On Good Governance Day, remembering Vajpayee’s tarnished record on minorities in India

As is always the case in India, festivals are joyous not only for the community that can sanctify that day. Everyone else joins in, greet friends who profess that faith, but also rejoice in the “secular” aspects of the celebration. Everyone lights a candle on Diwali and looks forward to special Eid dishes. Before Christmas, the lines at pastry shops in cities like Delhi and Calcutta are likely to have more Hindus and Sikhs than Christians.

The “Christmas tree”, a picture on a piece of paper or a branch cut from the neighbor’s tree, decorated with tinsel and cotton balls, will be seen in many homes with young children. The power of television and the Internet, you could say.

But for many, it will not be a party of joy, but will be observed as Good Government Day, in which they may have to write an essay or participate in some other contest decided by the district authorities. This is how the Indian government has officially observed December 25 since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014 after winning the most polarizing election in independent India. He said it was in honor of Atal Behari Vajpayee, the first prime minister of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who was born on December 25, 1924.

Modi also announced a Bharat Ratna award for his senior politician who had been prime minister in three segments from 1998 to 2004, leading the National Democratic Front. To her surprise, the United Progressive alliance headed by Congressional Speaker Sonia Gandhi won a majority in the 2004 elections. She chose economist and former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, a position she held until 2014.

A surprise twist

Vajpayee and political experts were surprised by this turn of events because the BJP stalwart was seen as a very popular leader, within the party and with the masses. He was personable, spoke Hindi as few politicians could, and was interested in poetry of the kind that young partisans like, full of patriotism and the cultural language of India.

His fatherly figure contrasted with that of his deputy prime minister, the stern Lal Krishan Advani. The two had guided the destinies of the BJP for much of the previous three decades, even if the minor leaders held the incumbent position of party chairman.

Vajpayee was also popular with a large portion of the religious minorities. He gladly accepted the delegations’ requests to visit him. On his birthday, shortly after going to church, a large number of Christian nuns, and the occasional archbishop, lined up to present huge bouquets of flowers and boxes of Christmas cake.

The ideologues of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, which led the BJP and of which Vajpayee was a member for life despite his unorthodox lifestyle, told us in 1997 that he was just a mask, public relations or public face. In a meeting with three British diplomats, Govindacharya allegedly called Vajpayee the mukhota or mask of the party. “The real leader is the party president, LK Advani,” he was reported to have said.

Vajpayee told reporters that he was deeply hurt by the statement by a high-ranking ideologue.

Vajpayee died in 2018, mourned by the nation and hailed by world leaders. In his years in power, he had traveled to Pakistan by bus and made visible efforts to forge friendship with the neighbor with whom India had fought four wars, one in his time as prime minister. It also detonated five nuclear devices in Pokhran, Rajasthan, in 1998, much to remind the world that Indira Gandhi’s demonstration of Indian military nuclear technology was alive and well.

Pakistan did the same with its own detonations. Nuclear rhetoric is not buried. Politicians revive it in every election campaign.

In retrospect, for India’s religious minorities, both Muslim and Christian, despite his poetry, eating habits and human warmth, Vajpayee failed them at the crucial moments when they most needed his safety. Especially when things were low, he sided with the hawks in his group, tolerating the aggressive stances and actions of the Sangh.

This was most obvious when fanaticism and aggression by Sangh affiliates turned violent, with arson, looting and mass murder.

Violence in the Dangs

The church leadership tested him in his first year in office. Gujarat’s Christmas Eve 1998 had witnessed violence directed at small rural churches in the Dangs tribal forest belt. Rolling through the region that night, religious extremists set fire to all the churches with wooden pillars and thatched or tiled roofs. The largest buildings in the district capital, Ahwa, faced the terror of the mob.

A church delegation, led by Delhi Archbishop Alan de Lastic, who was then the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, spoke with Prime Minister Vajpayee and asked him to visit Dangs and see the fire for himself. Vajpayee took a helicopter ride to Ahwa, saw the damage with a grim face, and flew back to the national capital.

Questioned by the media in his press conference upon his return, Vajpayee suggested a “national debate on religious conversions.” He said he had also called on the Gujarat government to crack down on anyone who tried to stoke community tension. The government, he admitted, had not banned a Hindu demonstration on Christmas Day that sparked the violence.

Vajpayee said that he “was aware that the Constitution of India allowed everyone to spread their religion,” but added that “perhaps the time had come to look at the issue again.”

The Archbishop of Lastic reminded him that the matter had been half discussed in the constituent assembly. The Constitution makes it clear that people in India have the right to practice, profess and propagate their religion.

Within weeks of Vajpayee’s press conference, one of the most gruesome acts of violence against Christians took place in Manouharpur, Orissa state, where a Bajrang Dal activist, Dara Singh, led a mob that burned alive to an Australian, Graham Stuart Staines and his two young sins. , Philip and Timothy as the three of them slept in their jeep in a forest they had come to for a religious meeting of Adivasis.

The incident shocked the world. The president of India called it a stain on the country’s name. Vajpayee sent a cabinet minister, George Fernandes, to Orissa. Fernandes returned and told the media that there was a “foreign hand” in the triple murder. The courts subsequently sentenced Dara Singh to death, a sentence that the state’s highest court commuted to a germ for life in prison. Staines’s widow, Gladys, said she had forgiven the killer, but the state was obligated to take action.

Vajpayee’s insinuations of criminality in conversions to Christianity in India is the official dogma of the BJP, and even more so of the RSS and its affiliates. The current spate of multi-stage laws against conversions is rooted as much in this as in the now rampant Islamophobia.

Islamophobia also took firm roots in Vajpayee’s time at the top. He was not lacking in enthusiasm for Advani’s Rath Yatra polarization as the BJP showed its muscles in its push for political power and the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992.

But it was as in 2002 that Vajpayee, as prime minister for the third time, failed to meet minority expectations. This time, Narendra Modi, an RSS leader, had been catapulted as Prime Minister of Gujarat. The killing of 59 kar sevaks on the burning Ayodhya train sparked a massacre of Muslims in various districts of the state, including Ahmedabad.

During a press conference in Ahmedabad on April 4, 2002, following the mass killings and rape of Muslims in central and northern Gujarat, Vajpayee said that he had advised Chief Minister Modi to observe his “raj dharma”, the duty of the ruler. . Obviously, the advice was not heeded. There was bloodshed for at least three days as the mutilated and burned bodies of the kar sevaks were carried along a well-planned route, awakening the common people and the cadres. The police seemed absent.

A first impression that Vajpayee would ask President KR Narayanan to remove Modi as prime minister did not bear fruit. Political experts later said that Vajpayee had been told that Modi was more popular among the majority community than he was by now, and that a change in state leadership would fuel a rebellion.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.

John Dayal is a veteran journalist and human rights activist.