Save Narmada I K Shukla

Save Narmada

I K Shukla

Published on February 13, 2007

The Centre (New Delhi) suspending Narmada Dam height -raise may yet prove to be a pyrrhic victory.

First, it has just suspended, not abandoned, the height-escalation. This gives cheer and comfort to the pro-Dam lobby. It may feel emboldened: it is only a battle lost, not the war. This has spurred and reinforced the scandalous unity between the BJP and Congress in Gujarat, and among the Gujarat MPs. Salutary to recall, Congress in Gujarat was a junior partner of saffronazis in the Genocide of Muslims, 2002. It has continued to be in tow to the HinduTaliban both in Gujarat and nation-wide ever since. Congress has not pursued justice either in Gujarat or in Ayodhya, thus letting Modis and Advanis off the hook. It did not pursue UmAbharti in two major infractions of law. It has not prosecuted Bal Thackeray for a series of crimes, nor canned him away from mischief and mayhem. It has spared Singhals, Togadias, Rajnaths who never stinted their venom-spewing and spoiling the national atmosphere of social concord.

Second, beholden and hog-tied to the alien and native vested interests alike, Congress is not at all different from BJP in the matter of "development" model cooked in foreign boardrooms of corporate oligopoly, and dictated to the subservient Third World nations, all in the name of "growth". This model enforces blindness to the diabolic growth of immeasurable scale and violence: massive misery, poverty, hunger, dislocation, erasure of cultures and habitats along with extinction of millions of humans. Neo-liberalism is a dreadful and deceitful euphemism for old colonialism and elitist predation, native and foreign.

Third, BJP hegemons are desperate for want of an issue or a slogan to rally the pseudo-Hindu lumpens and swastika-swaddled dupes so that they may be unleashed on the people to wreak havoc and set the nation aflame. Recall in this context Gujarat, of all states in India, exclusively sending hordes of "karsevaks" regularly to Ayodhya. There was a purpose, there was a plan. It all worked. Narmada Dam (Sardar Sarovar Project) may yet prove to be the rallying point for a demoralized and dispirited BJP.

Fourth, the seeming transitory differences between the BJP honchos and their regional satraps, or erstwhile havebeens like Khurana and UmAbhartis, can, by this providential windfall, be papered over however cynically and opportunistically, in a show of solidarity with the fascist fraternity (Sangh Parivar) arrayed against the perceived enemies: Congress, minorities, leftists, democrats, and secularists.

Fifth, if Congress (UPA) can be destabilized and dislodged through saffronazi demagoguery and violent confrontations and anarchic destructions , and BJP could assume in Delhi the reins of power once again, and soon, it would be quite a bonanza - this Sardar Sarovar Project.

Sixth, Modi, the Butcher of Gujarat, has (not so obliquely) queered the pitch for Medha Patkar and other fasters by announcing a 51-hour fast himself. He has signalled his determination that Patkar and her fellow fasters' lives are not that important, his is. Patkar and colleagues NEED NOT BE SAVED, Modi should be!

As to how Congress gives in to the criminal culture intiated and patented by BJP, there are examples galore. At the moment only a few need be recalled: Ayodhya, Meerut, Gujarat. And, Congress honored with Prawasi Bharatiya Samman an NRI from USA notorious for his closeness with Modi and fulminations against minorities. It was not too long ago.

Congress has its tunnels of ugly contacts with BJP always open. Did not Advani extend the olive branch to it recently? Only it had to abandon minorityism, and appeasement. In electoral terms: it should leave its accord with the leftists.

Advani was blind to the irony. It is saffronazis who are the immoral, and from times immemorial, the traditional minority. They are desperate to assemble a vote bank through extirpation of non-Hindus and forcible conversions of Dalits and Adviasis, as in Orissa a few days ago.

They have long been appeased.

It is time Congress were forced to confess and recant. For the abiding and solid majority of the nation has known and seen this fraud long enough to feel comfortable or assuaged by its temporizing and continual succumbing to the saffron dragon times without number. They fear it may do so again, reflexively. 15Apr.06

05Nov.21.

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.