Seven per cent or saffron? The BJP seems to have made its choice. None in the Government, save Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, speaks of achieving a 7 per cent growth in the GDP. Virtually every forecaster has scaled down its prediction and the consensus now is that 2001-2 will record a growth rate of less than 5 per cent. This is where saffron comes in.

The BJP-led Government has little to offer the people this year, and the next year looks just as bleak. It is a throwback to 1999, which was a lousy year for the BJP. After the nail-biting one-vote defeat in Parliament, the prospects of a BJP victory in the elections were not high. Then came Kargil and everything changed. More parties were willing to break bread with the BJP in the run-up to the elections. The BJP-led alliance won the elections comfortably, although the BJP itself got the same number of seats as it held in the dissolved Lok Sabha. Thanks to Kargil, and the BJP emerging numero uno, more parties joined hands with it after the elections too, including avowed socialists and secularists like Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav. (The BJP's prayer song should be "may their tribe increase".)

The elections to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly which will be held in March 2002 are as important to the BJP and some other parties as the parliamentary elections of 1999. The BJP desperately needs another Kargil. It thought it could get one, by proxy, when the US declared war against Afghanistan. But India was sidelined as the six-plus-two countries gathered to decide the fate of Afghanistan.

If the BJP cannot get a Kargil, it is determined to make one. Fear is the key. The first step is to invent an enemy and arouse fear and hatred against that enemy. The enemy today is the Muslim, his religion, his pan-Islamic identity, his political allegiance.

Home Minister L.K. Advani's target is apparently terrorists, but there is a sub-text to his war of words. Thanks to Afghanistan, he can now wage a war against both terrorists and those who do not fit into his theory of "cultural nationalism". They are the Muslims. I am therefore not surprised at all that he counts his rath yatra as one of the three defining movements of independent India.

Or take another example: look at the portions expunged from history textbooks. Romila Thapar's book on ancient India refers to beef being served as a "mark of honour" for special guests. Beef is believed to be the favourite meat of Muslims and is believed to be abhorred by Hindus. The subliminal connection is made, and out goes the reference to beef. No one cares to answer the question whether in modern India many Hindus, especially the very poor, consume beef (usually meat of the buffalo).

R.S. Sharma's textbook on ancient India pointed out that the "caste system was not basically different from the class system based on divisions of labour". The caste system survives until this day. There is no child who does not know what his or her caste is-reservations and Mandal have ensured that awareness of caste is widespread. Yet, our children should not be told or taught that the caste system prevailed in ancient India.

Ancient India must be an idyllic world. Brahmin dynasties ruled over the people but let's expunge that fact. Persian verses record that Guru Tegh Bahadur's followers resorted to plunder and rapine. No one regards Guru Tegh Bahadur as anything but a revered spiritual leader, yet the historical reference is a sacrilege that must be deleted. Why? Because, according to Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, "impressionable minds have to be saved from the historians' onslaught". Note the choice of words: the minister wants to save our children not from history, or its onslaught, but from the onslaught of historians. He will do so by replacing one set of historians (Marxists and assorted leftists) by another. Because Joshi likens himself to Jesus Christ, he doesn't mind being "crucified for his beliefs". He is our new saviour.

We must be grateful that the Central Government can only rewrite CBSE textbooks. We must be grateful that only eight out of 100 children will matriculate and, out of that number, only a small fraction attend CBSE schools. We must be grateful that our children learn more outside the classroom than inside, that they have other reading material than the Joshi-ordered textbooks.

But like all other crazy things done by fundamentalists, rewriting textbooks will also pass. It is being done with the Uttar Pradesh elections in mind. The BJP is inventing an enemy and will carry its saffron flag into the battlefield. Saffron, long regarded as the colour of asceticism and renunciation, will unfortunately now come to represent a shame that we cannot hide.

(The author is a former Indian finance minister.)