The BJP’s electoral juggernaut got off to a thundering start with the detonation of Congress-mukt Bharat. Eradicating the grand old party was projected to be as basic to the health of India as eradicating mosquitos is to the health of a local community in the rainy season.
We no longer hear this drumroll. Instead, the BJP has settled down to a quiet realisation that the survival of the Congress is far more beneficial, indeed necessary, to its prospects. The party does well in states where the Congress is its principal adversary; whereas its effectiveness is less certain where regional outfits are the antagonists.
The irony and pathos of this scenario are ignored. All the more surprising, given that it is germane to the core insight in the Indian philosophical worldview. The practical implication of the Indic vision is that binaries – self vs. other, us vs. them, etc. – belong together. They don’t have to cancel each other out. The self is incomplete, even unhinged, without the other. The day cannot exist without night, heat without cold, and death without birth. One of the entities in a binary relationship will be undermined if its opposite is eliminated. Even truth cannot exist or be identified, without falsehood. It is not unlikely that the BJP think-tank reads what or where the Congress is more attentively than the Congress office-bearers themselves.
Perhaps, this could explain the mythological intensity and tenacity with which Rahul Gandhi is being interrogated by the ED sleuths. As members of the public, we are still uncertain as to the nature and extent of Rahul’s culpability. But, one thing is certain. An aura of disproportionality hangs over the extent of the interrogative process and the volume of the putative offence. Even if this is justified by alleging evasiveness and lack of cooperation on Rahul’s part, ordinary citizens cannot help sensing a whiff of ritualistic rigour about the process; like a dentist struggling to extract a severely impacted molar.
Predictably, Congresswallahs have failed to read the script right. So much so, that they have played into the hands of the BJP strategists right royal- ly. The heroic show of solidarity with Rahul that Congress cadres are enacting in the streets of Delhi and elsewhere in the country, was perhaps what the ED exercise was premised on. Several top Congressmen, associated with the alleged National Herald ‘scam’ have been interrogated by the ED in the past. Not a whimper was heard about any one of them.
This time around, Congressmen have helped transform the ED interrogation into an epoch-making national ritual. This can only be good news for the BJP. Even if nothing emerges from the interrogation and the alleged ‘scam’ fizzles out, the BJP would have reaped a rich harvest from the present scenario, thanks to the naiveté of Congressmen.
It is hard to assume that the near-juxtaposition of the Rahul interrogation and the Prophet-ridicule turbulence is merely coincidental. Even if it is, the pattern the two events share remains significantly valid. In the latter case, the intemperate remarks by two BJP spokespersons about the Prophet would have evaporated into thin air, if the Muslims had ignored what they said. How the Danish cartoons of the Prophet (PBUH] played out is relevant to this context.
They would have been no more than a strictly limited, obscure local sneeze if Muslims around the world had not exalted them to global visibility. Religious zealots became, willy-nilly, collaborators with secular mockers in making the local offence a global sensation. The after-effects of it still rumble.
The core principle in both events – Rahul’s interrogation and the Prophet’s vilification – needs to be noted. It is how we react that makes or mars an event. The decisive thing is not what is done, but what we do with it. An action, or event, quite insignificant in itself, could be made to seem epoch-making by over-reacting to it. This insight is commonplace in film-making. It is also used in provoking individuals and groups. Additional material for embarrassing an individual can be gathered from how he reacts to the provocation. Contrariwise, the provocation can serve as an opportunity to prove the authenticity of a religious person or political party provided the stuff is in them. In the case of Rahul’s interrogation, much is now made of the fact that he corrected the text of his depositions before the ED. It could have been done only if he was entitled to it. If entitled, why discredit him for it?
If the two episodes referred to above were isolated events, we could have ignored them. They don’t seem to be so. Our concern here is not with specific episodes and individuals, but about the health of our society and the ambience of the nation. That being the case, it is undeniable that there is an aggravation of tensions and conflicts. We are today far more fragmented than before. Hostilities bristle and tensions mount in our midst. Even innocuous events prove inflammable. Admittedly, conflicts are native to live. Society is, by definition, a sphere of contained conflicts. A certain degree of tension is good for the vitality of life. The strings of a violin will yield quality music only if they are keyed to the right pitch. Tension, however, becomes pathological when it is mistaken for enmity and the false diagnosis is reached that only by abolishing the cause of the tension can the society or nation be safeguarded. It takes two to tango. Insisting that one party or group alone – the BJP, in the present context – should survive and its antagonists must be eradicated, is like saying that the quality of clapping can be improved only if one of the two hands is cut off.
This idea of the self thriving at the expense of all else is a proven recipe for national disaster. In a democracy, the ruling party and the opposition together constitute its working dynamism. Eliminate the opposition, democracy dies into dictatorship. This will be bad news as much for the BJP as it is for all other parties. As of now, that might not seem to be the case. Opposition parties alone appear to be in peril. Maybe so; but only in the short run. If democracy is an equation (=), it is necessary that both sides of the equation of democratic governance are in purposive alignment. The treasury benches need the opposition as much as the BJP needs the Congress to be in fine mettle politically.
The Sangh Parivar will not be even half the force it is if all Indian Muslims are packed off to Pakistan. If the equation in the presidential mode electoral wrestling match is between Modi and Rahul – it may not stay so for long – then it is necessary that Rahul stays and stirs in the saddle. What perception- gains or electoral benefits would there be in interrogating a Rahul if he takes sanyas from active politics?