By Md. Ali, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: “The mainstream in India can only be secular. By and large, we are a people with a secular ethos. The hardliners have not had a lasting impact on our history…the BJP should think about this.” This is the advice cum warning which the BJP can’t afford to ignore because it has come from somebody who helped it gain a thumbing victory in Bihar in the last assembly elections. The party got a seat share which it had never expected.
While writing the cover essay for a national daily this Sunday, Nitish Kumar, who is playing his third inning as the Chief Minister of Bihar, has appealed to the saffron party to turn secular, arguing that the party will do well, if it follows a secular agenda.
Nitish Kumar [Photo by businessweek.com]
Giving the example of recent assembly elections in the state, the Bihar CM argues that BJP will only gain by following a secular agenda: “They were never as strong in Bihar as they are now. The Bihar experiment has been noted at the national level. ”
Even at the national level the BJP turned very strong whenever it joined hands with secular forces, Kumar further writes: “If you look at the party’s career, it has become strong whenever it has aligned with the secular stream. At the Centre, it jumped to 182 seats in 1999 only when Atalji was the leader who reached out to everyone.”
Mr. Kumar’s best comment on the NDA alliance is probably when he says, “I said I am with the BJP but I will follow the secular agenda.” But, the inherent contradiction of his relationship with the saffron party came out when he writes, “In fact, Muslims voted not just for me, but also for the BJP because they knew that it was I who would form the government.”
While writing about Muslim vote, Mr. Kumar says, “Muslims need employment and modern education too. They can not be asked to forget every thing else in the name of security.” It is a criticism of his opponents (read Lalu Yadav), who used to say that the biggest availability was that no communal riot ever happened during his 15 years rule as the CM of the state.
Nitish Kumar with senior BJP leader LK Advani[Photo by publictrustofindia.com]
It was not only the Hindutva party which Mr. Kumar writes about. In an essay, where he has talked about issues as diverse as the decreasing importance of caste in elections, Muslim vote, and Madal politics, he has devoted few paragraphs to the Congress party also. Nitish Kumar says that the party will decline if it remains centralized, “The congress remained strong till it functioned as a federal party. But as it got centralized, it lost in region after region.”
Talking about the decline of caste as a parameter of identity in Bihar, Mr. Kumar says that the idea of Bihari identity has taken over the backward sense of identity which caste denotes: “Slowly people will find it meaningless to harp on caste in the old ways…the pull of old identities may still be there but attention is shifting to something larger.”
The warning is to the BJP is that it will loose relevance, if it continues to harp on politics based on “mandir,”: “The Mandal and mandir cards can be used no longer. Once everyone’s participation is ensured in development, what remains to be exploited? Mandir came as a counter to Mandal. Now something larger is growing.”