by HARTOSH SINGH BAL
MJ Akbar joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in March last year, during the election campaign that delivered the party and Narendra Modi to national power. Though he is now a BJP spokesperson, many in the party distrust him. PHOTO/Arun Sharma/ Hindustan Times/Getty Images
In December 2002, weeks before the announcement of state election results in Gujarat, MJ Akbar, then the editor-in-chief of the news daily the Asian Age, published a column. That July, Gujarat’s legislative assembly had been prematurely dissolved, and its chief minister, Narendra Modi, had resigned, following criticism of his Bharatiya Janata Party government for widespread anti-Muslim violence under its watch earlier in the year.
Akbar’s column, titled ‘Congress is BJP’s B-Team in Gujarat,’ chided the opposition party for a campaign strategy centred on “soft-Hindutva,” a watered-down version of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology. “It is chicanery to claim outside Gujarat that you want to destroy the evil of communalism by defeating Narendra Modi,” he wrote, “and to indulge in a variation of his communalism inside Gujarat.” But he had sharp words for the BJP, too. A major victory for Modi should cause the party to worry, he said. The chief minister is an ideologue, with a difference. The difference is hysteria. It is an edgy hysteria, which can mesmerise; and it easily melts into the kind of megalomania that makes a politician believe that he is serving the larger good through a destructive frenzy against a perceived enemy. In Hitler’s case, the enemy was the Jew; in Modi’s case the enemy is the Muslim. Such a politician is not a fool; in fact, he may have a high degree of intellect. But it is intellect unleavened by reason, and untempered by humanism.
Akbar continued,
If Modi wins big, he will immediately seek to make the whole of the BJP a version of his Gujarat experience. He is already visibly contemptuous of the senior leadership of his own party. … Modi will mount a challenge within his party, and get some support too; he will dream of becoming Prime Minister of India after a national victory fashioned through the Gujarat rhetoric.
With all of this, Akbar warned, “long before Modi gets anywhere near Delhi, he will have destroyed the BJP.”
The party won 127 of the 182 seats in the Gujarat assembly, and Modi returned as chief minister. He retained the office until May 2014, when he stepped down to take up a new post, as the prime minister of India.
In March 2014, during the general election campaign that delivered Modi and his party to national power, MJ Akbar was inducted into the BJP. Draped in a scarf in the party’s colours of saffron and green, he appeared before the media on a Delhi stage to accept a bouquet from the BJP president, Rajnath Singh. Days later, Akbar wrote an article in the Economic Times justifying his evident change of heart about the party and its leader. Of the 2002 violence in Gujarat, he wrote that, under the preceding ten years of national Congress rule, “every relevant instrument of state was assigned the task of finding something, anything that could trace guilt to Modi. They could not. … One suspects that only some politicians have a vested interest in the past during an election when Indians want to vote for their future.” For India, he continued, “There is only one way forward. … You know his name as well as I do.”
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