Didi may challenge Modi in 2019

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Since Narendra Modi bulldozed the parliament in May 2014, and repeated the feat three years later in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state, the opposition is overwrought with frustration. With the chances of its electoral recovery rather distant, it is unable to paper over the lengthening, and deepening, lines of its internal fissures. Like Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s exit from its camp; his JD(U) facing an existential crisis; or the CPI(M), which is convulsing with internal dissensions so deep that its general secretary Sitaram Yechury fails to get his party’s nod for returning to the Rajya Sabha with Congress support.

The opposition is hamstrung for other reasons too. Faced with BJP, RSS and their ideological challenge, the traditional ‘secular’ politician seems to have lost the plot. His response to incidents of serious cultural onslaught is feeble, at best. For example, no opposition party has worked out a coherent strategy to combat the Hindutva groups nursing their private militia in the name of cow vigilantes. They attack cow vigilantism as though it were the handiwork of extreme bigots sheltered by the Hindutva groups. But they have failed to present it as an integral part of an agenda to turn the religious minorities into second class citizens. Their bankruptcy surfaced when Congress workers attacked a BJP leader in Chhattisgarh responsible for cows death. On the rare occasions that Congress president Sonia Gandhi, or Rahul Gandhi, the vice president, comment on contemporary issues, they fail to strike a chord. While Rahul shoots and scoots, his mother has limited grasp of India’s social and civilizational issues. BSP supremo Mayawati, always shy to venture beyond Dalit issues has become even more tongue-tied. Down south in Tamil Nadu, ruling AIADMK and two other factions are getting sucked into the BJP rather than trying to redefine themselves in India’s political landscape after the end of multi-party rule. In Maharashtra, so total is the hold of BJP that Shiv Sena, its ideological sibling and local rival for power, outshines other opposition parties. In the states where the Congress is ensconced, such as Karnataka, there is not much certainty about its continuance.

In such bleak scenario for the opposition, two things are missing—leadership and strategy. Some of the opposition parties assumed that, in fighting BJP, the best strategy would be to forget past differences with the Congress and tie up with it. In Uttar Pradesh, former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav tried it, and paid heavily for that mistake. In West Bengal, the CPI(M), by fighting the 2016 assembly election jointly with the Congress, fell into the same trap.

With the passing of years, if there is a single opposition leader to cobble up a strategy against BJP’s divisive politics, she is Mamata Banerjee. The West Bengal chief minister is a master player of the caste and sub-caste cards. In 2011, she succeeded in putting the 34-year-old CPI(M) rule to an end my mobilising the subalterns against a party which, though highly regimented, had only higher castes in its upper echelons.

Her Bengal is in BJP’s crosshairs for a long time. During CPI(M) rule, there was no entry for the Hindutva politics as the state’s poor were entirely identified with the hammer-and-sickle. BJP thought that, following the Marxists’ exit, it may be able to polarize votes.

But the BJP’s strategy against Mamata Banerjee has not succeeded so far. It brought limited dividend in 2014 with BJP getting 16 per cent votes (only two seats). But the BJP share came down to 10 per cent in the assembly elections two years later. Banerjee ruled the roost as her deft ‘salami slicing’ of the state’s huge OBC and dalit population did not allow the BJP to herd all non-Hindus under the saffron shamiana. It is a strategy that has worked.

In India, with ‘forward caste’ population estimated to be around 25 per cent (that leaves three-quarters of the population comprising the entire panoply of OBC and dalit, plus minorities), it is tough for BJP, to win elections without support from a large section of non-caste Hindus. That explains why Modi, and party president Amit Shah, have been reaching out to those on the lower rungs of the caste ladder, with a Dalit being made the President of India. Ram Vilas Paswan, a Dalit, heads the LJSP, an important partner in the ruling NDA. During his tours aimed at the 2019 general election, Shah makes it a point to have lunch (well publicised) one day in a dalit home.

In India’s social fabric of mixed hue, it is not possible to win elections on the support of one or two castes. Mayawati, for example, won elections in Uttar Pradesh whenever she could broaden her appeal beyond the jatav community of dalits to which she belongs. But Mamata Banerjee’s appeal is subtler. It works on the ‘class animosity’ among castes, thus posing a challenge to the BJP strategy of appealing to an all-embracing Hindu identity. Last year, as there were minor skirmishes between Hindus and Muslims at Dhulagarh in Howrah district, BJP bent over backwards to give it a communal tinge but the Trinamool leader used a mix of her understanding of subaltern politics, and executive power, to deny BJP any leeway.

The answer to religious identity politics is the politics of subaltern identity. Nitish Kumar realised it as he introduced the mahadalit concept and re-embraced Lalu Yadav. But he has hung up his boots in opposition politics. In today’s scenario, if Modi’s BJP can face a serious contender in 2019, it has to be from Mamata Banerjee.

Centre dusting files on OBC reservation data

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

DoPT swings into action

Harish Gupta
New Delhi, Oct 26 : The Modi government has fast-tracked collating data with regard to representation of SCs, STs, OBCs and persons with disabilities in government jobs.

Sensing that the issue of reservations of these sections of the society has become controversial recently and may have a bearing on the outcome of Bihar elections, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) directly under the Prime Minister has asked all ministries and department to furnish information in this regard by October 30.

A circular has been issued by the DoPT on October 20 asking the ministries and departments that they must furnish information with regard to representation of these sections within the next ten days. The information, however, was originally sought by the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC). The commission told the Parliamentary Committee on Welfare of Backward Classes that it had sought the information in connection with formulation of a report on creamy layer. 

