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With the demolition of the masjid, the issue is dead

Political parties, firmed up by ideology, are the last ones to realise when their policies are way out from people's thinking. The BJP and the CPI(M) are two examples. Both are hung up on issues and doctrines which have ceased to matter with the public.

The BJP has not yet outgrown its obsession with the Ram mandir. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Ram Prakash Gupta, who forgets what he says five minutes later, has tried to reopen the issue by observing that the mandir can come up in the "same quiet way" in which the masjid was destroyed. Being an RSS man, he does not hide his intentions. Most BJP members feel the same thing, but they do not say so because of the party's decision to lie low on such subjects for the time being.

What the BJP leaders fail to appreciate is that the climate has changed. There was a time when they could and did stoke the fires of bias and prejudice by propagating that Lord Rama was born at the place where the Babri masjid stood. Making it an issue, Home Minister L K Advani charioted through northern India and sowed the seeds of communalism.

With the demolition of the masjid, the issue is dead. It does not incite the community any more. Exploiting it is like whipping a dead horse. Most Hindus were not happy over the demolition, to begin with. They would like to forget the nightmare. But this fact has not yet seeped into the mind of the BJP.

At its last session at Chennai, the party reiterated that the building of the temple was still on its agenda. The BJP conclave made it clear that the construction of the mandir had been deferred till the time it had a majority of its own in the Lok Sabha. The party did not bother about the sensitivity of the non-BJP allies in the National Democratic Alliance government which Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee leads.

I doubt if the announcement on the mandir would have been made if Vajpayee had been present at the session. Because of the Indian Airlines hijacking he had to stay in Delhi. But it is well known that he has different views on the subject. Not long ago, he told me in an interview - it has appeared in print - that he favoured "a settlement." He went on to say that he had in his mind a "formula for conciliation" but he would disclose it at a proper time.

But it is not only the mandir which has distanced Vajpayee from many in the BJP. There are some other issues on which he does not see eye to eye with them. One can see the fallout on the administration as well as governance. The Prime Minister's Office is at odds with the Home Ministry.

The Gujarat government's order that government employees are free to become members of the RSS and by doing so, they will not violate service conduct rules, is one point of difference between Vajpayee and the hard-liners. Another is the UP chief minister's fiat that the concurrence of the district BJP chief (invariably the RSS sanchalak) is necessary for the transfer of public servants of that district.

The fact that Vajpayee has done little, apart from expressing his unhappiness, to stall the two orders, one in Gujarat and another in UP, the RSS has started to assert itself in right earnest and it has begun to count. What would happen if the Congress governments in the four states, Nagaland, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Karnataka, were also to issue similar orders, one to allow government servants to join some Congress front and two, to let the Congress district committee chiefs decide about the transfers in their districts? The BJP must not forget that.

Does the RSS, the BJP and even the prime minister realise the harm they are doing to the country's administration which reflects some sort of unity at present? What happens to the cohesion which has stayed despite political pressures? The RSS is confined to one community and it is known for its chauvinistic and sectarian views. If it is to dictate to the government, it may divide the nation.

Against this background, fears on the revision of the Constitution have justifiably become pronounced. They are essentially due to lack of trust in the BJP. On the one hand, the government assures the country that there is no intention to change the secularism part of the basic structure of the Constitution. On the other hand, Law Minister Ram Jethmalani argues that the Supreme Court's notion of "misguided secularism," as the basis for the invocation of Article 356, needs to be reversed. Under Article 356, the Centre can dismiss a state government on the basis of a governor's report and take over the administration directly.

The Supreme Court judgement to which Ram Jethmalani refers is the one which pronounced the dismissal of Chief Minister S R Bommai's government "illegal." Some judges took the opportunity to say that "if a party in power in a state does acts calculated to subvert or sabotage secularism, that would be unconstitutional and amendable to action under Article 356." For Jethmalani to resurrect the judgment and question the secularism part is to announce from the roof top what the BJP has in mind.

Secularism is India's ethos. It rejects the two-nation theory. It shows how people are attuned to a pluralistic, multi-cultural society. The BJP would have accepted this by now. But it continues to follow its old line, not knowing how far the people have travelled from that doctrine.

The CPI(M) is the other party which is not facing the facts. It is still talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat and shutting out even inner-party democracy. Those who want modernity are being forced to fall into line in the name of discipline. West Bengal Transport Minister, Subhas Chakraborty, and Central Committee Member Saifuddin Chowdhary have been singled out as 'rebels.' Their fault is that they want the party to come out of the shell in which it has stayed for years. They want their party to modify its polices and programmes so as to be more acceptable to people.

Leaders like Jyoti Basu, Harkishen Singh Surjeet and Somnath Chatterjee realise that the communism of the Soviet brand has failed and that the ideology of yesterday cannot face that reality of today. While parroting the Marx-Engles philosophy, China has adopted the capitalist ways. The CPI(M) may not go that far but it needs to accept some of the methods through which the West is going up and up economically.

The party has to open up and learn to accommodate other points of view. It made a "historic blunder" when it did not allow Jyoti Basu to become the Prime Minister in 1996. It would continue to commit the same type of mistakes if it did not realise that it was far behind the other political parties due to its hide-bound attitude. A party is for the people and not the other way round.

Communism charges the capitalist structure of society with being based on violence and class conflict. I think this is essentially correct, though that capitalist structure itself has undergone and is continually undergoing a change because of democratic and other struggles against inequality. The question is how to get rid of this and have a classless society with equal opportunities for all.

Can this be achieved through methods of violence, or is it possible to bring about those changes through peaceful methods? Communism has definitely allied itself to the approach of violence. Even if it does not indulge normally in physical violence, its language is that of violence, its thought is violent and it does not seek to change by persuasion or peaceful democratic pressures but by coercion and, indeed, by destruction and extermination.

Kuldip Nayar