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Shoddy politics over a settled issue
Saturday June 23, 2012 09:06:38 PM,
Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam
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We are passing through interesting
times. Interesting and intriguing. The best show going on is the
newly found love for secularism in the NDA, announced from the
rooftops by the illustrious Nitish Kumar himself.
The Bihar Chief Minister, who has been comfortable supping with
the devil all these years, finally discovers that angels too exist
in the polity. After being chummy and paly with the hate-spewing
Hindutva votaries, and ruling Bihar on their support, accepting
some of their most insidious agenda against Muslims, Kumar
decides that a part of BJP is not secular enough, whatever it
means.
These people are capable of all kinds of volte face and every
variety of sommersault. Remember LK Adavani’s Ayodhya rath
yatra and the murder of hundreds of Muslims all along the yatra
route? By staging the nationwide massacre of Muslims and
demolition of Babri Masjid, Advani gave secularism a bad name.
He abused it as “pseudo-secularism”, and virtually banished it
from India.
However, the same Advani, who with his track record of
monumental communal violence should have been the most unsuitable
for judging someone else’s secularism was, in years to come, to
declare Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah a secular person.
The debate over secularism has been restarted by the same old gang
which tried to uproot it from Indian soil. The debate is not at
all about secularism, but about power. Power game inside BJP: one
side led by Narendra Modi, another by BJP leaders opposed to him.
Kumar is the front of one faction of BJP, which is likely to
support Pranab Mukherjee in the presidential election instead of
PA Sangma, the official NDA candidate. And all this is not about
secularism. All sections of BJP are equally unsecular, including
the faction with Kumar.
Secularism is so popular today with the right wing that even RSS
has claimed to be secular. So, what do we make out of it? Nothing.
Just ignore this dishonest debate by pseudo-secularists of the new
vintage.
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