It was an embarrassing moment for many secularists in India watching Bihar’s Laloo Prasad Yadav’s response on Star TV, prime time, as election results from his state pronounced the near rout of his party in Bihar. “Mr Yadav, do you think this is due to the voters’ disenchantment with the government for lack of any development in the state”. “No”, replied Yadav bravely, “the issue in the election was secularism, not development”.

 Can secularism ever be a one–point agenda unrelated to other concerns of people?  
In the midst of the election campaign in August, a Muslim petty trader, Rehman, was burnt alive at a village market in Orissa. One of the eyewitnesses told the police that Dara Singh — the man charged with the torching alive of Graham Staines and his two sons, in the same state earlier this year — was the man responsible for the latest incident. A week later, a Christian priest, Fr. Arul Doss, too, was done to death in the same state. 

The Bajrang Dal, the RSS and the BJP were quick to condemn such brutal killing of minorities in Congress–ruled Orissa. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad even issued a press statement, maintaining that whoever was responsible behind such killings “could not be a Hindu”. But, ironically, the Congress party — the party that swears by secularism, the only party capable of challenging Hindutva on a national plane, the party that depends crucially on minority votes — maintained a deathly silence. 

Is secularism a mere mantra  — to be enshrined in the party manifesto and chanted reverentially on convenient occasions — which has nothing to do with issues like the security of life and property of all citizens, irrespective of their faith? 

Was secularism an issue at all in the Lok Sabha polls of 1999? To begin with, what does one mean by secularism — not in the academic sense but in terms of how it relates to the lived experience of people?
In the 1991 polls, with the Shiv Sena as its only ally, the BJP secured 120 Lok Sabha seats. With three more allies on its side in 1996, the Akali Dal in Punjab, the George Fernandes–led Samta party in Bihar and the Haryana Vikas Parishad (HVP) in Haryana, the BJP’s tally climbed up to 161. Having emerged as the single largest party, the BJP was invited to form the government and given two weeks to prove its majority in the Lok Sabha. 

But it was still a different India three years ago where the BJP was a political untouchable for most politicians. In the 13 days that his government lasted, Atal Behari Vajpayee and the rest of the saffron stalwarts were unable to win over even a single MP to their side. Leave alone party politicians, even those who had fought and won as independents were unwilling to shake hands with the party whose manifesto contained ‘contentious issues’ — 

Ø Building of a Ram Mandir where the Babri Masjid once stood in Ayodhya; 

ØRemoval of article 370 from the Indian Constitution which grants a special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir;

Ø Introducing a Uniform Civil Code (to replace the different existing personal laws for different religious communities).

Until the BJP’s electoral drubbing in the Assembly elections in UP and elsewhere in late 1993, then BJP president, L.K. Advani, used to revel in the ‘majestic isolation’ of his party. But the acute isolation of 1996 confronted the BJP and its sangh parivar with a difficult choice: retain ‘ideological purity’, remain a political untouchable and make a solo bid to power by hard–selling Hindutva. Alternatively, adopt tactical flexibility and put ‘contentious issues’ on the backburner so as to break out of political isolation.

Since the prospects of coming to power on the strength of its own divisive agenda seemed remote, at least in the current scenario, the BJP and its parivar deviously chose the latter. And reaped rich dividends in the elections of 1998 and 1999. 

The BJP entered the electoral arena for the Lok Sabha polls in February 1998 with 18 allies. Thanks to the alliances, the party improved on its own tally of seats — from 161 in 1996 to 182 in 1998 — and, more importantly, headed a coalition government. But the wafer–thin majority of the BJP–led coalition made Vajpayee hostage to some of his mercurial allies — Jayalalitha being the most obvious. 

On the eve of the 1999 polls, the BJP made yet another quantum leap. In June this year, the Janata Dal, which formed the core of the ‘Third Front’ (the Congress and the BJP being the first two), disintegrated with virtually the entire bulk of the party choosing to ally with the BJP. Leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav, who for years had shouted themselves hoarse at the communalism of the BJP, suddenly had no qualms rallying behind the saffron bandwagon. 

