R Jagannathan

Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi may deserve all the brickbats he gets, but it’s actually time to ask ourselves this: why do we love to hate him? Is it because he is truly a demon in a class of his own, or is it because we are trying to fight similar demons in ourselves?

Let’s look at all the crimes he is accused of and see if they don’t exist elsewhere.

Among other things, Modi has been accused of aiding and abetting mass murder after the Godhra train fire; he is accused of using religion to polarise voters; he is believed to have used fake encounters to eliminate political and other opponents; he is also seen as having built a huge personality cult around himself.

Look closely at each of these allegations, and they can be applied to almost any successful leader in India. For starters, the 2002 communal carnage was not any worse than the 1969 one in Gujarat. When adjusted against population growth, the 1,000-plus toll in 2002 is not too different from the 500-plus killed 38 years ago under non-BJP rule. The 1984 anti-Sikh riots were, in fact, worse than Gujarat 2002. And, as more unmarked graves are discovered in Nandigram, West Bengal is looking more like Gujarat or Bosnia.

I am not trying to equate one crime with another here in a cold-blooded fashion, but sometimes when the media and the secular mafia work up a fake sense of indignation over something, one needs to look for more substantial answers.

Take the next accusation: polarising communities for electoral gain. Sure, Modi’s doing it. Who isn’t? In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi got an overwhelming mandate due to effective communal polarisation that essentially appealed to Hindu majoritarian instincts.

Buddhadeb Bhattacharya raised the Taslima issue to win over Muslims angered by Nandigram. To make sure they got the message, he even made some dubious comments on Lord Ram — when nobody had asked him for his opinion.

Congress governments at the centre and states are shamelessly wooing Muslims by dangling the bait of the Sachar report.

The Kerala CPI(M) has no qualms about partnering with communal leaders like Abdul Madani — a key accused in the Coimbatore blasts and later acquitted — in order to court the Muslim vote.

As for encounters, the less said the better. If Modi defended the fake Sohrabuddin encounter, he can cite countless other cases to buttress his point. The battle against terror in Punjab was won precisely through such encounters. Kashmir is probably witnessing the same. Maharashtra is another hotbed of encounters.

In Andhra, the Greyhounds were used to exterminate key Naxals. The CPM is in power in West Bengal because it colluded with Siddhartha Shankar Ray to eliminate Naxals root and branch. The Delhi police have been accused of nabbing ordinary Muslims and murdering them in cold blood by calling them terrorists.

And personality cult? Give us a break. Which leader in India does not want one, if he/she could have it? Sonia Gandhi? Karunanidhi? Jayalalithaa? Mulayam Singh? Mayawati? Lalu Yadav? Deve Gowda? Chandrababu Naidu? Jyoti Basu? Only powerless people rail against the cult of personality. In fact, the Indian sub-continent is full of oneman (or one woman) political parties where the key individual or his family is above the institution.

So what are we driving at? One, it is the rare politician who does not use caste or communal issues to improve his chances of re-election. Modi is no exception.

Two, the reason why we hate Modi is because it brings us face to face with our own basic communal feelings. Just as a man with rape on his mind will shout the loudest against an incident of rape, we (and the whole bunch of political secularists) condemn Modi because we feel guilty about our own communal instincts. Modi is merely the peg we are hanging our own collective guilt on.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net

Source : DNA