Waiting for a new president

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

India’s next President will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal choice, unless the Bharatiya Janata Party or, more importantly, its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, bungles badly.

Pranab Mukherjee’s five-year term as President ends on July 24. The Election Commission will soon set in motion the process of choosing his successor shortly.

As constitutional head of state, the President is required to act on the advice of the council of ministers at all times. But at some critical junctures, as, for instance, when a new Prime Minister has to be inducted, the President has to act on his own.

The President is elected by an electoral college comprising elected members of the two houses of Parliament and of the Assemblies of the states and Union Territories.

The 776 MPs and 4,120 MLAs each command half of the electoral college votes. The value of an MP’s vote is 708 but that of MLAs varies from seven in Sikkim to 208 in Uttar Pradesh, as it is pegged to the state’s population.

In the early years of Independence, the Congress could get its nominee elected as President with a comfortable margin as it dominated Parliament and the State Assemblies. As it declined, and a fragmented national polity emerged, the Congress has to choose its candidate after wide consultations to ensure smooth election.

When the Janata Party, which was cobbled together to take on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime, held sway at the Centre and in the northern states, it was able to get its nominee, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, elected as President. Eight years earlier Mrs Gandhi had blocked his election as the Congress candidate by switching her support to VV Giri who was contesting as an independent.

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance which was in power at the Centre at the time of the 2002 election was in a hopeless minority in the electoral college. The BJP and the Congress both backed retired missile scientist APJ Abdul Kalam, and he became the President. 

The Congress and its United Progressive Alliance partners commanded only 33 per cent of the electoral college votes when it picked Pranab Mukherjee as its candidate in 2012. The NDA, which was close behind with a vote share of 28 per cent, fielded former Congressman and Lok Sabha Speaker PA Sangma. Mukherjee collected almost twice as many electoral college votes as Sangma, thanks to the support of a host of smaller parties.

Having won 282 seats in the 542-member Lok Sabha in the 2014 poll and 312 seats in the 403-member UP Assembly in this year’s elections, the BJP is now way ahead of the Congress. With its NDA partners it commands about 47.5 per cent of the electoral votes valued at about 1.1 million.

But the non-BJP parties are in no mood to give up without a fight. Congress President Sonia Gandhi has been in talks with other opposition parties to pick a consensus candidate. Those under consideration include former Bengal Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Janata Dal (United) President Sharad Yadav and National Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar.

Even if Shiv Sena, an NDA partner which revels in giving Modi occasional pinpricks refuses to back its nominee, as in the last two presidential elections, the BJP is in a position to cover the small shortfall in its electoral college majority with the help of regional parties.

Three southern parties, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (vote share about 5.5 per cent), YSR Congress (vote share about two per cent) and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (vote share 1.5 per cent) and Odisha’s Biju Janata Dal (vote share 3.5 per cent) are believed to be ready to go with Modi.

Some of them may want to know who the BJP’s candidate for the office is before committing themselves. Few expect Modi to favour party veterans Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi whom he has sidelined. Other names doing the rounds include those of three women, Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, Union Minister Uma Bharti and Jharkhand Governor Draupadi Murmu, who is an Adivasi.

In the last three years the RSS has tightened its grip on the BJP and placed its hard core leaders in constitutional positions in several states. It is, therefore, time to ask if the next President will be an organisation man from that outfit.

RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat’s name was proposed by Shiv Sena for the office of President. Oddly enough it was endorsed by a Muslim Congress leader from the south. Bhagwat said he was not interested in the post. That only means he prefers to be king-maker rather than the king.

One hopes Modi and Bhagwat do not lose sight of the fact that the President, who symbolises the majesty of the republic, needs to be a unifying figure. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 16, 2017.

Hindutva’s two-fold strategy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been going around talking about development, shadowy groups have been conducting murderous campaigns to overawe and silence the society.

The violence is directed not against political opponents but against writers, Dalits and Muslims. The game plan, it appears, is to clear the way to declare India a Hindu Rashtra (nation), the proclaimed goal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ideology.

An atavistic element is discernible in the choice of targets. Hindu texts testify to violent attacks on Buddhist centres of learning by proponents of the Vedic religion in the medieval period. Dalits who were outside the Vedic society came under duress after Buddhism declined and a casteist society emerged.

Muslims were the ‘other’ whose presence helped the Vedic community to posit a Hindu society. According to VD Savarkar, originator of the Hindutva concept, a life-and-death struggle began the day Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who had raided the subcontinent 17 times, first crossed the Indus.

Three eminent thinkers have been killed under a plot which was hatched before Modi came to power. Narendra Dabholkar of Maharashtra, a campaigner against superstition, was shot dead in 2013 when there were Congress-led governments at the Centre and in the state. Govind Pansare, also of Maharrashtra, and MM Kalburgi, of Karnataka, were killed after BJP-led coalitions took office at the Centre.

Police investigating the cases have said all three were killed by members of a Goa-based outfit called Sanatan Sanstha, founded 25 years ago to provide education in Dharma. A trial court had found six of its members guilty of planting bombs.

Atrocities against Dalits have been reported from several states. The BJP or its associates have not been implicated in any of the incidents but the party’s caste supremacist approach and failure to condemn the gruesome killing of two children and a youth in two separate incidents in Haryana, where it is in power, put it in the dock.

