This general election initially set out to be no more than the sum of its parts. That is why the BJP was ahead even then, because it had a string of solid, rooted to the ground, performing chief ministers and other stalwarts who could deliver seats on a state-by-state basis. That is why I was personally dismissive of the plethora of pundits predicting a substantial Congress edge despite five years of gross mis-governance, breathless corruption, a horrible law and order situation, and walk-away allies, to which the global economic meltdown was only the proverbial lemon over bitter gourd.

Arithmetic to Algebra

The Supreme Court has changed everything. Stepping in with the supreme vanity of the vainglorious, the apex court has injected algebraic chemistry into the pedantic arithmetic of Election 2009, catapulting it into a referendum on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. With “enemies” like this, we don’t need friends.

Suddenly, an issue-less, lustre-less election, with few talking points after the Prime Minister shunned serious debate on any issue pertaining to his five-years in office, has placed the spotlight squarely on its most charismatic figure – the irrepressible Narendra Modi. The unspeakably dull Manmohan Singh and the Page Three half-politico Priyanka have been pushed to the sidelines.

This election was also about enhancement. The BJP took some of the most successful and popular schemes of its state governments (girl child, affordable food grains) and extended them to the national level in its manifesto promise of good and meaningful governance.

Hindu Rashtra

But now the Supreme Court has elevated the elusive ‘Hindu hriday samrat’ to the centre-stage for the remaining three phases of Election 2009.

This will help bring the submerged tensions associated with Gujarat 2002 to the national high table, permitting suppressed anxieties fuelled by Mumbai 2008, unchecked jihadi infiltration across the Line of Control in Kashmir, unmitigated illegal immigration across the entire north-east (there are a staggering 30,000 new armed jihadis in remote Sikkim alone), communal votebanks, and menacing foreign-funded conversions, joblessness and economic instability, to be articulated more forcefully as issues necessitating the firm hand of a Hindu Rashtra.

Hindu Rashtra is a Hindu-centric polity, where the core and the peripheries are tended to in the consciousness that this is the sacred bhumi of the Hindu people, where latter-day entrants (by conquest, migration) must position themselves relative to the native majority.

While it is nobody’s case that the minorities (read Muslims and Christians, otherwise populous and powerful world-conquering faiths) are or should be second-class citizens, a healthy national polity cannot rest upon the negation or repudiation of the Hindu face and Hindu ethos of its native majority. Much less can it tolerate the insidious annihilation of its foundations and culture through foreign-funded and coerced conversions that promote civilisational amnesia and open the country to virtual slavery by allowing foreign interests to run its national and international affairs. 
 

The loss of Hindu consciousness has denied India the friendship and affinity of its natural friends and allies; forced it to court unnecessary hostility with nations with which it should have friendly working relations; crippled it from making necessary interventions overseas in the defence of its natural and legitimate interests; and pushed it into bizarre and unsustainable marriages of (monetary) convenience to the powers-that-be. Never has a nation been so much at odds with itself as India under the de facto leadership of the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi. It is time to stem the rot.

Nehruvian secularism

In India, under Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru and his heirs, secularism began as the exile of religion from the public arena; it degenerated into full-blown religious identity politics by minority faiths coupled with the determined suppression of all forms of Hindu self-affirmation in the public domain. This was an unnatural state of affairs, and it could not last.

The challenge began soon after independence, when the murti of Sri Rama Lalla (infant Rama) appeared mysteriously (sic) in the precincts of the dilapidated Babri Masjid in 1949, and could not be dislodged despite the strenuous exertions of Prime Minister Nehru. It was another four decades before ignited Hindus could dismantle the Babri structure in 1992 and liberate the Ram Janmabhumi; 43 years is not a long time in the history of an eternal civilisation.

Godhra and after

In the aftermath of the tragedy that hit Mumbai last November, political parties tacitly avoided heightening public fears or communal sentiments in the larger interests of the nation.

But now the Supreme Court has inexplicably, smack in the middle of elections whose remaining phases were believed to be tilted in favour of the BJP, ordered (27 April 2009) the Special Investigation Team to probe a complaint that the Gujarat Chief Minister, his cabinet colleagues, police officials and senior bureaucrats (62 persons in all) aided and abetted the post-Godhra killings.

The two-judge bench was acting on a complaint by Jakia Nasim Ahesan, wife of former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri. Mr. Justices Arijit Pasayat and A.K. Ganguly asked SIT to file its report within three months.

While court sympathy for the lady is understandable as she lost her husband in the violence, it remains pertinent for Hindus that novelist Suzanne Arundhati Roy had cooked up an internationally sensationalized story about the rape-cum-murder of the daughters of Mr. Ehsan Jafri. There was no embarrassment or apology from Roy or the magazine that published her trash when the family of the late MP told the media that the daughters were alive and well, and were not in Gujarat during the riots!

There were also news reports that late Mr. Jafri had threatened the crowd with his licensed pistol (or gun), and that this probably escalated the eruption of violence in which he died. Given the overall sensitivity of the entire spectrum of events relating to the Godhra and Gujarat violence, the Supreme Court has erred in giving special weightage to the bias of the widow of Ehsan Jafri.

Worse, it has reinforced a growing public perception that the apex court is hostile towards men in uniform – police and army – who perform their duty in exceedingly difficult situations. This is part of an unwholesome bias towards the Christian West-funded human rights activists who constantly bay for the blood of Third World regimes that do not conform to western diktat.

I say this with conviction because till date, NO ONE, no one has ever said that Mr. Narendra Modi “supervised” the Gujarat riots, that is to say, the mowing down of Muslims in the violence that burst out upon the incarceration alive of kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya after bathing in the Saryu on Magh Purnima.

As the official death toll in Gujarat is now just 1100-odd persons – and not the mystical figure of 2000 touted for years by the secular fanatics – and as SIT has already uncovered the true movements and activities of Police Commissioner P.C. Pandey who was wantonly defamed for seven years and hounded from his post by even the Election Commission – the Supreme Court could have acted with greater discretion.

It is relevant that one-third of those who died in police firing to control the Gujarat riots were Hindus, and this is fairly explicit evidence that the State Government was performing its task quite professionally.

Modi for PM 
 

Politically, this is a god-send to the BJP. Long pilloried by the Hindu-baiting media for his presumed role in the Gujarat riots, loved and admired by Hindus for his firmness in tackling jihadi elements and developing his state, Mr. Modi has moved imperceptibly from a Probable PM in 2014 to a Possible PM NOW!

The Congress has obligingly played ball, demanding Mr. Modi step down for “justice to prevail” after the apex court order.

Begum Teesta Setalvad (Ansari), who virtually went underground after the SIT indicted her and her NGO, Citizens for Justice and Peace, for cooking up macabre tales of wanton killings in its report to the Supreme Court on 13 April 2009, promptly re-surfaced on television channels and called the order a great victory.

It remains to be seen for whom.

The author is Editor, www.vijayvaani.com
[For details about the implications of the SIT report, see
http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=521]