March 16, 1998

By seeking to form a government, the Left and Congress are mocking the mandate

Tavleen Singh

Not again. Please. Let us not yet again have a situation in which secularism becomes the excuse for landing us with yet another dishonest coalition in Delhi which will deprive us of the one thing India needs more desperately at the moment than any other: governance. Secularism was not an issue in the recent general election; governance was.

But even as I write this, sundry "secular" Marxists, Yadav chieftains and discredited Congress leaders are back to playing the same game that gave us the permanently unstable United Front (UF) government in 1996 -- a government we suffered for 18 months. All in the name of secularism, a word that has become almost more discredited than the leaders who attempt to grab power once again under its flimsy guise.

Once more political circles in Delhi resound with that old war cry: we will keep the BJP out at all costs. Why? The BJP-led alliance may be slightly short of a full majority but it has convincingly proved that as far as the average Indian voter is concerned, it is no longer seen as communal. Just as the Marxists in West Bengal are no longer seen by Bengali voters as half-crazed Stalinists.

The BJP has travelled a long way in the past five years. In this election campaign, we did not once hear the sort of vicious nonsense that the likes of Sadhvi Rithambara and Ashok Singhal spouted when they campaigned for the party in earlier elections. As a result, the BJP alliance can now claim a larger vote share -- for the first time -- than the Congress and its poll partners. This happened despite Sonia Gandhi telling voters, as she addressed hundreds of thousands across the land, that the country would break up if the BJP came to power. Clearly, the average Indian does not believe this. Rather, many believe the BJP deserves its chance to show us whether it can provide us with a better government than the others. Everyone else has had a chance.

If the "secularist" game succeeds, then it would be pertinent to ask why we needed to have a general election. If it was so easy for the Congress to suddenly discover good qualities in a front it vilified till recently as comprising a bunch of incompetent idiots, then surely the party could have spared us all and made its discoveries before forcing an election on us.

Luckily for Congressmen, the DMK has been decimated in this election. So they are spared the embarrassment of explaining why they are now prepared to do business with "Rajiv Gandhi's killers". Please note that they are now more than prepared to do business with those who refused to throw the DMK out of the UF -- as the Congress had demanded, in a desperate attempt to postpone going to the polls even after effectively having announced the demise of I.K. Gujral's government.

Why bother, though, to go into such intricacies when we all know that secularism has become nothing more than a sham. In the words of the inimitable George Fernandes, "There are secular people in this country and there are normal people. We are normal people."

Nobody, not even Muslims, seriously believes any more that the BJP in power is going to turn into a Hindu version of the Nazi party. Nobody seriously believes either that the BJP is any more communal than, for instance, the Congress, under whose secular aegis we averaged at least one serious communal riot a year. But the game goes on and there are new players -- like Messrs Laloo and Mulayam Yadav -- who started swearing their support to the Congress even before the campaign ended.

Time and time again, the Yadavs have shown us that they have scant respect for decorum or norms in public life. So they would steal the mandate without batting an eyelid. But what about those eternally moralising Marxists? Are they not ashamed to seek admission to a government led by a party they have always regarded "the running dog of capitalism" -- or whatever it is that is the ultimate Marxist insult these days?

The whole thing, the intrigues, the machinations, the lies, are even more sickening when you realise the country faces serious economic problems as a result of the absence of governance and political stability for nearly two years now. Industry is facing a recession, even if we hesitate to use the word. Agricultural growth has seen a precipitous drop. Our currency staggers as it tries to withstand the winds from east Asia. Our infrastructure is bursting at the seams.

The new government is going to need all its energy to put India back on the road to progress and development. Yet, what do our secular leaders do? They play around with the mandate and behave not much better than Ali Baba's 40 thieves. If their plans succeed, they would have stolen the mandate. At least let's call it what it really will be.

Congress leaders like the ubiquitous Ghulam Nabi Azad have made it a point to go on every television channel to announce loudly that this is not a mandate for the BJP. Perhaps it is not, at least not fully. But what it certainly is not is a mandate for the Congress -- despite the charms of Sonia and her children -- and, most certainly, it is not a mandate for the UF.

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