By Ghulam Muhammed
Al-Jazeerah, June 10, 2005
For Indian Muslims, the brouhaha over L.K. Advani’s pep talk during his Pakistan visit does not induce any change of assessment of what Sangh Parivar and its fundamental ideology stand for.
Advani had been Sangh Parivar’s ideologue and strategician. Given his past 'successes' over Babri Masjid demolition and the current stalemate in BJP’s prospects to increase its vote catchments area, to include the fertile Muslim lands, he had completely lost touch with the stark fact, that is not a leader of RSS, but only a follower.
The die-hards will support him, only if he sticks to their basic premises. He cannot chalk out new initiatives that can impinge on the sanctity of Sangh Parivar’s eternal enemies, the Muslims, Pakistan and Jinnah.
On the other hand, if Advani thought he can win over some Muslim votes by making friendly noises from across the border, he has not yet grasped the depth of Muslim enmity towards him in particular. They will not like anything better than for him to be tried as the conspirator in chief of the conspiracy to demolish Babri Masjid, to achieve his political goal of breaking Congress monopoly of power, which was supposed to be solidly based on loyal support of Muslim vote bank. Both Vajpayee and Advani had been making cosmetic changes over BJP’s exclusivist policies against Muslims. However, Gujarat had put paid to all their past and future efforts to lure Muslims into their parlors.
Not that Congress has any special deal for Muslims as far as the overall Brahmanical order stipulates. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes in his Indian Express article: The Jinnah Touchstone: ‘Surprise, surprise, Congress scratched, turns out to be closer to RSS, stuck in the past.’
Still Congress has been more successful in manipulating Muslim psyche, with any number of bridges across the long river of history shared by its own homegrown and homebred hard-line Hindu protagonists and the spineless Muslim masses, terrorized by the combined forces of Congress and RSS cadre, through staging communal riots all over the country.
Where does Pakistan and Jinnah come into this seemingly eternal tragedy of communal divide that could not be healed even by a life-wrenching partition of the country itself and passing of over half a century?
Without harboring any lofty and noble pretences, Pakistan’s pragmatic leadership has gone out its way to play a very fine game of brinkmanship by successfully inspiring confidence in Indian leadership of a genuine Pakistani desire to call it a day, as far as the corrosive enmity is concerned that the hard-liners of both neighbors had nourished in search of security from each others real or imagine designs on each other.
Inviting the same extremist Hindutva leader that conspired and worked hard to organize a mass movement to demolish Babri Masjid, and offering him to lay down foundation stone of temples, dear to their Hindu mythology, was an act sharply in contrast to the one single-most source of deep Hindu hurt of Mahmood Gazni’s destruction of Somnath Mandir.
If Musharraf of the ‘naya dil’ was not the kind of zealot that the Hindus hated and demonized, he had gone on to give a solid proof of Muslim toleration that does not contradict with the best traditions of early Islam.
Though it came easier for Musharraf rather than for the hard-line Pakistani religious leaders to show a sign of great magnanimity; the fact that hardly a single voice was raised on Advani’s visit to lay the foundation stone of the temples, does go to prove that Muslim masses, even in Pakistan are not as fanatic as the Sangh Parivar’s Togadias and Singhals have come out to prove.
To brand Advani, the very brand leader of their anti-Muslim political existence, as a traitor, alluding possibly to his Karachi birth and his non-Brahmin status, shows how deeply poisoned their psyche had become, following their losses in election after elections, and nary a sign of any future recovery to hold them together.
The shock of Advani resignation from the Presidency of BJP, that attracted huge media focus on the negative role of RSS Parivar, may get majority of moderate Hindus to further move away from the politics of Muslim-baiting and thus further reduce the chances of BJP ever coming out with any success with their negative politics. It is to be seen, if Advani can ever regain his confidence to be an effective leader of his rowdy flock after having suffered the worst humiliation of his long political career at their hands. And what mask he will be forced to wear, if he chooses to continue to hang on to his political aspiration to lead his party and through them the country.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai, India. <Ghulam_muhammed2@yahoo.co.in>
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