|
Know Your Next PM-in-Waiting
Following is excerpts from Advani’s address about his autobiography, ‘My Country, My Life’
 "In 2007, the 60th year of Indian independence, a TV channel carried a feature called the 'Ten Defining Moments in Independent India'. It presented my views on a couple of them-namely, the Emergency Rule in 1975-77; and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the other 'defining' political developments that the media talked about included the Partition of India in 1947; Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948; integration of 562 princely states by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first Home Minister; the first general elections in 1952, pursuant to the declaration of India as a Republic; the Chinese aggression in 1962; split in the Congress party in 1969; the India-Pakistan war in 1971 leading to the liberation of Bangladesh; the first ever defeat of the Congress party in parliamentary elections, followed by the formation of the Janata Party government in 1977; Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, followed by the gruesome anti-Sikh riots in the national capital; the Bofors scandal and Rajiv Gandhi's defeat in the 1989 elections; India becoming a nuclear weapons state with Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government conducting nuclear tests at Pokharan in May 1998; and the first non-Congress government, that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), to rule India for six years (1998-2004)."
What struck me, was that I had either been a participant in, or a ringside viewer of, almost all the above-mentioned seminal developments in independent India. Along with my senior colleagues Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, I feel fortunate to be one of the few persons in Indian politics to have participated in every single general election since 1952-either as a campaigner or as a candidate.
My life, in a nutshell, has been an active one. The journey from 1947 to 2007 is a very short one in a nation's history, especially a nation as ancient as ours. But it is quite considerable in an individual's life. In my case, independent India's political voyage has subsumed my own, giving me an opportunity to both observe, and in my own humble way contribute to the many momentous developments along the way. It has also been a fairly eventful life-brimming with activity, and full of vicissitudes-however, in totality, highly satisfying. Indeed, it is fi lled with more satisfaction than I had ever anticipated. It has taught me innumerable lessons, helping me evolve into the person I am today.
I admit that I am neither a historian nor a scholar of political science. However, as someone who has devoted all of his adult life in the service of the nation and amassed a wealth of experience, I can claim to have the practical and contemplative understanding that comes to a dedicated, longstanding and goal-oriented practitioner of politics. I felt it was time for me to share my experiences and understanding with my fellow Indians; and also to share, especially with the youth, my dreams and concerns, my aspirations and apprehensions, about tomorrow's India.
In Chinese script, I am told, the word 'crisis' is written as a compound of two characters, one denoting 'danger' and the other 'opportunity'. My own life has recurrently brought home to me the fact that there is an immense truth in the interrelationship of these two concepts. Both for an individual and a community, conditions of adversity pose a challenge. And a challenge brings out the best in each one of us.
My first experience of the validity of opportunity being the flipside of crisis came in 1947, a life-transforming year both for my country and for me. It appeared as a dividing line in India's history, as well as in my own life. I spent one-fourth of my life, the first twenty years, in Sindh, which is now a part of Pakistan. I was born in Karachi, the capital of Sindh, in 1927. In 1942, when I had just turned fourteen, I joined the RSS, a nationalist organisation dedicated to uniting Hindu society across the dividing lines of caste, language and region, and bringing about India's national renaissance on the basis of her cultural and civilisational heritage.
However, as the years passed, there was another reality, an alarming reality, which gripped the minds of my fellow swayamsevaks and me-indeed, the minds of all Hindus in Karachi. Clouds of partition had begun to hover over the sky in Sindh. A strange phrase 'Two Nation Theory', and an unfamiliar name 'Pakistan', were being talked about in hushed and anxious tones. Rumours were rife that a new Muslim nation was being created. Would Karachi and Sindh cease to be in India? Would we have to leave our city, our beloved Sindh? Even the thought of it was menacing. The thought turned into a violent reality on 15 August 1947.
Our Motherland was partitioned. India's freedom and Pakistan's creation were heralded by unprecedented mass killings and the largest ever crossborder human migration in history. Nearly a million people died in the inferno of communal riots, and approximately fifteen million people became refugees. I was one of them. I left Karachi for good on 12 September 1947. Uprooted from our home, and escaping the flames of Partition, my family and I found protection and solace in the bosom of Mother India. Though herself mutilated and truncated, she made us feel at home.
