Saffronazis Stalking India: Terrorism on the March

 I K Shukla  

Published on February 13, 2007

L.K.Advani and Rajnath Singh, respectively the previous and present presidents of BJP, will launch their saffron-swamped March on India at the end of first week of April, 2006, in imitation of Mussolini�s Black Shirts� March on Rome of 1922. Whereas saffron may lend putatively a native touch, the deference to Il Duce remains religiously enshrined in the Black Caps of RSS. (B. S. Moonje, the father-figure of Hindu fascism, had visited him in 1930). The Black Cap corps of Hindu fascists stubbornly commemorates its anti-India, anti-Gandhi stance in repudiating and rejecting the white, homespun, Gandhi cap, the headgear designed by the Mahatma to signify independence from the British modes of colonial couture.

Marches were the stock-in-trade political ploys of Italian fascists and Nazi hordes comprising terror and mobsterism. This gangster tactics of intimidation and violence has been routinely used by, and proved destructively advantageous to, the Hindu fascists. Since there is semantically nothing it can be honestly sheathed in, the Vedic Taliban have christened such anti-religious, anti-social, and anti-national stalking as Yatra. Just as Hindutva, a criminal cult of power-hungry status quoists, has nothing in the least to do with Hinduism, so these violence-oozing marches have nothing in common with Yatra. This is only of the several markers of Hinduism that the saffronazis have pillaged and prostituted.

Advani thinks he can retrieve his lost eminence and usefulness in the Hindutva band wagon by communal polarization among voters via communal riots, as in his earlier Blood Yatras, which yielded spectacular electoral gains. He fantasizes that this way he would not only ramp up his sagging political fortune, but also staunch the hemorrhaging of BJP and stop its vote bank shrinkage. Rajnath thinks he has no way else other than this tried and tested, even if time-worn, gambit to establish himself as a leader in his own right, without the stilts of patrons and party public relations. He likes to believe he can, and must be seen he can, help BJP in UP to revive and surge.

Uma Bharati is only one, though significant, of many factors impelling these twin marches. Either she can be repudiated and cut down to size; or, she can be roped in, after a formal show of contrition, to go stump for the BJP before she can be taken back. Is this conjecture unrealistic? Not, if we notice how Um Bharati has repeatedly gone on changing the dates of announcement for her incubating new party.

There is another factor, though belatedly so apparent, why these fascist Hindu marchers feel so comfy. Congress complicity. Covertly, it has been made foolproof. Congress did nothing to protect its own people, let alone the Muslims, massacred in Gujarat 2002, or the Christians murdered ever since in an unbroken series in many BJP-run states. BJP is emboldened and feels endorsed. Ehsan Jaffri, Congress MP, along with others, was burnt and hacked into pieces, for the crime of having contested against Modi in the elections. And, several Congress MLAs and other office bearers of Gujarat Congress were among the killers and rapists and robbers of Gujarat Genocide of Muslims in 2002. As if this comradeship between Congress and BJP were not enough, Congress helped BJP by letting go scot-free the Hindutva criminals involved in the Babri Mosque demolition. It found no time, despite repeated reminders, to file answers before the Liberhan Commission enquiring into the criminally engineered Babri Demolition! And, too, Congress at the centre is damn sure, it can count on BJP support to continue in power, avoiding mid-term election, were the Left to withdraw from the UPA government in disgust at and protest against its retrograde and repressive anti-national policies. Without these sordid and sub rosa factors, BJP would not have had the effrontery to demand security from government for its blood-and-fire fascist marches from Rajkot (Gujarat) and Puri (Orissa), the former the paradigm of Hindu Rashtra, cleansed of minorities, under one-party rule in perpetuity; and the latter to be made now the fiery vale of bloody tears and the domain of rampant saffron terrorism, and regnant swastika tyranny. Ruling class solidarity trumping all.

The ruling class solidarity manifests itself in ways more than one. No functionaing democracy would have suffered Thackeray, Togadia, Singhal, Katiyar, Advani, Joshi, Um Bharati enjoying impunity and trashing law. Had any member of minority escaped the dragnet or the dungeon with far less subversive activities and seditious statements? This is how democracy is always unhinged, and rendered into a joke, by the rulers. Even when most busy with these depredations, they, the ruling hegemons, cry loudest about democracy and constitutional norms, sanctity of parliament, and all that gibberish, the simony-infested media cooing and echoing these pieties.

It is national security that would be grievously threatened with appeasement of this monster, as before. It is communal divide that is to be fomented through the Bloody March (revisit Suma Josson�s film Bombay�s Blood Yatra for the reality check). BJP, dislodged from power, but having tasted blood � crimes and swindles galore as power-dividends � that is desperate to rehabilitate itself. Congress is helping it by instructing various state governments to provide protection.

When did Congress ever demand or provide such protection for any other political party�s march? Is Congress not only disoriented, but also demented? The state guaranteeing protection to communal outlaws, fascist criminals, fierce stalkers, degenerate death merchants, anti-social hoods and anti-national gangsters? Did Congress ever issue any such advice to protect Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and Adivasis to the terrorist state governments run by the BJP and its cohorts? Why did it choose to appease the errant governments of so many states seething with discontent under the saffronazi enemies of humanity, and inveterate, implacable wreckers of the nation? Will playing deaf and dumb by Sonias and Man Mohan Singhs be of any comfort to the harried masses? Will this masquerade of the cynically mute avail? Will it avert the disaster looming on the horizon of state after state where the wheels of this death chariot would crunch out hatred and violence, death and devastation, fragmentation and flight? Has appeasing the criminals in history ever paid?

These are the questions that people at large and across the nation and beyond would be asking in anguish and anger ever more importunately.

2 April 06

Prof. I.K. Shukla is a rewound literature and cultural connoisseur, writer and poet and author of several books including Hindutva: Treason and Terrorism, Hindutva: An Autopsy of Fascism as a Theoterrorist Cult and Other Essays etc.