Lessons in agitprop

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Lessons in agitprop

Friday, 21 December 2018 | Ishan Joshi

Lessons in agitprop

The movement for a Ram temple, a so-called core issue for the BJP, is best led by socio-cultural organisations and not a political party

When LK Advani picked up and ran with the Ram Temple movement as a political project to headline the Indic impulse that had been airbrushed from post-colonial historiography, it was a major ideological intervention in national discourse albeit one that could have done without the unacceptable lumpen violence which accompanied it. Of course, there is no denying that it helped the party he helmed at the time, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), electorally; whether more as cause or effect is a debate for elsewhere.

What the BJP’s current leadership needs to understand, however, is that without context we do not exist. So, to try and re-heat what it apparently thinks is the key trigger issue for the party’s core constituency — a Ram temple at Ayodhya (and for many also at disputed sites in Mathura and Kashi) — and serve it up in time for the 2019 general election is likely to end as a damp squib. Because in the main, as this article will argue, the BJP is no longer seen even by its so-called core support base as the primary vehicle which will bring these demands to fruition. That does not mean these issues are not important for millions of Indians but simply that the RSS and its affiliates, which have been agitating for and providing the theoretical framework within which these demands gained currency over the decades, today have the organisational heft, intellectual tools and agitprop ability to press their case independent of the BJP and with whichever administration that governs India.

It was Advani’s advent on the scene which, many conveniently forget, took the agitation for a Ram temple at Ayodhya and through it the project to promote a civic nationalism contextualised in an Indic civilisational tradition out of its crude, exclusivist provenance and made India pause and think about our nation-state’s trajectory post-1947. From Rajiv Gandhi to AB Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi, Narasimha Rao to George Fernandes, the leading political figures of their times, not to mention the intelligentsia, all grappled with this political-theoretical riposte to an emerging and very worrying — at least to most independent-minded, responsible citizens who did not subscribe to a doctrinaire Marxist, neo-Islamist or effete-liberal worldview — differential citizenship model premised on a negation of the notion of an Indian exceptionalism signalled by the overturning of the Shah Bano judgment and made their peace with it in different ways.

The impact of this engagement can be seen in contemporary India — from the temple-hopping spree of Congress president Rahul Gandhi during the recent Assembly polls campaign to the interventions by secular intellectuals on the zeitgeist of the Hindu/Indic tradition and the acceptance by sober thinkers of the Centre Right that lumpen violence needed to be quelled far more rigorously than it eventually was. But today the boot is on the other foot. Some of the successors of Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi in the BJP are unfortunately the rabble-rousers themselves while the Sangh Parivar has started throwing up many more thinkers of some ability, confidence and sophistication than it did in the past while its affiliates have acquired the organisational strength to demonstrate, agitate and protest to build pressure on issues close to their heart on all political parties (sans those which seek to de-legitimise it ideologically like the Communist parties).

Against the backdrop of  such a landscape, the BJP, as a political party which was voted into power with a brute majority in 2014 under the leadership of Narendra Modi, is highly susceptible to the charge that it wants to rake up the emotive Ram temple issue for electoral gain just before the Lok Sabha poll. The feedback from the ground is if that is indeed what is tried, the charge will stick; if not wholly then at least very substantially. This is, naturally, not to suggest that as a political party the BJP does not have the right to lend its support to the agenda of its choice just as, say, the CPI-M has an unalienable right to demand the redistribution of wealth. All political parties also have to function within the parameters of the Constitution. It follows, therefore, that the BJP should have been working from the day it came to power four-and-a-half years to pass relevant legislation, including via joint sittings of Parliament if required given its lack of numbers in the Rajya Sabha, on this traction-generating issue for the party faithful.

But it chose, in its wisdom, to go for the low-hanging fruit such as supporting anti-cow slaughter agitations which soon descended to random vigilantism and led to a grotesque, violent and entirely unacceptable killing of human beings whom mobs set upon because they were suspected of being involved in cow smuggling/slaughter. Crucially, this issue was not something that needed to be put on the statute book as most States of the Union already had pretty stringent laws to deal with illegal cow/progeny slaughter. If the argument was that these laws were not being implemented rigorously, and there is some truth to that, then (recognised) socio-cultural organisations working in the field needed to petition respective State Governments with their concerns and build public pressure for stringent application of the law.

Why a ruling political party elected to administer the country effectively thought it appropriate to wade into this issue, especially when its credentials as an upholder of policies for cow protection as prescribed in the Constitution were not in doubt, remains inexplicable.

Now, with the elections close, any attempt by the party leadership to try and play on the issues it could have but did not take up will be subject to the law of diminishing returns. The BJP ought to resolve it will make the corrections required in its policy implementation architecture and go to the people asking for a renewed mandate on its performance, hoping for the best. The electorate, while it may overwhelmingly support the Ram temple as a matter of faith, is showing welcome signs from a governance-accountability perspective of voting on development. If the Ram temple and development-governance are posited as binaries, the BJP’s so-called core issue is likely to get trumped even among the non-card holding simpatico.

In any case, the Ram temple is far too important and sensitive an issue for political-electoral theatre. There needs, ideally, to be omnibus legislation for temples at Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi as part of an inclusive, non-denominational national project on the lines of the reconstruction of Somnath with the participation of as many Indians as possible regardless of ethnicity, jaati and mode of worship. That is unlikely though not impossible in the few months left before the General Election. To be blunt, however, a Vajpayee may have managed it but the current dispensation does not have a leader of that calibre. But then a Vajpayee also couldn’t get a decisive mandate like Modi did, so the ironies of history continue apace.

In the interim, socio-cultural organisations, faith-based outfits and advocacy groups working on the ground and through the legal system on the Ayodhya issue are best placed to take ownership of it and work on having a clear roadmap on dealing with whichever party comes to power at the Centre to ensure its implementation. If it’s the BJP, it should be asked to learn from its mistakes; if it’s the Opposition, it should be asked not to repeat them. Is the Congress listening?

(The writer,  a senior journalist, is a media consultant and commentator on contemporary affairs.)

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