Tried & tested failures

There is a touch of irony in the way Jawaharlal Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary has come in handy for a myriad parties defeated in this year’s parliamentary polls to come together to pay homage to him. This, at least, proves the relevance of Nehru and his ideals, even if many things Nehruvian have become passé. There are lessons for everyone – Nehru’s supporters who pay him lip service, those who re-invent him when convenient, and his critics, who wake up only when his party, the Congress, is out of power. The primary lesson is that there is nothing, nor it can or should be, static about the political processes that India’s democracy undergoes.

What is recurrent, however, is that the socialists, as per an old adage, never stay together for long, and never stay apart for too long as well. Various factions of the ‘Janata Parivar,’ having diluted much of what they learnt from Rammanohar Lohia, incidentally an inveterate Nehru-baiter, are getting together. Nitish Kumar and Laloo Pradad top that list.

Another Samajwadi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, his base in Uttar Pradesh fast eroding, accuses Gujaratis of being ‘liars’. Even allowing for anti-Modi rhetoric, he is maligning a whole community. Now, he blames laptops that son Akhilesh distributed as pre-poll gifts for spreading “BJP propaganda”. He forgets that he had only provided the medium; someone else took advantage for it. By the way, many a beneficiary sold the laptop in open market for Rs 6,000.

Socialists and Communists have forged anti-Congress fronts in the past. The buzzword in the 1980s was fight against ‘authoritarianism.’ Many of them combined with the BJP to defeat the Congress. Now it is an anti-BJP front. Having been in and out of such alliances, the BJP, as per Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu, says that they are “tried and tested failures.” Another Union Minister Arun Jaitley has pointed to Nehru’s critics at Nehru celebrations. This is partly because the BJP was not invited – rightly, since it has launched a systematic campaign to demolish Nehru. The BJP should know that if the ideas of Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and Deen Dayal Upadhyay have survived and have got re-invented as ‘Hindutva’, the Nehruvian ideology, too, can serve as the basis for a fight back to save secularism.

The Communists are cautious because they cannot hobnob with Mamata Banerjee, their bête noire. They did not push this idea before this year’s parliamentary polls as well. It may be too early in the day to forge a bulwark against the BJP and all that it is promoting.

The Congress has rightly given secular topping to its Nehruvian cake. But it should first introspect on the abuse of that ideal. Its governments had repeatedly failed to control sectarian violence for short-term political gains. The party hunted with the Hindutva hounds till they demolished Babri Masjid. That it has lost ground across the country is ample
proof of it.