The acceptance of the BJP by virtually the entire political spectrum today is as comprehensive as its political isolation was stark in 1996. If it was Jayalalitha’s AIADMK which teamed up with the BJP in 1998, this time it’s the DMK in Tamil Nadu. If Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference decided to extend support from the outside to the Vajpayee–led government in 1998, this time it fought elections as part of the NDA and is now a part of the government at the Centre. The Telugu Desam Party’s Chandrababu Naidu fought against the BJP in the 1998 polls, agreeing to extend support to the Vajpayee government from the outside only subsequently. This time, the TDP and the BJP jointly fought the Congress in Andhra.

The BJP, which led an 18 party alliance in 1998, now counts on 24 allies. In theory, it now has to lean on many more parties to stay in power. But in practice it also means there are over 300 MPs behind Vajpayee in the Lok Sabha against the precarious figure of 273 in a House of 544. 

What does this augur for secular politics in India?  
Even for some secularists, the present political arrangement is not such a bad thing after all. With only 182 seats of its own — exactly the same number that it had in the last Lok Sabha – the BJP depends crucially on people like Chandrababu Naidu, M. Karunanidhi, Mamata Bannerji, Ramvilas Paswan, Ramkrishna Hegde and others. None of them can afford to ignore minorities’ votes in their respective regions and constituencies. The continued dependence of the BJP on these leaders and parties for their continued hold on power also means, according to these secularists, that issues like Ayodhya, article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code continue to be kept in abeyance. Such a grand alliance also means strengthening the ‘moderates’ and the ‘liberals’ and weakening the hold of the hawks within the sangh parivar. 

If Ayodhya, article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code was all that Indian secularism was about, there may have been some merit in such wishful thinking. But the ‘evil genius’ of the sangh parivar lies precisely in its ability to have, for all practical purposes, reduced the issue of India’s secularism to the BJP’s postponed agenda. 
Be it the reporters who raised questions at BJP’s press conferences during the electoral campaign, or TV anchors and even unsympathetic expert commentators who quizzed BJP leaders before and after the election results, or political parties who in their electoral campaign charged the BJP with playing communal politics. Hardly anyone went beyond asking the BJP to state for how long the issues of Ayodhya, article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code would remain postponed. 

Responding to these queries was, at the worst, a little awkward. Being past–masters in the art of double–speak, different leaders of the BJP and different segments of the sangh parivar said different things at the same time; or the same leader said different things at different points of the electoral campaign. The net result of this was Advantage BJP – the statement of one general secretary, Venkaiah Naidu, convinced the ‘liberals’ and the fence sitters that the BJP is turning ‘moderate’; the statements of another party general secretary, K. Govindacharya, reassured the core supporters of Hindutva that the party remains committed as ever to the Hindu Rashtra ideology.  

Neither the avowedly secular political opponents of the BJP, nor the print and electronic media thought it necessary to educate the voter how in the brief tenure of the BJP at the Centre and in states like U.P. and Gujarat —
Ø Life has come to mean endless anxiety, at best, for Christians and Muslims in Gujarat for nearly two years. After several independent fact–finding teams sent by civil liberties organisations and the National Minorities Commission had established numerous instances of attacks on minorities in Gujarat, Prime Minister Vajpayee, the most ‘liberal face’ of the BJP, visited the state only to return with a call for a “national debate on conversions”.  

Ø There is a sustained effort to infiltrate, capture and pack educational and cultural institutions with men and women known primarily for their commitment to RSS ideology. One such RSS leader, who is now going to decide what children should be taught in schools, proudly asserted in his autobiography how he killed a Muslim woman in 1947 because too many Hindus wanted to enslave her for their own lust! (See Pg. 22). 

Ø For the sangh parivar, Kargil became a convenient pretext to communalise the Indian armed forces.

Ø Attacks on minorities have continued before, during and after the present polls in Gujarat, Orissa and Kanyakumari by votaries of Hindu majoritarianism.