Political analysts have often wondered why the Hindus and Sikhs who came from Sindh and Punjab so were quickly and easily integrated into free India and why, on the other hand, the Muslims who went from this part of India to West and East Pakistan were treated as unwelcome muhajirs for many decades. The only answer that comes to my mind is the age-old sense of cultural unity that binds Indians of diverse castes, communities and regions into a natural national entity. In the decade of the 1980s and '90s, I developed this theme as 'cultural nationalism' and made it the subject of a countrywide debate on what defines Indian nationhood. Explication of this theme is an important aspect of the raison d'etre of this book.
The second major challenge I would like to recall in this context is the one that came in 1975, that is, almost midway between the advent of Independence, and today. Once again, an adversity turned into an opportunity. On, 11 June, the Congress party's supposedly invincible citadel of Gujarat crumbled when the Opposition alliance under the banner 'Janata Morcha', led by Morarji Desai, trounced the Congress (I) in the state assembly elections. On the same day, the Allahabad High Court pronounced its verdict on the election petition filed by Raj Narain, an important Opposition leader, against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The court accepted the election petition alleging corrupt electoral practices, annulled Indira Gandhi's election and disqualified her from Parliament for six years.
These two events together caused the equivalent of a political earthquake in the government and the Congress party. Its tremors set off a sequence of events, the climax of which was the promulgation of an Emergency under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution. While this Article had been invoked earlier during the wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965 and 1971), this was the first time it was being used to deal with 'internal disturbance'. Tens of thousands of leaders and activists belonging to Opposition parties, including a large number of Members of Parliament (MPs) and state legislators were put into prison. These included the venerable Lokanayak Jayaprakash Narayan. Along with my senior colleague Atalji, I was imprisoned in Bangalore Central Jail, where I spent nineteen months. Stringent press censorship was imposed and even the coverage of parliamentary proceedings became subject to censorship. For over nineteen months democracy was eclipsed.
At one point of time, during this period, it seemed as if multi-party democracy would never again return to our country. The Congress party's National Herald wrote gushing editorials on the virtues of a one-party system like that of Tanzania. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared that 'the nation was more important than democracy'. The entire network of mass media, including the all-pervasive All India Radio (AIR), was harnessed with the primary objective of brainwashing people into believing that liberty, civil rights, press freedom and judicial independence were all elitist concepts which had nothing to do with the common man's welfare, and that the nation should show gratitude to the Congress government for the transformation wrought by Emergency.
When the opportunity eventually came in March 1977 for testing how effective the mendacious campaign had been, political pundits were astounded. Even the unlettered elector was not taken in by the propaganda. Indira Gandhi and her Emergency was rejected. A neat ballot-box coup was effected, an electoral massacre of her men took place, and the Janata Party was installed in New Delhi.
In the post-Emergency era, I was called upon to lead my party at a time when Indian politics witnessed three other important developments. Firstly, in spite of the menacingly huge majority that the Congress government enjoyed in Parliament, it meekly surrendered, in 1986, to the politics of minority appeasement in the Shah Bano controversy. The case, in which Rajiv Gandhi's government legislatively annulled the Supreme Court's ruling in favour of a sixty-two-year-old widow's right to alimony from her former husband, became a milestone in the Muslim women's search for gender justice. Secondly, the leadership of the government disgraced itself, and was defeated in the 1989 parliamentary elections, due to its involvement in the Bofors deal, India's biggest defence corruption scandal. Lastly, a legitimate demand from the Hindus for the construction of a befitting temple for Lord Ram at his birthplace in Ayodhya was opposed by a set of pseudo-secular political parties, many of whose leaders privately saw merit in the demand but were afraid of saying so publicly for vote-bank considerations.
My party's active participation in the movement for the reconstruction of the Ram temple soon snowballed into the largest mass movement in the history of independent India.
