Why Hindu hardliners are the real losers under Modi government

It is well-nigh impossible to understand the logic of what the BJP is trying to do.

The problem is not that the actions of BJP would not make any sense to "pseudo" secularists - that those of my ilk have been branded as, for many years. In fact, the likes of me have long ago stopped trying to understand this strange agglomeration. However, I speak, not of our lack of comprehension, but about the fact that most of what they are doing makes little sense to many of their own path pradarshaks, acolytes and camp followers.

Take the Land Acquisition Bill for instance - when it was introduced by the Congress in 2013, both Rajnath Singh, the then BJP president and the current home minister, and Sushma Swaraj, the then leader of opposition and the current minister of external affairs, came out vociferously in support of the peasants. Sushma Swaraj even made several radically pro-peasant suggestions in the area of compensation, including the proposal that land should be taken on lease from the peasant so that there is a regularity of income to the peasant whose land is acquired, and in case the land is not put to the use for which it was acquired, it should go back to the original owner.

One wonders what she must be thinking sitting in the ministry of external affairs as the prime minister runs a campaign for land acquisition that grinds to dust the arguments that she had so assiduously built and presented on behalf of her party just two years ago.

But this is not the only thing that must be making life increasingly incomprehensible to many in the BJP, especially the RSS apparatchiks. How would they explain to themselves the forthright stand against a ban on cow slaughter taken by Laxmikant Parsekar, the current CM of Goa and an old RSS hand - the man credited by many in the BJP for building the party in Goa. And what must come as a real shocker to them is the latest position of the CM of Maharashtra insisting that at least one screen in multiplexes be reserved for Marathi cinema at prime time. This pandering to Marathi vote bank politics is totally out of synch from someone with a long association with the RSS - an organisation which, despite being in almost exclusive control of Maharashtrian Chitpawan Brahmins for decades, insisted that all its leaders speak in Hindi, even those from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra and Karnataka.

What is befuddling the common BJP karyakarta and the ever sure and committed RSS shakha pramukh is the discovery that the "Hindu Bharat" which, they were convinced, was waiting for the BJP to come and liberate them from the clutches of the anti-Hindus has turned out be a rather elusive category.

They had thought that once the slaughter, sale or possession of the meat of not only the cow, but also bulls and bullocks becomes punishable with ten years of rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50,000 to Rs 1,00,00, they would fix the Muslims and Christians. Unfortunately quite the reverse has come to pass. The ink on the legislation had not even dried when it was discovered that more than 50 per cent of the millions engaged in the trade of beef, hide, leather and bones and of those engaged in the leather goods industry are Hindus.

These smart alecks have a lot of learning to do. People, their professions, their skills, their lives are so deeply enmeshed into each other in India that is Bharat, that every time you try to target your pet enemies, you will end up hurting those that you were setting out to appease.

They have just about begun to discover the ephemeral nature of the myths about India that they had created and had come to believe in. Khalil Gibran had once said, "The tragedy of the liar is not that no one believes him, his tragedy is that he begins to believe his own lies."

There is hope still - this is an ancient land and its poor, mostly illiterate or quasi-literate people, are repositories of great wisdom who don’t like to be taken for granted. They are slow to anger and deliberate for long before they move into action. But when they decide to teach someone a lesson, they teach them good. They taught the British and they taught the emergency regime of Mrs G. It would do the new apparatus well to remember these lessons of history.

It is early days yet, they have time to learn. But if they refuse to learn in this little time, the BJP will have plenty of time to repent at leisure - but not the advantage of learning from their margdarshaks, because they have already been marginalised.