Hitting At Hindutva

The Gujarat chief ministers's rivals make desperate attempts to attack his trump card and take the sheen off his successful agenda. India Today's Uday Mahurkar reports.

With the Gujarat assembly polls drawing near, the electoral battle in the state is getting murkier and murkier. Political rivals of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi are trying diverse tactics in a bid to dislodge him. On the one hand, workers from a series of secular NGOs opposed to Modi have fanned out in the state to ensure that he doesn't cash in on his Hindutva image as he did in the 2002 polls which he swept by a two-thirds majority. They are holding small group meetings in remote corners of the state to keep people away from the Hindutva rhetoric.

On the other hand, Modi's political rivals who mainly include the Congress besides a set of BJP dissidents led by Patel leaders are trying to erase his Hindutva image driven by the belief that the Hindutva rhetoric associated with Modi is his political armour and until such time it is penetrated, Modi will be able to surmount all possible challenges as he did last month by taking the Congress head on the Sohrabuddin fake encounter issue and turning it into a Hindutva issue.

This strategy of the rivals has even brought Mohammed Ali Jinnah into the picture, reminiscent of the days when the same issue had bedevilled Advani and the entire Sangh Parivar in 2005.
The opportunity came when the Modi Government's mouth piece Gujarat carried a historically correct article by columnist Gunwant Shah on Mohammed Ali Jinnah in which he quoted Jinnah's close friend Kanji Dwarkadas as saying that "Jinnah was essentially secular but took up the communal agenda of the Muslim League as Gandhiji and other leaders of the Congress ignored him no end while he was in the Congress and had the Congress been sensitive to Jinnah's feelings, he would have refrained from treading the communal path."
The article quoting Dwarkadas also has very intricate details about the Hindu associates of Jinnah including his family servants even when he was riding the Pakistan bandwagon. Some of the details of Jinnah's attitude in that crucial period when attempts to avoid Partition of India were being desperately made as mentioned in the one-page article are extremely revealing. For example, when one of the last meetings between Gandhi and Jinnah at the latter's residence in Mumbai ended in failure Dwarkadas found Jinnah ill and crestfallen. At that moment when Drawkadas asked Jinnah as to whether Gandhi had spun the negotiations as part of his larger strategy to put him ( Jinnah ) in a tight box and project a false image before the people, Jinnah said: "No. Gandhi talked to me in a openhearted manner and we talked a lot many good things ".

When both the Congress and the Muslim Leagure were part of the Government and fighting every day on the eve of Partition and the creation of Pakistan seemed imminent to Dwarkadas, he suggested to Jinnah: "Is it not possible for the Muslim League and the Congress to work unitedly for the nation inside the Government while fighting outside it?". Jinnah reacted to it in his typical manner: "Do you mean to tell me that you and me should kiss each other inside this room and start stabbing each other no sooner than we step outside it? Is it possible?".

Incidently, Shah was quoting Dwarkadas from a book titled Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Creation of Pakistan, written by known Gandhian Shaileshkumar Bandopadyaya..
Shah, a former academic who has taught education as a subject abroad including in the University of Arizona, is a regular columnist in Gujarat and every issue of the weekly carries a rider saying that "the views expressed by columnists in the magazine are their own and don't reflect the views of the Gujarat Government". But still a local newspaper carried a story on the article accusing Modi of giving a "secular certificate to Jinnah " and following in the footsteps of Advani.
Next, the Congress and the RSS dissidents opposed to Modi started firing against Modi using the article. While Modi' supporter-turned-critic Dr Pravin Togadia, VHP general secretary, accused him of betraying the Hindutva cause by painting Jinnah, as secular, Congress leader Arjun Modhvadia virtually accused Modi of being unpatriotic and advised him to eugolize Indian Muslim leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad instead of Jinnah. "The article exposes the true credentials of Modi", remarked Modhvadia. Congressmen even burnt an effigy of Modi on the issue even as Modi's rivals within the BJP clapped from the sidelines hoping that the controversy will rob Modi of his Hindutva lustre.

A furious Gunwant Shah, the columnist who is also a known academic, accused the Congress and Modi's rivals of distorting facts and using his shoulder to fire at Modi. Observed Shah: " How can my article be attributed to Modi when the magazine in which it was published clearly says that the views mentioned by columnists writing for the magazine are their's and not of the Government. This is a clear distortion of facts."

Shah argued that he was only quoting Jinnah's friend Dwarkadas and that history, howsoever bitter, can't be distorted. According to Shah, who has no ideological leanings as a writer, it is a known fact of history that Jinnah took up the communal agenda only after Gandhiji extended an olive branch to the fundamentalist maulvis of the Muslim community by supporting their Khilafat movement brushing aside Jinnah's advice that such a tie-up with the maulvis would push the community on the fundmentalist path in place of a modern path.

Interestingly, in spite of such provocation, Modi has continued with his strategy of maintaining a stoic silence against all allegations of his rivals in the belief that he will reap rich dividends if he keeps quiet now and responds to them as part of his poll rhetoric later during election time. The Gujarat BJP general secretary, Vijay Rupani, however, reacted to the charge: "The allegation is so far-fetched and it needs to be ignored altogether. Our rivals should find more credible ways of proving their points".

However, robbing Modi of his Hindutva lustre certainly is part of the strategy of a section of his rivals. But so far desperate measures have proved of little help.

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