple to file returns in. The Prime Minister
announced in 2014 that he would “trust the ordinary citizen”, for
instance, by doing away with the attestation by a gazetted officer of
several documents. That message, of the primacy of civil society in a
democracy, will hopefully become the norm by 2022 rather than continue
to be an exception.
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