Kasaragod: The BJP rose from two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to 303 seats in 2019 because other secular parties sleepwalk from one election to another with no ideological work or political engagement with people or their party workers in between, said political economist and social commentator Parakala Prabhakar.
Over the years of inaction, India's character has changed, he said. Today, India's secularism, economy, and Parliament are on the road to a slow death and people are not reacting to it because the changes were gradual, he said.
He was speaking at an event in Kanhangad where his book 'The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis' was released in Malayalam.
Not very long ago, just 10 or 15 years years ago, every political party, including the BJP, used to say it was secular, he said. "BJP leaders used to tell us they were genuinely secular not like the Congress and the communists who were pseudo-secular. Do you remember?" he said. Today, every political party, with a few exceptions, is saying they are also Hindu but not like the BJP, said Prabhakar, the husband of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and a critic of communalism.
"Just see the shift. For 65 to 70 years, everybody was a proud secularist. The political discourse today is such that everybody is claiming to be a proud Hindu, claiming 'I go to the temple. I observe fast'. People are writing books 'Why I am a Hindu' and 'what kind of Hindu I am'," he said. "This is a very important development. It took time but it happened," he said.
Veteran BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani listed three options in his autobiography on how the BJP should deal with Muslims, the largest religious minority group in India. "His three options were reject, appease, or reform, and suggested that the community should be slowly reformed because their number was too large to ignore," he said.
But today's BJP has opted for the first option of rejecting the community and is on the way to grow in spite of political resistance from the community, he said. "That is the stage of Indian secularism," he said.
There was a time when BJP had Sikander Bakht as its Vice-President for eternity, whether he had a voice in the party or not, Prabhakar said. "They needed him then," he said.
Today, for the first time, the Union Council of Ministers does not have even a single member from the largest minority community. The party does not have a Muslim MP in Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha or legislator in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in India, or Gujarat or Karnataka. In Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Karnataka, it did not even field a Muslim candidate, he said.
"India as we know, India as a secular democratic country, India that respects diversity, a different way of life, different languages, religions, regions are slowly disappearing before our eyes. We are not noticing it because it is disappearing slowly," he said.
When the three farm laws were introduced without a discussion in Lok Sabha and after massive protests, they were withdrawn without discussion, he said. "What I saw is the slow disappearance of Parliament," he said.
He alleged the government not only hid data that it was uncomfortable with but also manipulated data for its convenience. "So much so that Indian statistical architecture is undependable," he said.
The latest example is the exit of K S James as the Director of the International Institute of Population Sciences. Under him, the National Family Health Survey, round 5 was conducted. "The government pressured him to change the data. He refused and he was asked to go," said Prabhakar.
On the economic front, 24% of the country's youths are unemployed, he said. "We are in the company of Iran, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan. They are all recovering from war and conflict. We are recovering from the government. We are recovering from the mindless and stupid demonetisation," said the economist.
A large part of the country's cash was demonetised when the economy was already slowing down. None of its objectives such as ending black money, terrorism, or shifting to digital currency has been met. The cash in circulation now is Rs 34 lakh crore, up from Rs 15 lakh crore at the time of demonetisation, he said.
The inflation rate, particularly the food inflation, is at an unacceptable level, said the RBI. Last Friday, the RBI's Monetary Policy Committee refused to lower the repo rate, the rate at which commercial banks borrow money from the central bank. (To be sure, the prices of pulses such as urad dal, tur, and moong dal are almost twice that of a year ago.) "We don't realise these things because there is no jerk. Remember, there was a lot of talk when the dollar touched Rs 80. Today a dollar is Rs 83. We don't talk about it," Prabhakar said. The same is the case with fuel prices, he said.
"During the Covid pandemic, migrant workers died walking on the roads and bodies piled up on the banks of the Ganga. They said it was a Hindu tradition of Jal Samadhi. But there was no Jal Samadhi before or after covid," he said.
He blamed the political parties for society's numbness. "My complaint is when communalism can have an army of people, where is the army of people for secularism?" he said.
"The 'communal army' is highly motivated and dedicated and works on minds day after day without thinking of election results or coverage in the media," he said. "The drumbeat of communalism has put people in a trance. We have to stop the drum beat to pull people back," he said.
For that, secular people have to start talking about the need for secularism, the character of India, the character of the freedom struggle, he said.
He called on the secular people to expose the hypocrisy of the government when it uses slogans such as 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam'. "It was taken from a minor Upanishad called Maha Upanishad," he said. The full text says the othering of people was a characteristic of small-minded people. "For one with a broad mind, the entire world is a family. It is a description of people like us. It does not apply to them (the BJP government) because they do not accept differences. But they manipulated even the scriptures because it sounds big, good, and very very liberal," he said.
