BJP: The Mandir card won’t fetch votes

According to the old saying, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce. But some political parties are obviously not familiar with this verity. The visible stir in the BJP to once again milk the construction of the Ram Mandir, as an issue for the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, makes it very clear that strategists in the BJP neither remember history nor are they able to internalise the lessons it provides.

Past experience provides incontrovertible proof of the diminishing returns of fundamentalist politics. The BJP did profit from the Ram Mandir agitation in the early 1990s but not for too long. In the 1993 elections the BJP formed the government, but since then the issue of building the Ram temple in Ayodhya has steadily lost its appeal for voters. The BJP actually failed to get a simple majority in the elections in Uttar Pradesh in 1996, and has since ceased to be the single largest party in the state.

In a “Mood of the Nation” survey carried out by India Today magazine in August 2003, when the Ram Mandir agitation was still fresh in public memory, almost 50 per cent of Hindus said that Ayodhya would not determine their voting choice. In Ayodhya itself, although the BJP candidate always did well, his margins and vote share have been by and large declining. The city’s shopkeepers, traditionally strong supporters of the BJP, are more concerned about the declining volume of business than about the construction of the temple. Ved Prakash Gupta, a prominent local politician around this time who left the BJP in 2002, went on record to say that the repeated agitations in favour of the temple have hit people of his community, the banias.

Interestingly, if the aim is to use the construction of the Ram Mandir to polarise voters on communal lines, the truth is that even the Muslims are disinclined from being provoked. In a survey carried out by Outlook magazine in 2002, the bulk of the Muslim respondents (40 per cent) replied in the negative when asked: Do you consider those fighting the Babri Masjid case as true spokespersons for the Muslim community In fact, the same survey revealed that 52 per cent of the Muslims wanted a negotiated settlement of the Ayodhya dispute. The remaining 48 per cent said that they would be happy to accept a judicial verdict. Not one advocated violence.

In other words, whether in the years nearer to the Babri Masjid demolition, or today, ordinary people, be they Hindus or Muslims, do not wish to fight against each other. But, the fundamental BJP-RSS electoral project is to subvert this intrinsic sentiment and deliberately create communal polarisation. Why else would it set in motion programmes like ghar wapsi, love jihad, and beef politics Why else would Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, a minister in the BJP government, publicly spell out the difference between “Ramzadas” and “haramzadas”, and, inexcusably just receive a token rap for public consumption for her outrageous statement.

It has always been the long term RSS project to consolidate Hindu vote against the “other”. But what the RSS is still not able to understand is that Hindu vote is not a monolith. It is divided along caste lines, and caste itself represents long entrenched differentiations in economic opportunity, social equality, personal dignity and political outlook. If dalits are being attacked across the country, by self-styled cow vigilantes belonging largely to the upper castes, their priority will be to fight for their rights and not become passive accessories in a project of communal hatred initiated by their very tormentors.

The BJP is also attempting to overarch these differentiations through the jingoistic invocation of nationalism. The surgical strike against terrorist launching pads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir was supported across the political spectrum. Nitish Kumar was among the first to congratulate Centre and our brave armed forces. But the crass manner in which the Prime Minister, his senior ministers and BJP workers are trying to use this strike for electoral purposes is deplorable.

The BJP believes that a combination of communal politics and jingoism will provide it the winning electoral formula. But, the real issue before voters continues to be the deteriorating economic situation. Centre’s claim of over seven per cent GDP growth is nowhere visible on the ground. Exports are falling, industrial production is down, the manufacturing sector is declining, the banking sector is in a mess, prices are rising and unemployment is growing. The promise of creating two crore jobs annually has turned out to be just a jumla.

The agricultural sector is the worst hit. The nation’s agricultural growth was below one per cent last year. Every half hour a farmer commits suicide but budgetary allocations for agriculture are far from adequate. The promise to increase minimum support price to farmers on the basis of 50 per cent profit above costs of production has been conveniently forgotten. Fertiliser subsidies have been reduced and irrigation budgets slashed. Half the farmers in the country are already under a per capita debt of Rs 47,000, but the BJP’s only answer is to promise farmers more credit! Crony capitalism appears to be thriving, with one business house, rumoured to be close to the central ruling dispensation, alone having borrowed from PSU banks what all the indebted farmers put together owe to banks.

In such a situation, if the BJP believes that by replaying the Mandir card, or again creating a communal divide, or whipping up pseudo-nationalism, it can beguile voters to forget issues directly related to their lives, such as economic hardships and social inequities, they are condemned to repeat history both as tragedy and farce.

The writer, an author and former diplomat, is a member of the JD(U)