ndia That is Bharat When the choice is between bad and worse

I
Satiricus

Is India doomed? Is India doomed to become Bharat? Satiricus fears so. For it seems so. What else can it mean when the BJP starts talking about going ?back to basics?? It'sa terrible thought, and in addition to frightening Satiricus, it also puzzles him. For going ?back? to basics is obviously a backward step, then why should a party that has gone forward to secularism now want to go backward to its basic communalism?

Once upon a time, long, long ago, Advani had openly called the BJP a ?Hindu party?. Fortunately enough, it had realised that being a Hindu party in Hindusthan would be its undoing. So what did it do to the Hindus after coming to power in their name? In order to save its secularised soul, it dumped them. Of course, that was as it should be. And this dumping was done so dexterously that even the RSS, the quintessence of communalism, was more or less taken in, for one of its top leaders is on record as certifiying just before the elections that the RSS was happy with the NDA. But what happened? The BJP found to its cost that you can be a Hindu or you can be secular, you cannot be two contradictory things at one and the same time. In particular, it found that there is no percentage in being fifty per cent secular, its huge Haj subsidies notwithstanding. So its current soul-searching should rather have drawn it to cent per cent secularism. Instead, alas, the opposite seems about to happen.

Apparently, those whom the secular gods wish to destroy, they first drive communal. So now that it is out of power, the BJP has remembered the Hindutva that it had forgotten while in power. Does that mean it will now really represent the Hindus instead of just claiming to do so? That would be a disaster for democracy. For, as columnist Rajeev Shukla, a faithful foot solider of the secular brigade, admitted in black and white the other day, ?If indeed the BJP had ever represented the Hindus, no other political party would have existed in India. No other party, at any rate, would stand a chance in any election. After all, 85 per cent of the country'spopulation are Hindus.? Good God! That would actually mean being a really Hindu party would mean being really democratic. That is down-right dumb. For under Indian democracy all may be equal, but 85 per cent Hindu voters are less equal than 12 per cent secular-cum-Muslim voters.

Those whom the secular gods wish to destroy, they first drive communal. So now that it is out of power, the BJP has remembered the Hindutva that it had forgotten while in power. Does that mean it will now really represent the Hindus instead of just claiming to do so? That would be a disaster for democracy.

Satiricus recalls that as long ago as decades back, the late Swami Chinmayanand had publicly appealed for the building up of a Hindu vote bank. Fortunately his communal call was duly disregarded, and secularism was saved. In fact, since then the star of secularism has been in the ascendant. Is that shining star about to be blotted out by a cloud of communalism? Talking about stars, even stargazers seem to say so. Take the 82-year-old astrologer Lachman Das Madan, who had made the astonishing but accurate prediction that neither Vajpayee nor Sonia would become Prime Minister after the last elections. But now the same Madan, obviously in communal cahoots with anti-secular stars, predicts that, come September, the Congress-led UPA government will collapse under the weight of its contradictions, and ?the BJP will come back?. Good God! Just two months!

Then what happens to the prediction of some Congress leaders in the know that our invisible Prime Minister would last for full two years? Madan has also made another prediction that is far from astonishing??There will be a definite split in the Congress Party?. So what'snew? Splitting is an age-old pastime for the Congress, which it has pursued with such single-mindedness that now there are not enough letters in the English alphabet to name the factions. And talking about splits, is this astrologer sure it'sthe Congress that will split? For if doctors differ, so do astrologers?like Madan on one side and Nostradamus on the other, Satiricus recalls that a part of the 400-year-old prophesy of that French astrologer was discovered about four years ago in some small French town, and reported in the Indian press by Auroville-based French journalist, Francois Gautier. According to it, Nostradamus predicted a split in the BJP, one section of it going back to its ?national roots?. See? We are back again to this ?going back? business. Either the BJP will go back to being a Hindu party, which is bad, or a new Hindu party will emerge out of it, which is worse. For in his pernicious prosphesy, Nostradamus actually talks of the new Hindu party reviving the ?nation'sunique soul??which is exactly what the RSS has been saying all these years.

All in all, secularism certainly still khatre main hai. So what to do? Oh, well, our later-day Arjun has twanged his mighty ministerial bow, and warned his minions??either you are secular, or you are not part of my team?, as a newspaper has put it. According to the report, the Minister ?told them (HRD bureaucrats) categorically that there had been deviations from the secular path in the previous regime of Murli Manohar Joshi, and they should remember that his government and he were committed to secularism.? So there we are! Secularism is now saved in the nick of time from the jaws of a communal death. Singh'ssecular historians have already advised the dumping of history textbooks written during Joshi'sterrible tenure by ?saffron? historians.

So now Aurangzeb can go back to being an unfortunate victim of an unhappy childhood, which made him slightly dislike the Hindus, and the Aryans, from whom the Arabs and the Europeans borrowed astronomy and mathematics and medicine and even music, can go back to being barbaric invaders. But Singh Saheb, there is still one saffron danger to secularism?hide those old copies of the Quran that were saffron in colour.