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M.K.Venu is Executive Editor of Amar Ujala publications group)
Renowned socialist leader, the late Madhu Limaye, one of the architects of the broader opposition unity created against Indira Gandhi during emergency, wrote extensively about how the RSS and Jan Sangh leaders always found it very difficult to shed their Hindu nationalist beliefs and embrace the Janata Party's secular, democratic constitution.
There was intense debate over whether the leaders of the Jan Sangh - the precursor of the BJP - should give up their membership of the RSS before formally joining the Janata Party which had a secular-democratic-socialist constitution. The debate was in fact triggered by Madhu Limaye who insisted that the Jan Sangh leaders joining the Janata Party be asked to formally declare their allegiance to a pluralist democratic state. Only Atal Behari Vajpayee would formally declare his allegiance to composite nationalism, socialism and democracy, according to Limaye's writings.
This discussion is very much alive, perhaps even more intense today, as Narendra Modi publicly declares that Muslims are as patriotic as any other community in India and would be willing to lay down their lives for the nation. Modi, of course, said it in response to American journalist Fareed Zakaria's query about what the PM thought of the attempts by the Al Qaeda leadership to recruit Indian Muslims for their activities.
However, the timing of Modi's statement to Zakaria might suggest he was also, after an unusually long spell of silence, clarifying that he did not agree with the constant denigration of the Muslim community by his own members of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh in the run-up to the recent by-elections in that state. Modi needs to say this more clearly to assuage the feelings of the minority community. He must also demonstrate his intent by casting aside the likes of member of Parliament Adityanath, who was chosen by the BJP to lead the debate on communalism in Parliament as well as the party's election campaign in the UP by-polls.
So if we take Modi at face value and believe that he disagreed with the nature of the campaign run by his partymen in UP, then we have to conclude that there is some internal dissonance between the Prime Minister and the Sangh Parivar ideologues. This will come to the fore in future election campaigns, especially in Bihar which is going to the polls next year. In Bihar, the BJP's Sushil Modi has already sounded a note of dissent on the BJP strategy of attempting to polarise Hindu votes in Uttar Pradesh.
Bihar will really put the BJP to what we can describe as the Madhu Limaye test. Modi will soon realise that there are fundamental contradictions in trying to fuse backward class politics with that of Hindutva which is led in the RSS by upper caste Brahmins who largely belong to north and central India.
In due course, Modi will have to make a choice between the two kinds of politics. In the Lok Sabha election, his image as a backward class born trying to make it to the Prime Minister's post had immense appeal among the subalterns. Modi knows this better than anyone else that the massive surge of new voters, mostly youth, came from among the subalterns who want material progress and social justice. There is evidence to show some of these young voters have gone back to their regionally established backward class leaders in both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the recent by-elections. But it may be too early to make any definitive assessment on whether Modi is losing popularity among them.
However, in the future, he will be confronted with a stark choice of whether to go with the ideas of his Brahmanical mentors in the RSS or to strike out on his own to try and pass the Madhu Limaye test.
Limaye was a Lohia socialist and Narendra Modi too has publicly spoken of his attraction to Lohia socialism. Lohia had pioneered politics for social justice among the backward caste. In a recent article in
The Indian Express, Suhas Palshikar, a political scientist at the Pune University, had quite insightfully argued that Modi had the backing of two sets of voters. One, the entrenched urban middle class which by and large supports the BJP's cultural agenda. This class won't abandon the BJP so easily. The other set of voters is constituted by the impatient urban youth, largely non upper caste. These voters will want Modi to deliver on the Madhu Limaye test. At some point Narendra Modi will have to choose between the two.
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