The BJP took its fourth step towards full power at the Centre when it tainted the walls of the Parliament of the world’s largest democracy by placing on one of them an oil portrait of Veer Savarkar. Their first step was taken in September 1990 when LK Advani launched the Rathyatra from the rebuilt Somnath Temple in Gujarat, the chariot passing through some 10,000 kilometres in western and northern India the ultimate destination being Ayodhya. A modern Toyota van was decorated like a chariot used by Arjuna. The sacred vehicle carried the RSS symbol, saffron flag, side by side with the BJP lotus. Nor do we forget that on 30 October a crowd of Hindu volunteers attempted to storm the heavily guarded Babari Masjid in Ayodhya and managed to place a saffron flag on top of the structure.

The second step towards the goal was the demolition of the Babari Masjid in Ayodhya built by the founder of the Moghul Empire which produced the Hindu Renaissance its greatest literary figure being Tulsi Das (1532-1623), the poet of Ramacharitmanasa. Then the third step was Narendra Modi’s pogrom of Muslims in the last Assembly elections in Gujarat. Modi’s victory in the election encouraged the BJP, the political wing of the RSS, to take the fourth step, unveiling a portrait of the father of Hindu communalism, Veer Savarkar, in Parliament.

The BJP realised that the electoral victory in Gujarat was actually a victory of Hindutva. Gujarat was no longer the land of Gandhism: it was the land of Modism, that is, of Hindutva. Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani then thought that it was now necessary to assure a clear majority in Parliament, to acknowledge in public, that Savarkar was a national figure. But in what sense is Savarkar a national figure? And why should it take 56 years after our attainment of national freedom to realise that Savarkar was a national figure? Which historian of India has called Savarkar a national figure? He has no presence in the serious political and historical literature of our country. There is no mention of Savarkar in the 945-page Oxford History of India published in 1958. Nehru does not mention him in his autobiography and Subhas Chandra Bose too does not mention him in his two autobiographies. There is not a word on him in RC Majumdar, Hemchandra Raychaudhuri and Kalikinkar Datta’s 1122-page An Advanced History of India published in 1946. There is not even a passing reference to Savarkar in the 940-page The Role of Honour: Anecdotes of Indian Martyrs edited by KC Ghosh and published by the National Council of Education in 2002.

Savarkar has, however, a strong presence in our books on communalism an instance of which is David Ludden’s Making India Hindu (1996). In this work Richard H Davis calls him “the ideological progenitor of the RSS”. In the same work another authority on our modern political history calls him a propagandist of the doctrine of Hindutva. How then Savarkar is a national figure? When the BJP has a majority in our Parliament, God forbid it, we will see portraits of Keshab Baliram Hedgewar who founded the RSS in 1925 and MS Gollwalkar who succeeded him as the head of the Hindu Organisation in 1940. If the BJP becomes all-powerful we may have a marble statue of Nathuram Godse in the Central Hall of Parliament. Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948, as Narendra Modi destroyed Gandhism in Gujarat which is now a BJP state.

Savarkar is the father of Hindu communalism and has the distinction of spelling out the two-nation theory about two decades before Jinnah. We can now accuse Savarkar of subverting, through his doctrine of Hindutva, the ideological foundation of our 3,000-year tradition as interpreted by Sri Ramakrishna, Bankim, Vivekananda, Rabindranath, Sri Aurobindo and others. The portrait of the philosopher of Hindutva has virtually tarred with a large brush the other portraits which so long gave a moral and spiritual lustre to the hall of the Parliament.

In Savarkar’s 117-page Hindutva (1923), strong poison need not be served in a larger dose, in which he outlines his two-nation theory which created Pakistan. In the key passage of his book which is the Bible of the Sangh Parivar, its author says about the Muslim citizens of our country: “their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin”. Savarkar further says: “The Hindus being the people, whose past, present and future are most closely bound with the soil of Hindusthan as fatherland and holy land, they constitute the foundation, the bedrock, the reserved forces of the Indian state”.

From this Savarkar concludes - “Therefore, even from the point of view of Indian Nationality, must ye, Oh Hindus, consolidate and strengthen Hindu Nationality.” These words are still ringing in the ears of the Sangh Parivar. The less than Hindu tone of the National Democratic Alliance is just an interim political phenomenon necessary as a breathing time for the Hindu army. Even in this interim period the Sangh Parivar has filled our political arena with sadhus with tridents and acharyas holding synods to assert the prowess of the Hindu community.

The violent threats of the Visva Hindu Parishad and its leader Togadia demanding lands for a Rama temple is the voice of the BJP which has Hinduised the North and will gradually create a Hinduised India. Indian education is being saffronised to expedite the process. The glory of the Congress of Gandhi and Nehru is extinguished forever. The BJP is thriving on the ashes of that great party to which the British transferred power in 1947.

Our problem is that the parties which now seem to be opposed to the BJP have no notion of the danger ahead. The opposition to the BJP is concentrating on electoral strategies to capture power. I do not find anywhere an ideological passion, a passion for power being the only active force in Indian politics today. Happily, there are some foreign observers who have analysed the political scene in our country and forcefully expressed their conclusions. A group of senior scholars of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washingtron, Selig S Harrison, Paul H Keisberg and Dennis Kux, came together to edit a book, India and Pakistan containing essays on our two countries and our politics since independence.

The work published in 1999 includes an article entitled “India: Democratic Problems and Problems” by Dr Paul R Brass. He has expressed his views freely without any fear of Hindu opinion. He calls the National Democratic Alliance a “fragile coalition” (p 39) and observes: “At the North India town of Ayodhya, on 6 December 1992, a huge crowd of militant Hindu massed under the leadership of a ‘family’ of militant Hindu organisation, including the BJP, and destroyed a mosque there known as the Babari Masjid”. Dr Brass does not hesitate to include the BJP in this operation. He further says: “There are several affiliated organisations in the militant Hindu family. The parent organisation, the RSS, founded in 1925, stands for the consolidation of all Hindus into a united community. The BJP is its political arm, whose goal is to unite Hindus politically to achieve power at the centre and to transform India into a Hindu nation. The VHP, the spearhead of the Ayodhya movement, has been largely responsible for the mass mobilisation of Hindus that converged in Ayodhya on several occasions, including 6 December 1992’’. If this is so, the political parties affiliated to the Sangh Parivar should be banned. In the years preceding the BJP regime at the Centre, no Union government had the courage to ban the RSS and its allies. Our secular parties do not have the courage to do anything that may adversely affect their electoral fortunes. Let us remember that the Congress began its election campaign in Gujarat from a temple. Nor should we forget that Rajiv Gandhi made concessions to the Sangh Parivar on several occasions. How can you deal with the communal organisations if you are not ready to sacrifice your interests in the defence of secularism?