The NCBC had requested all departments/ministries through Department of Personnel & Training to provide information in a format prescribed by them. However, no information was forthcoming.

But the DoPT swung into action and directed the ministries and departments to furnish information. The parliamentary committee expressed its dissatisfaction over low representation of OBCs in Central government services and directed DoP&T to collect data sought by NCBC and submit it to the committee urgently.

However, sources in the government say that representation of these sections may not have touched the required 50 percent-mark. But it was moving in the right direction and the figure is going up. 

Penitence in Public Life

Emperor Asoka is one of the biggest achievers in ancient India. He carried Buddhism from a local faith to that of being a global religion. But his other big achievement was in abjuring violence in a dramatic manner and accepting peace. He got this story told to the posterity in powerful language in his edicts that say a lot about the mayhem he had himself caused in Kalinga, and his thoughts thereafter. The longest among the edicts reads: “150,000 persons were thence carried away captive, 100,000 were there slain, and many times that number died”. His penitence followed. “Directly after the annexation of the Kalingas began His Sacred Majesty’s remorse for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people.

After annexing Kalingas in the 3rd century BC, King Ashoka understood the virtue of penitence in public life. Why leaders do not understand it today

That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty”. It is doubtful if history would have remembered Asoka for his conquests alone. But since the discovery of his edicts and coins by 19th century British civilians in India, he captured the imagination of Indians as a king who not only felt remorse for his past wildness but could turn his repentance into an ideology which traveled far and wide.

His story acquires relevance in today’ context, against the background of the travails of Narendra Modi, a leader whose governance talents and iron will undoubtedly makes him a deserving candidate for the post of prime minister. Yet he is in a limbo because he has not thought it necessary to show any remorse whatsoever for the horrendous 2002 riots in Gujarat under his charge. True nothing has been proved so far to implicate him personally in the communal holocaust killing 1,200 people, mostly Muslims. Nevertheless, one of his ministers, a woman,  has been sentenced with prison term; another is facing trial; and the allegation that the police took too long to appear on the scene is an accepted fact. Maybe much of the violence had happened without Modi’s knowledge, as mob fury has its own dynamics, but he still remains morally accountable as the state was under his charge and it was his remit to maintain public order.

With Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, whose JD(U) is a coalition partner of Modi’s BJP, absolutely unwilling to accept Modi as the alliance NDA’s candidate as prime minister for the 2014 Lok Sabha poll, what has come into focus is the importance of penitence in public life. The value of atonement is not merely derived from the Bible, or the life of Asoka. If Modi had in all these eleven years made a single public gesture to express grief for his administration’s failure to prevent the riots, the atmosphere would have been different altogether for him. Instead he issued a half-hearted apologia before the assembly elections last year, with no mention of what was it about. A heartfelt “sorry” for the 2002 massacre would have erased many bitter memories from public mind of his own vitriolic utterances, including his citing, at the height of the violence, Newton’s law of motion about each action drawing an “equal and opposite reaction”.

One understands why it is so difficult for Nitish to accept Modi as NDA’s candidate for the post of prime minister and yet remain in the coalition. Far from its being a refusal born out of jealousy, it is an expression of helplessness. Bihar’s capital, Patna, is the place from where Emperor Asoka ruled over a vast empire in the 3rd century BC. In today’s Bihar, Muslims are 17 per cent of the population and are a community known to vote en bloc. Despite protestations to the contrary by Modi’s influential advocates in the media and elsewhere, the fact remains that Muslims have not pardoned him after 2002, not to speak of voting for him or his party. It is no wonder that he does not field a single Muslim candidate in the state’s assembly elections. It doesn’t matter as Gujarat has just 7 per cent Muslim population; they are scattered, and are too timid to matter electorally. But Nitish presides over a broad alliance of Muslims, a section of OBCs and dalits. In 2005, he managed to show the door to Laloo Yadav and his RJD precisely because Muslims as a community had switched sides. There could be other reasons too that had led to the ouster of Laloo Yadav, but getting Muslims over to his side was Nitish’s trump card. And now the BJP is cajoling him to give up his hard won constituency by riding the Modi bandwagon.

The 2002 Gujarat riots may be an old story but it has an unending recall value, somewhat like Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s pogrom, or, looking closer to our times, the three-day-long massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and some other places in early November 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh bodyguards. Its long shelf life in public memory is evident from the allegation against former Congress minister Jagdish Tytler that he played a key role in the riots near a Gurdwara in the capital leading to the death of three persons. Like Modi, Tytler never publicly regretted his role. He is of course not a gifted leader like Modi but he has the same arrogance of power, which people would neither forgive nor forget. The day last week when a Sessions Court ordered reopening of the investigation against him, 29 years after the incident, there were sizeable crowds of ’84 riot victims and their relatives who had assembled outside the court to demand his fair trial. Modi’s plight is on a larger scale. He is unlikely to get powerful allies in states with 15+ per cent Muslim population, like Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Kerala. These states account for 36 per cent of total seats in the lower house.

Asoka had ruled two millennia before modern democratic states came into being, but he understood the virtue of penitence in public life, and that of moderating one’s pride of power with a credible concern for the welfare of every section of the populace. It is a pity that Modi has not cared to understand the message of Asoka’s edicts. Maybe India will be the loser, for it genuinely needs the leadership of an “iron man”, or perhaps an “iron gentleman”.

(The author is the National Editor of Lokmat group)