Not since Jawaharlal Nehru in the early years of independence has a political leader commanded such wide respect as Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
This book presents, in the opening part, pen portraits of Vajpayee by some who have worked closely with him. Also his views, in his own words, on major problems faced by the country.
The author sees the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, under Vajpayee's leadership, to first position in the eleventh Lok Sabha as more than an episode in the history of elections in free India. It marks the electors' increasing realisation that other political parties have been disrupting Indian society by continuing, in order to secure more votes, the British colonialist policies of religious minorityism in the name of secularism, and of caste antagonism in the name of social justice.
Commended, instead, is the BJP's vision of social equity and harmony based on equal rights for all citizens with appeasement of none, and on the compassionate Gandhian economics of mutual sharing, Antyodaya and Swadeshi.
G.N.S. Raghavan entered journalism in the year of independence. After a five-year stint as political correspondent in Delhi of the Indian Express, he served in various media organisations of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and as Secretary of the Second Press Commission.
Among his publications are M. Asaf Ali: Memoirs-the Emergence of Modern India (Ajanta Books, 1995) and the following five, all published by Gyan: The Making of Modern India: Rammohun Roy to Gandhi and Nehru (1987); Forty Years of World's Largest Democracy (1990); Development and Communication in India: Elitist Growth and Mass Deprivation (1992); The Press in India: A New History (1994); and Social Effects of the Mass Media in India (1996).
Like many Indians who grew up in the middle of the 20th century, I was influenced by the Gandhi-Nehru-Marx hagiology, and the corresponding Savarkar-Patel-RSS demonology promoted by the post-independence intellectual establishment. This establishment has flourished on state funding, and is exemplified by such institutions as the National Council of Educational Research & Training (some of its school textbooks used to extol the USSR till its collapse); the universities that have proliferated since independence; and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library. As autonomous bodies, they need not have been subservient. But most of our intellectual elite have chosen to be conformist, like the sages of the Kaurava court and, in recent times, Soviet Academicians. From the late 1980s, while working on a full-length biography of M. Asaf Ali, I became aware of an ominous similarity between certain trends in free India and the policies of religious minorityism and caste antagonism pursued by British colonialists. Depressed sections of Indian society became conversion fodder for invasive proselytisers, Muslim and Christian, augmenting the changes of faith effected at the point of the sword. The religious minorities thus created were utilised by the British rulers to weaken the national movement. By a supreme irony, Gandhiji unwittingly strengthened Muslim separatism through his espousal of the Khilafat cause which legitimised pan-Islamism. Tragically, religious minorityism has been kept alive in post-partition India by vote-seeking politicians in the name of secularism, so that loneliness continues to be the lot of the nationalist Muslim. A second prong of British policy was to patronise loyalist elements in the upper crust of the Depressed Classes (later termed Scheduled Castes) and non-Brahmin leaders of castes that were socially, even if not economically, backward. This was in order to counter the Congress which was in the beginning led by persons from the forward castes who had been the first to take to modern education. Caste conflict, too, has been kept alive after independence in the name of social justice. The Congress as well as several competing parties have found in the creamy layer of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes the key to vote banks. In the absence of universalisation of education and eradication of poverty, the vast majority of these social groups remain-like the non-creamy layers of the rest of the population-sunk in illiteracy and want.
Against this background I began to study the political philosophy and programme of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Much of it I found attractive: the emphasis on priority attention to the poorest in Deen Dayal Upadhyaya's exposition of Integral Humanism, which resonates with Gandhian Antyodaya; Atal Bihari Vajpayee's criticism of the Maruti car as a symbol of elitism; and the emphasis in the BJP's manifestos on applying protective discrimination in favour of the backward social groups in such a way as to benefit primarily the poorest among them.
Recent events have shown that the BJP needs to be on guard against power-seekers in its own ranks. It has also to resist the temptation of competitive parochialism on issues like inter-State sharing of river waters. At the same it has to be sensitive to regional susceptibilities in the matter of the three-language formula. Above all, on the subject of secularism, it is time for the BJP to ask that sarva dharma sama bhaava, a definition readily accepted by Hindus, be affirmed also by political and religious leaders of other religious communities. One way to promote inter-religious ecumenism is to make compulsory, at all stages of education, instruction in the humane values common to all religions at their best. This was advocated long back, in 1949, by the Radhakrishnan Commission on Education. It was also urged repeatedly by Maulana Azad as free India's first Education Minister. A non-official resolution on the subject in Parliament will put to the test all political parties and individuals who profess secularism.
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