The Historical Circus

The Great Indian Carnival is here! The election fever has become an epidemic, turning everyone( including yours sincerely) to a part-time political commentator.We,Indians, have a penchant for drama and humour( not wit, we have exiled that long ago) and the conversations are taking such turns that even Comedy Nights with Kapil now seems serious discourse!
I was tempted into one such conversation with an ardent supporter of BJP who is not generally known as an idiot!That person wrote:
“And we(the members of the political party i m supporting) are not communists, capitalists, fundamentalists or any such crap……We are just humanists…….”
It was intended to shut me up and indeed, I shut up,albeit, with watery eyes.
While the comment itself was comical, the implications were almost, if I am allowed to use the term, sinister.It showed the complete lack of knowledge about even the A B C D of politics!It shows that in the conundrum of elections and parliamentary politics, a new class is in the rise that is politically motivated but politically illiterate and political illiteracy never bode well for any country and any party!
A question has been hurled at all non BJP supporters, time and again, that “congress is so corrupt, so bad, so dynastic.Why don’t you all speak against it?Why are all your energies channeled to bash BJP,or to be more precise, bash Modi?”
This question has an inherent misconception! It accepts, prima facie, that a non supporter of BJP has to be a supporter of Congress, if not of Congress, atleast CPI(M).While this may be true in some cases, a sweeping generalization in this respect undermines political intellect of the accused!Most of the people who, in what ever power they have, are ardent critics of BJP are also equally critical of Congressi politics and the hypocrisy  of  CPI(M).If today we speak against BJP, it is because BJP trying and is infact successful to some extent, to create a huge support based on concocted facts and falsification of history.Our hatred of Modi is not generated from any personal grievance or from the fact that we don’t like his 56 inch chest.It has more reasons to it. For a long time, BJP has been urging us  to forget Gujarat 2002, let us forget it,for the time being.They have also been urging us to agree to the pseudo-development of Gujarat, let us accept even that,for the time being.But what about the dangerous misogyny of Modi, refer to his ‘Dehati Aurat’ comment,Delhi rally? What about his comments regarding Bangladesh and Pakistan, refer his Silchar rally?What about his support to the most hateful perpetrators of linguistic massacre, refer Silchar rally again?What about the shameless flaunting of environmental laws in Gujarat, no monitoring of air pollutants, effluent treatment laws disregarded, CEPI index of Vapi,Ankleshwar shunned away? and the list can go on and on..
BJP has got a problem with history, a big problem in fact.India has a long tradition of heterodoxy of faith and politics.In this complicated tresses of history, to find an historical sanction of its acts, BJP has no other way, than to opt for selective amnesia.Not long ago, if my memory serves me right, there was an article in The Hindu where a person had tried to stoke the pride of Hinduism by stating that in the last forty-five years, the most prestigious moment for the Hindus were the defeat of Pakistan in 1972 war.The next day, there a letter pointing out to certain facts that in 1972 war, the Chief of the Army Staff was a Jew, the Commander in Chief a Sikh,the people for whom the battle was fought mostly Muslims,so  there wasn’t anything to be proud of exclusively by the Hindus.This is not a stray incident.All round, in the conundrum of 2014 elections, we have seen history being twisted and molested as per convenience.The recent attempt of BJP is to yell at the top of their voice to prove that they are secular.They have been repeatedly trying to convince the informed that the secularism prevalent in Gujarat(?) is the only true form of secularism.Selective amnesia again!.No , I am not talking of 2002,it has been invoked sufficient number of timesand rightly so.What I try to draw your attention to is the fact that BJP is an arm of the Sangh Parivar.One cursory glance through their website and publications is enough to dispel any of BJP’s claim to secularism.Infact Dr. Mohan Bhagwat of RSS commented at a rally in Guwahati that “Hindutva is the only way for global welfare.” He has also said what he means by Hindutva:the sanatan dharma. RSS clearly has the stand in favour of declaring India as a Hindu country.How can this outfit, or any off-spring of this outfit be secular!
Do we remember the last time NDA govt was elected to the lower house?They had invented the Indus-Saraswati Civilization.By selective omission and inclusion of certain passages they  had almost said that the Vedas were written by those who inhabitated the Indus-Saraswati Civilization.There was a clear attempt at rewriting the history that shall provide a legitimacy to their brand of fundamentalist Hindutva.Because the existing history of the sub-continent with its numerous strands of ideas interwined, numerous schools of thoughts co-existing, cannot but oppose the overwhelming saffron paint that BJP uses to colour everything.Good or bad, right or wrong, India’s history is the history of tolerance and discourse and tolerance doesn’t suit BJP. Tolerance doesn’t lend legitimacy to their act of ghetto-ing the muslims in certain localities of Ahmedabad, tolerance doesn’t provide legitimacy to the way they speak of developing the minorities( Doesn’t these claims of working for the good of minorities remind one of the  “White Man’s Burden” of Kipling?) The case of text book howlers still continues in Gujarat-the epitome of development as claimed by the BJP.Do we remember the time when ABVP goons coerced the university authorities to exclude the essay of A K Ramanujan “Three Hundred Ramayanas” from the academic syllabus?Do we remember how Penguine decided to pulp the copies of Doniger’s Hinduism because of threats by a far-right outfit?
The way things are going, soon P N Oak will be potrayed as the only authentic historian and all dissenting voices, the voices which ask questions that,history says ,create knowledge, shall be pushed in a closet because dissention is not something that RSS-BJP-VHP is good at handling.