The spectacle in Varanasi, expectedly, received much attention on the Edit/Op Ed pages. The sight of the prime minister, in the garb of a Hindu devotee, performing rituals and prayers at the Kashi Vishwanath temple as part of inaugurating the first phase of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor project raises questions of propriety. His public display of faith and involvement in religious rituals, all of it beamed live by the public broadcaster into millions of homes, while holding the constitutional office of the prime minister, first witnessed in Ayodhya some months ago, has no precedent.
Suhas Palshikar (Writing on Kashi corridor, December 17), writes that the event projected the prime minister as “prime minister of a Hindu state”, that “India belongs to one religious identity which forms the basis of its national being”. He writes: “The prime minister has given out a message that being Indian is coterminous with being Hindu. Then, there is a mixing of state authority with Hindu identity. Third, wearing one’s religious faith on the sleeve is a hallmark of both religiosity and political prudence. Fourth, just like its politicisation, the monetisation of the monument was unmistakable. The emphasis was on expanding space and territory, on resources being spent on a Hindu place of worship and on making it more tourist-friendly.” The event highlights a new “social contract” that “puts a premium on a new consensus about India being a Hindu nation and therefore the Constitution being a handmaiden of state practices consistent with that socio-cultural construct. The new social contract is about forgetting what we wanted to achieve 75 years ago.”
Mrinal Pande (‘Dekhi tumhri Kashi logo, Dekhi tumhri Kashi’, December 18) historicises the Kashi experience and wants readers to look beyond the spectacle and immerse in an expansive span of time, which is Kashi. This is the Kashi of Kabir, Bhartendu Harishchandra, Premchand, Ustad Bismillah Khan and so many other creative minds, who dissolved their egos in the timeless city’s “fakkad universe in which the real seems fantastic and the fantastic suddenly unmasks the real”. Pande writes: “The age old experience of Kashi, the scene of so many massacres, sectarian riots and colonial loot, has taught it not to worship at the temple of history or eulogise political leaders for long. It has a more clear sighted picture of the future than the power seats in Delhi or Mumbai or Pune or Ahmedabad, intoxicated as they are with their own notions of India’s Hindu destiny. So far Kashi’s cultural vitality has held out against all the marauding hordes of Delhi bringing with them a loud cacophony of sounds and chants and sloganeering in the name of new gods. Let the hemp and music loving, free roving ascetic Shiva help it survive the latest challenges to its soul.”
The Indian Express editorial (‘The fundamental shift’, December 14) seeks to contextualise the Kashi event in the current play of politics and in the backdrop of the impending assembly election in UP. The editorial juxtaposes the speech made by the prime minister at Varanasi with a speech of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at a rally in Jaipur the previous day, where he tried to differentiate between Hindus and Hindutvavadis. The editorial says that these two speeches are not unrelated and that “together, they help frame the contours of a political contest in the current moment, ahead of another crucial round of assembly elections, including UP”. It argues that “a new political common sense is being normalised, a line is being drawn”, to connect the “majoritarian and religious with the developmental and governmental”.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta (‘Hindus after Hindutva’, December 10) reflects on the juxtaposition of Hinduism to Hindutva, “the virtuous Hindu to the nasty Hindutvavadi”. The attempt to “reclaim Hindu traditions as a way of gaining political legitimacy”, he argues, is “historically myopic and morally confused”. His warning: “Don’t expect the metaphysical project of defining a true Hindu to bell the political cat of building a decent society. Definitions don’t absorb communal poison.”
This newspaper broke the story that the government had recently summoned the Election Commission for a meeting with the principal secretary to the prime minister. The Express editorial (‘Buckling’, December 18) writes: “ The EC must urgently dispel the impression of not being able to keep an aggressive Executive at arm’s length, of any weakness in the knees. At the very least, the CEC should ask the Law Ministry to regret on record and withdraw the note in question. The government must also recognise that undermining the EC ends up weakening the very system it draws its strength from. In the run-up to the coming round of assembly polls, the red lines will need to be redrawn, with a renewed firmness. The EC will be closely watched.”
S Y Quraishi (‘The arm’s length test’, December 18) argues that the summons from PMO to the EC is “a transgression that should not happen again”. He writes: “The distance of an arm’s length in interactions between institutions envisaged in the Constitution is sacrosanct. It should not only be maintained but also “seen” to be maintained.”
Deb Mukharji (‘The rise of a nation’, December 16) writes on the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 and its future challenges. The Express editorial (December 16, 1971), marks this historic date. It says: “In South Asia, after India, it was the people of East Pakistan who rejected religious nationalism, and demanded empowerment through fair political representation and access to the country’s resources. On its 50th anniversary, Bangladesh is being toasted as the success story of South Asia, its economic development seen as guided and facilitated by its constitutional secularism.”
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