Ø It is not for nothing that both in the previous government and yet again, the home ministry (crime and punishment), the human resources development ministry (education and culture) and the information and broadcasting ministry (mass communications) were retained by the BJP at the insistence of the RSS. 
There can be no doubt that through Vajpayee’s earlier tenure as Prime Minister, and now, the saffron project continues to be advanced through other means, even while ‘contentious issues’ have been put on the back–burner — postponed agenda. Avowedly secular parties, political pundits and the print and electronic media have no perspective of building mass campaigns to raise public awareness on these very concrete issues that directly concern people. They could also be used to mount pressure on many of the BJP’s allies who still claim to have nothing in common with saffron politics. Otherwise, secularism will be progressively reduced to a mere chant, while the sangh parivar increases its stranglehold over society, and state. In preparation for the future Hindu Rashtra..

Archived from Communalism Combat, November 1999, Year 7  No. 53, Polls 99 1

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Home minister, L.K. Advani has made this point repeatedly: the rule of law does not prevail in Bihar. When he says this he possibly reflects his party’s political position on the ruling state regime of Rabri Devi–Laloo Prasad Yadav. Which is that the regime itself comprises lawless, if not unlawful elements and is, therefore, incapable of either upholding or enforcing the rule of law in the state. In the wake of the recent Jehanabad massacres, Advani and his party have become all the more convinced about their argument. But it would be a tragedy (probably no worse than the massacres themselves) if we were to get carried away by the argument and seek to find an answer to the curse of Jehanabad by focussing on the character of the state government.

This is because no mainline political party, including Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, is really relevant to the politics of Jehanabad. As is quite apparent, the bloody corpse count being done by two outlawed outfits in this deadly game of political one–up–man–ship, does not leave any scope for parliamentary politics. Of the two groups, one is the Ranvir Sena, a private militia of upper caste landowners, and the other is the Maoist Coordination Committee, a so–called militant organisation of the dispossessed lower castes. The very fact that the two are mobilising and nurturing their respective constituencies by mass murders proves that extreme violence has become acceptable to the supporters of the warring groups. In this situation, mainline democratic politics have become redundant.

Let’s first look at why Jehanabad is a special problem even in problem–ridden Bihar. Located to the southwest of Patna, Jehanabad district was created following the reorganisation of Patna and Gaya districts. It has no industry to talk of, but agriculturally it is well endowed. The land is fertile (part of the Gangetic plains) and is supported by the Sone irrigation system. Of course, the neglect of infrastructure has made this irrigation system non–functional in many parts of the district. The population is dependent on agriculture, but the land’s bounty has remained stagnant, and this makes the strife for land quite sharp.

On top of this, in a caste–ridden society, the caste divide in Jehanabad is particularly acute. The preponderant castes are Bhumihars, upper–caste land–owning farmers, Yadavas, politically assertive intermediate caste marginal farmers, and Dalits, landless lower caste peasants. A peculiar feature about Jehanabad is the high concentration of Dalits — in fact, it is the highest in Bihar. The sharp caste division has made Jehanabad a fertile zone for experimenting with extreme politics. One of the initial extreme leaders of Jehanabad was Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, a sadhu who got drawn to the communist movement and founded the Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha. He remains one of the revered figures of Bihar communists.

The communists were able to strike roots quite early in the region. In fact, the CPI was quite popular among the Bhumihars to begin with as the party’s leadership came from this relatively educated upper caste. But the honeymoon was brief — once the communists took up the demand for minimum wages and share–cropping rights, the land–owning Bhumihars felt alienated. As long as the CPI was organising movements against the zamindars, the land-owning sections felt drawn to it, but once the focus moved to  themselves, it became a different story. By the early sixties, the Yadavas became the vanguard of the CPI.

By the seventies, politics began taking a violent turn in Jehanabad. The CPI was furiously opposed by the Bhumihars and a measure of desperation crept in among them when despite their opposition, the CPI was able to send Yadavas to the Lok Sabha — Ram Ashrey Prasad Singh, a CPI leader belonging to the Yadava caste, was the main success story. The notorious King Mahendra, a Bhumihar Congress leader who patronised criminals and specialised in booth–capturing, grew in opposition to the CPI. Subsequently, there was Sardar Krishna Singh and other Bhumihar toughies. The ground, in other words, was being laid for a higher level of political violence in Jehanabad in comparison to the adjoining areas.

