Of biases and lies
Balbir Punj

Pankaj Vohra’s ‘Search for Sita’ (HT- November 22) is more like an intellectual trapeze to arrive at the ‘hereditary greatness’ of Nehru-Gandhi dynasty from the Shankaracharya issue via BJP. BJP has not, even remotely, suggested that Shankaracharya is above law. BJP’s objection is over the presumptuous and spiteful manner in which he was arrested in the dead of night before Diwali and the treatment given to him without any sensitivity towards his religious obligations. The specious argument provided by the Tamil Nadu Police was that he was going to escape to Nepal from Andhra Pradesh in a helicopter. Forget the facts that a helicopter would have to land several times to refuel for reaching Nepal or we have an extradition treaty with that country.

To allege that the BJP has taken up the Shankaracharya incarceration issue as a curtain raiser to the state elections due in February, is to display one’s ignorance of the BJP’s ethos. As a party that is not apologetic about its commitment to Hindutva, BJP could not but take up the issue of ill-treatment of a Hindu seer. Mr Vohra ignores the fact that the UPA Government at the Centre has sought to distance itself from the action of the TN Government in arresting the acharya. Was Dr Manmohan Singh’s statement in this regard an electoral ploy?

Ever since this deplorable arrest, we have had many lessons from the pseudo secular establishment about the equality of all before law. That lesson probably applies only if the victim is an icon of Hindus; it does not apply when an Urdu Professor of the DU gets too close to terrorists who plan and carry out an attack on Parliament House, or a Bhindaranwala and his goons armed to the teeth move around the capital unchallenged.

Pseudo secularists are also not worried about the majesty of Law if someone like Taslimuddin gets to be a Minister of the Central Government. The Bihar Government then obliges him by withdrawing the case itself instead of asking him to submit to the majesty of Law. Politicians are kept in luxurious guest houses even after being charged with criminal cases but a Hindu seer should be sent to ordinary jail to uphold the majesty of Law. If this is not a calculated contempt for Hindu society and distortion of ‘secularism’, what else is it?

Vohra deplores the BJP Government’s failure to construct the temple. It was the Supreme Court that had put up barriers against any such construction. It is to the credit of the NDA Government led by the BJP that it obeyed the court’s orders even though it went against its own grain rather than seek to turn it round by amending the law. In fact that sort of distorting law to circumvent the apex court was the monopoly of the Congress party, which torpedoed the court’s verdict on the Shah Bano case by amending the Muslim law.

Those who give us lessons in equality before Law should ask why Indira Gandhi refused to submit to the Shah Enquiry Commission’s demand to testify and why her minions burnt buses and created mayhem when she was arrested through a due process of law. The due process of law should not apply for Indira Gandhi but it must apply for the Shankaracharya. That is the perverted logic of the pseudo secularists.

The most deplorable part of Vohra’s Ramayana is this lie being doled out time and again that the Congress party was nurtured by four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Orwell wrote about Big Brother rewriting history in an authoritarian system; we now witness history being rewritten dropping all the people except the Nehrus from the Congress Pantheon.

The other lie is of the so-called “sacrifice”. The “sacrifice” was never mentioned till the fateful day when Sonia Gandhi met the President with a letter that she had been elected leader of the UPA. After that fateful meeting, we heard much about the “great tyaga”. And who is the authentic voice to validate that “tyaga”? Her own son. He suddenly discloses that right from 1996 “under no circumstances was she going to claim the top job”.

So all that history of 1998 when she met President Narayanan with the claim to be invited to take oath and the President insisting on proof of majority and her inability to provide that proof after Mulayam Singh Yadav put his foot down specifically on her becoming the PM and not the Congress Party assuming leadership – all that recorded history in newspaper columns was false! I wonder whether we have already begun to be pummeled into disbelieving the shreds of history of which we all were witnesses only six years back!.

Ram temple is an “emotive issue”. It was not an “emotive issue’ when the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi broke open the locks of the same place and then topped it with a “shilanyas”. It was not an emotive issue when the Congress Party in the 80s committed itself in Mizoram election to a Bible Raj or fought the 1984 election with pictures of the assassinated Indira Gandhi. Should we read history backwards for the benefit of columnists like Vohra who have already declared that there is “little hope for the saffron party”?

The BJP was formed to implement an ideology including some emotive issues. So long as there is a sufficiently large core of believers in that ideology the party will never be pushed into irrelevance even though it may lose elections or win them. The test of the BJP leadership is how it overcomes the electoral setbacks and makes the party (not the individual) relevant all the time; not how it hitches on to a family hierarchy. It is the Congress that needs its Sita. If ever the BJP too needs one Mr. Vohra should rest assured that it would not come from abroad.

The writer, Rajya Sabha MP and Convener of BJP’s Think Tank, can be contacted at bpunj@email.com