By Tavleen Singh

Two aspects of the recent election campaign have got me seriously worried communalism and violence.

Of the two, communalism is by far the more difficult to deal with, mainly because there is so much confusion about who is communal and who is not. Where this is concerned the Congress (I) can take full credit because through a sustained and very clever campaign over the years it has convinced the vast majority of Indians that it is the only truly secular party around. There has been particular success with that group of society which likes to think of itself.as “‘intellectuals”, so there are whole armies of opinion makers whose hackles rise at the barest mention of the BJP, but who find it quite easy to brush aside the very unsecured role that the Congress (I) itself has played in the past five years in its search for the Hindu vote and the Muslim vote. The end result of playing for both, as we have seen, has been that the party fell between two stools and gifted the Hindu vote to them. BJP and the Muslim vote to the Janata Dal-at least in North India.

What, however, is truly remarkable is the fact that after playing all these Hindu, Muslim and Sikh cards, and after distributing pictures of the Home Minister and the Lok Sabha speaker standing under Devyraha Baba’s foot, the party has been able to get away with telling us that it will ‘not compromise on its secular principles’. This extraordinary pronouncement has been made over and over again…

For Sikhs the real horror came when H.K.L. Bhagat came on to tell us that the BJP had won most of the seats in Delhi because ‘it was a vote for communalism, after all were the Akalis not supporting them? Do you remember the massacres in your constituency and the ‘party workers’ (read killers) whose release from police custody you were personally so concerned about?

But, the standard wisdom is that Mr. Bhagat is less communal than Mr. L.K. Advani because the Congress (I) is secular and the BJP is not, Frankly, I find this slightly confusing. I find the BJP’s fuss over Ayodhya annoying and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad gets on my last nerve but, on the other hand, the fact that the BJP has emerged as a major national party in this election must mean that there are enough Hindus around who believe in what they are saying. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to learn to live with the fact that most Hindus, especially in Urban India, seriously believe that they are second class citizens in their own country. This is the direct result of minority communalism and chauvinism having been consistently pandered to, particularly in the past few years. The answer is not to start tearing down mosques and replacing them with temples, but to at least recognize that we need to re-examine what has so far passed for secularism. In this election, for instance, it is entirely thanks to the BJP that in Delhi at least the Sikhs have been brought back into the political mainstream. Since the violence of 1984 the Sikh community has been isolated, sulking and its own view, utterly without Hindu friends. The fact that the BJP went out of its way this time to bring as many Sikhs onto its public platforms as possible and to draw them into the campaign has changed everything. As any BJP candidate will tell you, Sikhs came out in their thousands to work for the party, to man polling booths, and to identify themselves with the BJP. Does this count as communal or secular? I no longer know.

I have similar problems, I might add, in figuring whether it was communal or secular of the RSS… to protect gurdwaras the 1984 violence and to go out of its way to save Sikh lives. There is no question that they would not have done the same for Muslims, but the point is nor would the Congress (I). It is Congress (I) governments that have allowed the Killings in Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in the past few months and it has been a Congress (I) government in Delhi that has allowed the hysteria over Ayodhya to build up in the past five years. So, for a start, stop believing the nonsense about secular principles’ and let us examine the real issues-why are the vast majority of Muslims still living in dire poverty? Why is it so hard for them to get jobs in government and, most importantly, in the police? Why are most of the dead at the end of a riot Muslims? Why are policemen responsible for murdering Muslims youths in Meerut still not punished? It is only when some of these questions are answered that Hindus and Muslims will realize that the minorities have not been appeased by the Congress (I) but merely used, and then perhaps we can take a fresh look at secularism.

Article extracted from this publication >> March 16, 1990