To make things worse, Union Minister of State VK Singh callously likened the killing of children to stoning of street dogs. Public outrage forced Singh, who is a retired Army chief, to tender an apology.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, last year 47,064 crimes against Dalits by non-Dalits were reported. This was 19 per cent higher than the previous year’s figure. More than half the cases were reported from the socially and economically backward BIMARU states – Uttar Pradesh (8,075), Rajasthan (8,028), Bihar (7,893) and Madhya Pradesh (4,151).

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, who visited the family of the deceased children, linked the incident to the Prime Minister’s attitude and accused the BJP-RSS combine of crushing the weak and the poor. However, his party bears as much blame, if not more, for the current situation in Haryana.

Based on official data, the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations recently said 3,198 cases of atrocities against Dalits were registered in Haryana during the 2004-2013 decade, which was 245 per cent more than in the previous decade. From 2005 to 2014 Haryana was under Congress rule.

The most ominous part of the Hindutva project aims at accentuation of Hindu-Muslim polarisation through campaigns on the sensitive issue of cow slaughter. After the lynching of a man at Dadri in UP on false allegations of killing a cow, a truck driver was set upon by a gang at Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir state, where the BJP is the junior partner in a coalition government headed by the People’s Democratic Party.

The driver died in a Delhi hospital a few days later. A protest by dissidents paralysed life in the Kashmir valley. In Jammu, members of the RSS held a route march, openly displaying firearms.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said the small incidents which had taken place would not dent the country’s prestige, which, he claimed, had gone up under Modi’s prime ministership. However, Modi himself found it necessary to break his long silence and talk of the diversity which was India’s beauty.

What rattled the government was the spirited protest of scores of writers in different languages who returned the awards they had received from the state or its agencies. Most of them pointedly referred to Modi’s silence on the Dadri lynching and the official literary establishment’s failure to condemn the murder of writers. It was protest of a kind with no parallel in living memory.

Some observers are of the view that the violent activities of small Hindutva groups are hurting Modi’s development agenda. But, then, Hindu Rashtra is also part of his agenda. --Gulf Today, October 27, 2015 

US rebuke evokes divided response

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Public statements by President Barack Obama chiding India for the recent attacks on religious minorities has chilled the officially promoted euphoria over the personal chemistry between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and elicited diverse responses from the Bharatiya Janata Party government and its Hindutva ideologues.

Obama was the chief guest at this year’s Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi. He and Modi appeared before the media after one-to-one talks to announce elevation of the strategic relationship between the two countries to a new level.

Modi repeatedly referred to Obama by his first name to impress listeners about his personal rapport with him. That did not hold Obama back from telling a home truth. Addressing a rally before leaving New Delhi, he said, “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered on religious lines. Nowhere is it more important to uphold religious freedom than in India.”

Obama’s remark, coming in the wake of a series of attacks on religious minorities and a spate of conversions in the guise of homecoming by those who had forsaken Hinduism, was interpreted by observers as a parting shot. Modi, his government and the ruling party were not happy but chose not to respond publicly.

Last week, Obama brought up the subject again while addressing the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event in Washington attended by political, social and business leaders. He referred to his visit to India, a place “full of magnificent diversity…where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs” and said the acts of intolerance would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi. The government and the Hindutva outfits responded this time.

The first response came from unnamed officials who suggested that Obama’s statements were the result of political compulsions. They suggested that he had criticised India to placate the Christian lobby in the US and to prevent perceptions of closeness between India and the US racing ahead of ground reality. They also insinuated that the remarks were aimed at pressuring India into making concessions on the issues that defied solution during the Delhi talks.

For the first time officials admitted that the Indo-US nuclear, defence and clean energy discussions were marked by hard bargains. The most startling disclosure was that the US had pressured India to commit troops for service in Afghanistan, arguing they could be effective as they knew the region well.

One part of the officials’ theory was clearly wide of the mark. Far from pleasing the Christian lobby, Obama had invited its wrath by following up a reference to Daesh in his Prayer Breakfast speech with reminders of the terrible deeds committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Drawing attention to the treatment of the Blacks, he added, “Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

As is his wont, Modi maintained silence on Hindu communalism. However, two senior ministers responded to Obama’s criticism.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who dismissed the attacks on minorities as mere aberrations, said, “The best example of India’s tolerance was the Dalai Lama sitting next to Obama.” The Buddhist leader, who has been living in India since he fled Tibet in 1959, was among the guests at the Prayer Breakfast.

“Religious tolerance is inbuilt in our culture,” said Home Minister Rajnath Singh. “No one is insecure in the country, no matter to which religion he or she belongs.”

In an apparent attempt to meet the US criticism, he asked the Delhi police to take stern action against those responsible for vandalising churches in the capital. A high official telephoned the Archbishop of Mumbai and apologised for the refusal of visas to two Vatican representatives who were to have attended a meeting of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India.

While the ministers spoke in measured tones, Surendra Jain of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, called Obama a “stooge of the Church” and said he had not been a good guest. He asked the government to weed out politicians batting for the Church.

By reiterating the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s stand that India is a Hindu nation in a speech on Sunday, its chief, Mohan Bhagwat, made it clear that the Hindutva forces are in no mood to relent. In fact, he sought to widen the social divide by raising a new slogan, “One language, one God, one religion”, which is a total negation of India’s cultural diversity. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 11, 2015