The Yadavas, unfortunately, were found wanting in their attitude to the castes lower to them — the most backward castes like Kahars (palanquin bearers) and Mallahs (boatmen) and, of course, the scheduled castes. By and large, the Yadavas did to the lower castes what the higher castes did to them. The Dalits were oppressed, denied minimum wages, and their women routinely violated by both the upper and the intermediate castes. 

Culturally, however, this region was different from north Bihar. The Brahminical varna system did not have the kind of cultural sanction as it did north of the Ganga. Acknowledgement of upper caste ‘supremacy’ could be obtained here only under compulsion.

The combination of the Yadava attitude — or roughly speaking, the CPI’s politics — and upper caste oppression created conditions for the growth of still more extreme politics: in the main, it led to the growth of the IPF, a Marxist–Leninist formation which mobilised the low castes and vowed to extract peasant rights by the power of the gun. Subsequently, the M–L groups splintered, some joined parliamentary politics, while some, like the MCC, became very ruthless and barbaric in pursuit of their theory of annihilation of class enemies. Today, there are charges of the MCC behaving like a mercenary army whose ‘services’ have been bought by political parties from time to time.

It’s a measure of the nature of politics in this region of Bihar that virtually every caste has built and developed its own private army. The Bhumihars initially had their Bramharshi Sena (now it has become the Ranvir Sena to which all upper castes pledge support), the Yadavas, the Lorik Sena, the Kurmis, the Bhumi Sena, while the Dalits had their underground squads under the banner of M–L groups to counter and fight these private militias. Survival, in other words, hinged on a group’s armed might and the political discourse developed accordingly. 

No where in Bihar has the macabre phrase, chhey inch chota kar dena (slicing six inches from a person’s height — by slashing of the throat), been actually practised the way it has in central Bihar. Easy availability of illegal arms has made it all quite widespread.

Since the mid–Eighties, there have been mass murders. Topping the massacre milestones are the killings in Arwal where 70–80 Dalits were killed, and the Damoha killings soon thereafter when 25 upper castes were beheaded. It fell into a pattern after that. Adding to the spate of killings were other vested interests who utilised private armies to settle different kinds of arguments. Overall, while in the rest of Bihar the upper castes were learning to come to terms with the politics of Laloo Prasad Yadav and grudgingly acknowledge the importance of backwards politics, in Jehanabad time virtually stood still. Caste contradictions remained just as strong and caste rivalries implacable.

In the backdrop of this was, of course, the land issue. For one thing, land reforms have not been carried out in Bihar and in the district of Jehanabad the state has failed to rustle up even relatively less fertile excess land for distribution. For another thing, despite the prosperity of the land–owning upper caste (not all of them are, however landed; a good 40 per cent of the upper castes are marginal farmers), and despite the mobilisation by M–L groups, statutory minimum wages are simply not paid in this area. As a matter of fact, the issue has ceased to be an economic one; for the landlords it is now a question of prestige — how can they buckle under duress and meet the demand? And at the same time, the Dalits are determined to extract their due.

In this situation of extreme polarisation, nothing really will be gained in Jehanabad by replacing the Rabri government by central rule. At most, central rule would be viewed by Bhumihars and other upper castes of the area as BJP rule and would encourage them to wreck a more ruthless ‘revenge’. And, as a corollary, it would make groups like MCC even more desperate to establish that its power has not been diminished by the change of government in Patna, thus possibly escalating the spiral of killings. Instead of getting dragged into the political football over the massacres, it is time to treat Jehanabad as a national challenge.

A ‘national challenge’, of course, sounds like a moth–worn cliché. The kind of thing that is said when no solutions are in sight. But as it happens in Jehanabad, a start can be made by persuading the landlords to pay minimum wages. Given the kind of complex emotions that this otherwise simple demand is expected to generate, it requires an effort from every national party. Those who wear bleeding hearts on their sleeves whenever the fields of central Bihar are strewn with corpses could, as a very minimum, campaign for this basic right. You would be surprised how dramatic can be the change in political mood if this were to happen.  

Archived from Communalism Combat, April1999, Year 6  No. 53, Comment

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