Bogey and the boy

What’s with Digvijay Singh? In the aftermath of the July 13 bombings in Mumbai, while investigators began to look at Indian Mujahideen links, focus on extreme Islamist groups and assess the deepening of a home-grown jihad, Mr Singh persisted with a contrarian song.

He refused to rule out speculative possibilities, rejected what the Maharashtra government and the Union home ministry were saying and insisted “anybody” could have been behind the latest terror strike.
Then the Congress general secretary turned to right-wing Hindu activists, suggesting even they were within the ambit of suspicion. He helpfully pointed out that the RSS had established bomb-making factories. This is a fairly serious charge.
If the RSS — or indeed any private organisation — has actually set up bomb factories and if Mr Singh has solid evidence of this, he shouldn’t be wasting his time giving media interviews. He should tell the police or at least his party colleague, Union home minister P. Chidambaram. If this is true, the RSS top brass should be arrested and asked to explain itself.
Obviously this is not true and, once more, Mr Singh is trivialising and diluting the sobriety of the moment. Terrorism is not politics by just another name. It is a far more lethal phenomenon. Unfortunately Mr Singh treats it as he would a college students’ union brawl.
It is nobody’s case that Hindutva activists cannot or have not turned to acts of terrorism — some call it vigilante violence but it amounts to the same thing. However, the threat perception from Hindutva terrorism and from Islamist terrorism is of an entirely different order. As Gopal Pillai, who retired as Union home secretary at the end of June, said in a farewell interview, “If we talk about so-called armed people there will be fewer than 100 Hindu radicals in a country of our size. It’s not a major problem.”
On the other hand, the numbers India is challenged with and the extent of the problem it faces when it comes to the Indian Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and their sister organisations is of another magnitude. To talk up Hindutva terror and place it at par with Islamist terror is dishonest. Both parties are guilty of criminality, but one poses a more hostile threat than the other.
If Mr Pillai was saying as much in the days before he retired, officials of the ministry of external affairs have been equally blunt in private conversations. By overhyping the Hindutva terror angle, India has ended up weakening its case against Pakistan and unilaterally placed New Delhi and Islamabad in a position of moral equivalence. This is a spectacular self-goal and one for which Mr Singh, as the most vociferous claimant of Hindutva terror or “Sanghi terror”, as he now terms it, must get full credit.
Yet why is Mr Singh doing it? He doesn’t genuinely believe the gaggle of Hindutva bomb makers — crazy and criminalised as they are — make for as powerful a terror army as the LeT or similar bodies. So what is his logic?
The answer lies not in an analysis of Mr Singh’s statements after 13/7, but in a small incident afterwards. On a visit to Shajapur (Madhya Pradesh), he was greeted by BJP workers with black flags. Soon there was a clash between Congress and BJP-aligned activists. A free-for-all resulted and media reports suggest even Mr Singh rolled up his sleeves and resorted to what a certain generation of Chinese may have called “righteous and harmonious fists”.
No senior politician behaves in this manner. To be fair, Mr Singh has no known record of such temper tantrums and impetuousness in his long career. So what’s bothering him?
There are two theories, both interlinked and both relating to the Uttar Pradesh election of summer 2012. First, Mr Singh is desperate to stitch together a social coalition of substance for the big election in India’s politically most significant state.
Winning back the vast majority of Muslims and Brahmins is crucial to this Congress strategy. Mr Singh is determined to do this, even if it means taking recourse to scare-mongering, demonising the RSS and appearing disproportionately hostile to the Hindu Right.
Second, this method is not working. Being a smart politician, Mr Singh realises this; being a desperate politician, he only intensifies his rhetoric. Why is Mr Singh turning desperate?
Till 2009, the Congress believed it had Uttar Pradesh sewn up, that Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi would lead it to victory in the Assembly election of 2012. In turn, this would trigger a surge in the Lok Sabha election of 2014. This happy constellation would also coincide with the end of Mr Singh’s 10 years of renunciation of state power, which began after he was voted out in Madhya Pradesh in 2003. As Mr Gandhi’s confidant and ideological sounding board — some would use the word “mentor” — he would be an obvious gainer.
Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out thus. Despite fervent efforts and padyatras, the Congress remains a contender for third place in Uttar Pradesh. Its only competition is the BJP, which is probably even worse off.
By all accounts, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party remains the front-runner in an admittedly fractured electoral contest, with Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party recovering ground in recent months and consolidating second place. That is what really gives Mr Singh nightmares. The so-called Hindutva terror business is only a diversionary tactic. His problem is not the bogey; it’s the boy.

The author can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com [2]