The Bihar election result should be a wake-up call to the BJP. The extent of the drubbing clearly indicates that the BJP needs to change their policies and refurbish their public image from the one existing. The need of the hour for the BJP and the NDA government is to get its act together and get on with the task of governance and avoid getting into needless and infructious controversies. The BJP also has to get back the famed discipline that the RSS is known for which lately seems to have been given the go-by within the party. Otherwise after Amit Shah had spoken to the ‘hot-heads’ and the ‘motor-mouths’ we continue to see Shahrukh Khan being attacked virulently through the media, one by a sitting BJP MP and the other by Vijavargiya who is known to be close to Amit Shah. The slippages in this regard continue by the latter calling an elder BJP member like Shatrughan Sinha a ‘dog’ for meeting Nitish Kumar after the adverse election result in Bihar.
Sometime back Amit Shah had said that the PM has the mandate of the people whom he needs to satisfy. Is that the reason why the BJP functionaries are talking the language of the masses which is the only way that this segment of people would understand about the manner of functioning of their elected government? If so, it is rather a sad story since democracy in India has degenerated to the rule by mediocre people and is fast turning, under this present government, into a theatre of the absurd. Otherwise there is no logical or reasonable explanation of the many incidents that have occurred in the recent past. Just to recount the Dadri lynching, was Akhlaq not deserving to be part of the ‘achhe din’ that Modi has been trying to usher in under the slogan – Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas?
Further people like Anupam Kher and Bibek Debroy are not being logical in their arguments to support Modi and the various incidents of intolerance that have taken place. The first thing is that these people should talk of the ‘here and now’ rather than questioning what happened in the past and why people did not raise their voices during the Godhra incident or for the 1984 Sikh riots or the Emergency or the many incidents of intolerance that have happened since. This argument does not resolve the present situation and one could draw the issue further back and claim that there were none among the BJP or their parent organisations like the Jana Sangh or the RSS who fought for India’s freedom in 1947. As for a dialogue between aggrieved intellectuals and the PM, is the onus not on the PM to call these people over for a discussion? But for one Muslim Sahitya Akademi awardee none of the other dissenting authors were called for a meeting and was this particular person called because he was a Muslim? And after he said he would come with some of the other awardees who had returned their awards, the meeting was called off! As for the impact of the talk on intolerance on India’s international image, who should be more bothered about it? The PM or individual citizens. If the PM is not bothered about it and does not take steps to sort out the matter then it is clearly a failure of the person who is expected to lead the nation. As for Bibek Debroy, he should remember that he and even Bhagwati are nobodies as far as the larger constituency of the BJP are concerned and washing dirty linen in public and that too of a personalised nature without corroboration is absolutely irresponsible. As to the desire of the BJP brass to get the liberal and Left intelligentsia to vacate the thinking space is something that they have to be patient about since nothing happens overnight and 16 months in power is too early to change things which have been embedded for generations.
It is not known whether the orchestration of the incidents of ‘intolerance’ and the inflammatory comments against them are part of a larger design of the BJP and the incumbent government to claim de-stabilising forces are rife within the country and thus lay the grounds for yet another infamous Emergency. One hopes that is not the situation and better sense will prevail.
