No luxury of silence

In the wake of Delhi verdict, the BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar are going through motions of blame game, which is common to all parties that are humbled at the ballot box. The Sangh has already hauled up the likes of Nirmala Sitaraman, Smriti Irani and Ravi Shankar Prasad for their “undignified” digs at Arvind Kejriwal during the campaign. Sitaraman, for instance, called the AAP leader a thief. This action followed the general consensus in the Parivar that Narendra Modi et al had spoiled the BJP chances by their AAP chief-centric negative campaign.

The party chief Amit Shah has also come in for a round of bashing at the hands of Delhi BJP leaders. And the media is taking delight in taunting both Shah and Modi, who were the toast of the town till the other day. Conventional wisdom, therefore, is that Modi will find his stride stymied in the days ahead. I do not think so. Instead of Modi, it will be Arun Jaitely, who will find the going tough.

The Delhi strategy including the import of Kiran Bedi was largely dictated by Jaitley and my information is that Modi and Shah went along with him since he is a blue-blood Delhiite, who had cut his teeth in the Delhi University Student Union politics. In his CV are recorded the BJP victories in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Moreover, Arun Jaitley has earned the reputation of in-house Chanakya, who had helped Modi keep at bay the likes of L K Advani, though he himself started his innings as an Advani protégé.

So his Kiran Bedi plan met with no resistance, particularly after Modi’s rally at Ramlila Maidan ended as a flop show. The plan misfired because Jaitley failed to realise that Punjabis don’t dominate Delhi any longer. The influx of Biharis, Poorvanchalis and Uttarakhandis besides Haryanvis has changed the face of the city. Kejriwal himself is a Haryanvi; he was born at Siwani in Bhiwani district, and studied at Hissar and Sonipat, both in Haryana.

Frankly, how Arun Jaitley will survive the Delhi trauma is difficult to crystal gaze. Modi needs him as a one-man brain trust. So he may survive the attacks from within just as he had managed to overcome the loss of face he had suffered in Amritsar during the Lok Sabha election. Modi’s focus now is going to be governance and it means more dependence on the Chanakya.

On the Kejriwal front, things are no less scary. The underlying message in all the eulogies is that everything good that is to spring from the AAP fountain has come out of Kejriwal’s personal vision. During the campaign, the focus never shifted away from Kejriwal. The radio jingles, campaign slogans, publicity exercises, media interviews, everything appeared to be more about Kejriwal than the party that he leads or its other luminaries. He was the sole star of the AAP show throughout the campaign—and later on too. Like in the ‘new’ BJP, where there is only one star, Narendra Modi. In that sense, AAP and BJP are on the same page.

In good old days, this phenomenon was known as personality cult. The Congress is still paying the price for the Indiramma cult which reduced the century-old party to the fiefdom of one family. The Janata amoeba is no exception to the trend going by the street play Nitish Kumar has been staging in Patna and Delhi. Well, the more we denounce ‘personality cult’ in politics, the more we find more and more parties practising it.

The one-man or one–woman shows start to fail when that single personality begins to look feeble, faltering and vulnerable even though it is the whole party apparatus that can be blamed for the fall. A single person show also makes it easier for critics to aim their darts. Notice how a ‘founding father’ of the Aam Aadmi Party, advocate Shanti Bhushan, has been criticising Kejriwal. Those who left AAP have invariably taken potshots at him, accusing him of being ‘dictatorial’. Outsiders have no way of knowing for sure how valid is that criticism. But those who have followed the activities and words spoken by Kejriwal in public might be inclined to believe that he is not very fond of dissent. In his initial days in politics, he used to be rather wild in hurling charges against all his opponents. He included journalists in that category, declaring that he would send them all to jail when he found they were less than generous with him.

Well, in his victory speech, he sounded modest and humble, particularly when he said the scale of victory was ‘scary’. Time alone will tell whether it was a put–on appearance at image makeover.

As pointed out at the outset, Modi’s main concern as of now is not Delhi verdict but the jolt his ‘dear friend’ Obama has given to BJP’s Hindutava Agenda. The US President and the American media are unrelenting in their criticism of rising religious intolerance in India. The high priest of democratic capitalism, New York Times, has even criticised Modi for his ‘deafening silence’ over the activities of the Hindu right extremists.

Both Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Home Minister Rajnath Singh pooh-poohed the criticism. And asserted that there was no danger to the strong tradition of tolerance in the country and anything perceived as going against it is nothing but an ‘aberration.’ How would they deal with the ‘aberrations’? Deafening silence is their answer.

Arguably, we, as a nation, could have avoided this acute embarrassment, and BJP the severe drubbing in Delhi, had Narendra Modi cared to break his obdurate ‘maun’ at the first sign of the ‘fringe elements’ in the Sangh Parivar going berserk soon after his installation as the Prime Minister late summer. The attacks on churches, Parivar’s cry against ‘Christian evangelism’ and their talk of ‘Muslim fundamentalism’ have not helped matters either. Time for Modi to realise that he cannot afford the luxury of silence any longer.

By: Malladi Rama Rao