by BERNARD D’MELLO
Public memory of how (the) fascists “use[d] and abuse[d] democratic freedoms in order to abolish them” (Hannah Arendt) was strong when, more than 60 years ago, India’s Constituent Assembly rejected the option of a presidential type of executive. But now, the coming general elections are being framed as a presidential-style contest between the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) “strongman” Narendra Modi and the Congress Party’s “weakling” Rahul Gandhi, presuming, of course, that the latter will be named by his party as its prime ministerial candidate. In a recent Economic Times/Nielsen opinion poll of 100 CEOs, it was reported, 74 wanted Narendra Modi as prime minister compared to only 7 who backed Rahul Gandhi. The Washington-headquartered lobbyist Apco Worldwide, which had been hired by the Gujarat state government to promote the biennial “Vibrant Gujarat” Summit, seems to have transformed the image of Modi from that of an infamous communalist bigot into one which big business regards as most suitable to be India’s next prime minister.
The founding fathers (and mothers) of the Indian Constitution, apprehensive of the emergence of tyranny in the future, opted for parliamentary democracy. But religious-communal hate politics, already given an ideological content with the founding of the Hindu Mahasabha (a rightwing Hindu political assembly, founded in 1914) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, a rightwing paramilitary, volunteer Hindu nationalist organisation, founded in 1925), grew steadily after Partition. The Jan Sangh, the previous incarnation of the BJP, joining the JP movement only after the Emergency, opportunistically entered the power structure via the Janata Party, and over time, as the BJP, in a series of fascist manoeuvres within the parliamentary framework, established itself as the main contender of the Congress Party for power at the Centre.
To hell with secularism as defined in the Supreme Court judgment in S R Bommai v. Union of India (AIR 1994 SC 1918)! Gujarat, with Narendra Modi as chief minister, became the RSS’s, and, in turn, the BJP’s laboratory of Hindu Rashtra (nation). Following the Godhra tragedy, as the late eminent civil rights lawyer K G Kannabiran, who was a member of the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal that inquired into the carnage in Gujarat in 2002, put it, “genocide was unleashed on the Muslim population of Gujarat . . . . The mobs . . . converted Ram into a psychopathic, bloodthirsty god”
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