Having said this, I also realise, with much pain in my heart, that the Ayodhya movement followed a course that I had not envisaged. In particular, the demolition of the Babri structure on 6 December 1992 was most regrettable. As I said on that very day, it was the saddest day of my life. Had the demolition not taken place, the Ayodhya movement, I am confident, would have progressed on healthier lines and reached a positive denouement, both fulfilling the Hindu demand and promoting communal harmony.
The unexpected defeat of the BJP-led NDA in the May 2004 parliamentary elections has brought a new challenge before my party. I have acknowledged in this book, my own share of responsibility for the setback. In retrospect, I feel that many things could have been done differently. These lapses made the vital difference between victory for the Congress and defeat for the BJP. And, numerically, what a narrow difference it really was!
My party has gone through a prolonged exercise of introspection since May 2004. Many lessons need to be learnt, and they are still being learnt. Many correctives need to be applied, and they are indeed being applied. Hopefully, readers will appreciate that I am not lacking in candour in reflecting on this crucial development in my party's, and my own political life. With honest introspection also comes self-confidence.
Islamic Extremism And Its Ideological Support To Terror
Why was India targeted-and is still being targeted-by this vicious and religiously inspired campaign of terrorism? What are the ideological roots of terrorism in India? Unless these questions are squarely put and honestly answered, we can neither understand the phenomenon of terrorism nor succeed in combating it. I agree with all right-minded people that no religion should be denigrated, and no religious community should be typecast, by pasting the label of terrorism on them. All religions at their core, preach peace and brotherhood, and urge its adherents to follow the path of righteousness. No faith condones the killing of innocent persons and, therefore, terrorists have no religion.
Nevertheless, it is also an irrefutable fact that one of the most virulent forms of terrorism in our times seeks the cover of Islam. It calls its murderous campaign 'jihad', thereby trying to justify itself in the eyes of pious God-fearing Muslims. Terrorists, inspired by the distorted and self-serving interpretation of jihad, actually pursue a definite objective: to establish worldwide domination of political Islam, which is also called 'Islamism'. Naturally, India's multi-faith society, the constitutional principle of secularism that has anchored the Indian state, and the cultural-spiritual ethos of Hinduism that have defined the character of both the Indian society and state, are anathema to Islamism.
Hence, the ideological basis of terrorism in India has been unmistakably anti-national in its intent and pan-Islamic in its appeal. It is the manifestation of a deeper malaise of the spread of extremism in most parts of the Muslim world, funded as it is by fundamentalist groups based mainly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. As in Pakistan and other Islamic countries, these groups are targeting madarasas for indoctrination of young impressionable minds. There has been large-scale mushrooming of madarasas, particularly, but not exclusively, in India's border areas in the past two decades. Quite a few of them have been extensively misused for subversive and terrorist activities. They preach intolerance and bigotry. Saudi-funded organisations owing allegiance to ideologies like that of Ahle Hadis are known to propagate Wahabism (see footnote on page 22), an extreme form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, which does not even tolerate the Sufi and native infl uences on Islam in India. For example, the kind of syncretic Islam that I have seen in my childhood in Sindh, would be maligned as anti-Islamic by the Wahabis and sought to be violently weeded out.
Before 1998, I had a general idea about the activities of various radical Muslim organisations in India that were guided by an extremist agenda. But even I was shocked by what I learnt about them, and their links with extremist groups internationally, during my six years in the Home Ministry. For example, the footprints of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) could be seen in the terrorist activities and communal riots in many parts of India. Intelligence agencies brought to me, year after year, incontrovertible information about SIMI's links with pan- Islamic extremist groups abroad. Safdar Nagouri, its General Secretary asserted that 'Osama bin Laden is not a terrorist and neither is Jammu and Kashmir an integral part of India.' Its official publication Islamic Movement in July 2001 insisted: 'The ideologies of democracy, secularism and nationalism have replaced the objects of worship of the past. It is our duty to demolish these ideologies and establish the Caliphate as enjoined upon us by Allah.'
|
