Short Takes
In hindsight
The tone and tenor of BJP’s stock-taking after its crushing electoral defeat is amazing as well as amusing, writes Mohammed Ataur Rahman.
The pearls of wisdom coming out of the mouths of defeated and demoralised BJP’s leaders (many of whom have won even though their party as a whole has lost) make instructive reading.
One of the “Muslim” faces of BJP, Syed Shahnawaz Hussein, today looks more absurd than ever. A “Muslim” in BJP is not much different from a Jew in Hitler’s Nazi party. That such absurdity is part of life is evident from the fact that there really was a Jew in Hitler’s Nazi party. The fellow committed suicide.
Coming back to Hussein, he is the man who says on TV that BJP will make a “bhabya mandir” (grand Hindu temple) on the land where the Babri Masjid stood for four centuries before BJP leaders at the head of a demented crowd of lumpens demolished it on December 6, 1992. Hussein, instead of undoing the monumental crime, wants to compound it by building his party’s “bhabya mandir”.
Now this shameless fellow has suddenly become “secular”. Defeat is a good teacher, but Hussein has not learnt his lesson: he is only pretending to have learnt it. He has said that BJP’s slogans like “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan/ Mulla bhago Pakistan” have led to the defeat of the party. This man should know that vile slogans like the above, coined by the creative minds of RSS and sanctioned by the RSS and BJP top brass, have always been a staple of BJP’s (and its predecessor Jan Sangh’s) electoral politics.
Hussein knows fully well that the government in which he was a minister had come to power only through raising such criminal slogans, creating hate and hysteria, triggering anti-Muslim riots across India. Suddenly this fellow has begun to see the evil of such politics. Defeat is an eye-opener, but he is only pretending to have open eyes. His eyes are still wide shut. It is the shock and awe of a devastating defeat that, as merely a reflex action, has forced his eyes to open in an unseeing, uncomprehending daze.
There are some other wretched souls in the BJP who are condemning Varun Gandhi’s hate speech as one of the causes of the defeat. This party first tried to play both sides-dissociating itself from the speech, but endorsing Varun’s candidature. Then supporting everything about Varun. Of course, the RSS was more than glad to have on its side this child prodigy. Now we are told even RSS is not happy about that speech. Interestingly, Varun won the election inspite of, or because of, that despicable speech.
The hypocrites of BJP are feigning injured innocence. They know that they would not have got even five members in the Lok Sabha if they did not create anti-Muslim hysteria. How else the “sanyasin” Uma Bharati became a big league politician? Or, how did Rithambra became a celebrated Hindutva speaker? BJP cannot live without hate and violence. Everything else is mere eye wash. g