EDITORIAL
Replying to a debate on ‘ghar wapsi' (homecoming) or reconversion of Muslims to Hinduism—initiated in the Lok Sabha by Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia—Union Minister Venkaiah Naidu yesterday, inadver-tently or willingly, exposed the real face of the BJP when he stoutly defended the RSS as a “great” institution to which “we are proud to belong as it is our mother organisation”. This was sufficient proof, if such evidence was at all needed, of where the BJP leaders stand on the issue of the RSS-inspired communal game of the Sangh Parivar.
Earlier in the day Scindia, while initiating the debate, had pointedly brought into focus the statements of leaders of RSS outfits spewing venom at Muslims and Christians “who had forcibly converted countless Hindus to their faiths” and asserting that the ghar wapsi movement would change the demographic character of India ”now that we are in control of the Central Government”. He further referred to the allurements being offered—ration cards, BPL status et al.—to poor Muslims so that they convert to Hinduism and quoted RSS activists furnishing figures of the enormous money being spent for the conversion of Muslims and Christians.
Incidentally, Venkaiah Naidu did not even care to answer these charges. All he said was that the Opposition was trying to divert attention from the issue of “development” that his government was seeking to grapple with.
By then, however, almost the entire Opposition, including SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav (who had, intriguingly, tried to confuse people by calling, in his speech, the ghar wapsi a non-issue much to the delight of the Treasury Benches), had staged a walkout in protest against Venkaiah Naidu's total identification with the RSS and its project.
In the recent past there have been several statements by stalwarts of the Sangh Parivar (BJP leaders included) that highlight the seriousness with which the polity is being sought to be communalised by them. First came the repre-hensible public utterances by the BJP's Union Minister of State, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, that reflected the Hindutvavadis' attitude towards non-Hindus. Then began the ghar wapsi movement planned by the RSS following high-level discussions at its headquarters at Nagpur from November 7 to 9. Thereafter a known face of the BJP/RSS claimed that Taj Mahal was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple—implying thereby that it was the first step on their part to lay claim on the heritage monument. And then a BJP MP placed Nathuram Godse at par with Mahatma Gandhi by affirming that both were ‘patriots‘! [His subsequent half-hearted retraction in Parliament carried little conviction.]
The last such pronouncement has come from the Governor of UP, holding a constitutional position. He is a known RSS figure who was a Minister in the erstwhile A.B. Vajpayee Government He announced that a befitting Ram temple will soon be built at Ayodhya at a time when the matter is still pending in the court. [Before that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called for making the Gita the national scripture; this provoked Gopal Gandhi to say that such a move was “tinkering with the loom of India's diverse republic”.]
However much the leading figures of the BJP-led NDA Government accuse the Opposition of diverting the nation from the main agenda of the Narendra Modi administration, namely, that centring on ‘development', it is the divisive steps aimed at causing communal disharmony (like the ones mentioned above) which constitute the real agenda of the BJP/RSS now that they have tasted absolute power at the Centre under Modi's ‘dynamic' leadership.
There is no option for secular democrats of all shades but to unite against this divisive agenda of the ruling establishment that poses the most diabolic threat to our Constitution and its secular foundation. We cannot, under any circumstance, let the Hindu Taliban take over this country and turn it into a Hindu Rashtra.
December 12 S.C.