Short Takes

Throwing a Challenge at Law
in the Middle of Lok Sabha

Former deputy prime minister, Union home minister and senior BJP leader L. K. Advani is a true RSS man: he never cared a hoot for law, or rule of law, and has consistently been a law-breaker.

Imagine such a chronic law-breaker having been India’s home minister and deputy prime minister responsible for maintaining law and order. Ironies are built into our political system, for how do we explain a person directly responsible for running a movement that led to the murder of thousands of Muslims across India, the orgy of rape and arson and destruction of Muslim property worth thousands of crores of rupees, ending up as the law-keeper?

Mr. Advani, with his cohorts, half a dozen of whom later became ministers in the NDA government, were also successful in their ultimate goal of demolishing Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, despite assurances to the Supreme Court of India and the National Integration Council (NIC) to the contrary.

Such monumental lawlessness and such organized, sustained violence against Muslims was rewarded with power and ministerial berths. These are some of the flaws of democracy that we have to learn to live with and try to cope with. Now that the RSS, BJP and other Sangh organizations have known that lawlessness and mass violence is rewarded, not punished, they are sure to do more of it, with greater non-chalance and brazen-facedness.

Put in this context, Mr. Advani’s bold declaration in Lok Sabha on September 9 that he had authorized the bribing of members of Parliament in the cash for vote scam is not as outrageous as it would look to anyone not familiar with his ways as well as that of his mentor organization, RSS.

Just to show that India’s law is smaller and weaker than BJP-RSS, he challenged the government to arrest him if it could for that clear infringement of law. Mr. Advani was upset about two of his MPs put in jail for accepting cash from Amar Singh allegedly to change their party affiliation. While these people have been caught on tape wagging big bundles of currency notes in Parliament, and the money sourced to the political maverick Amar Singh, there is no proof to show that the money ultimately belonged to the Congress Party as BJP is now alleging.

The two BJP MPs sent to jail for brandishing wads of currency notes are Mr. Kulaste and the funnily-named Mr. Bhagora (fugitive). This time Mr. Bhagora seems to be exceptionally unlucky as he cannot possibly run away from the law, which makes the law-breaking Mr. Advani extremely furious.

A fuming Mr. Advani also threatened the government with another rath yatra ostensibly for “good governance and clean politics.” Let us hope by good governance they do not mean rewarding their cadres with petrol pumps worth hundreds of crores of rupees (for which they were rightly renamed Bhartiya Janata Petrol Pump Party) and looting India’s mineral wealth worth lakh of crores of rupees as Yeddyurappa did in Karnataka. Let us also hope against hope that clean politics does not mean the murder of thousands of Muslims across India and a long orgy of rape and arson as shown by their record.

We hope to return to yatra politics in this column once Mr. Advani boards his mechanized rath. He has dutifully asked BJP chief Nitin Gadkari to dutifully take the permission of RSS for this warm-up before coming polls in UP.  g

Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam