Welcome summer, with deepening water crisis

How good are grandpas?

The Lok Sabha poll 2004 is making many in the country hold their breath for the comings and goings on between political parties. Imagine the once pillars of the Indian National Congress walking across to the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party they had been bashing as communal, dangerous and Hindu party. People who were considered quite close to Sanjay Gandhi, including his wife Maneka and son Varun, the Emergency time like V C Shukla and many others were seen saying goodbye to Congress for other alternatives. If they were part of a dynasty and its camp followers, the dynastic fort seemed to have fallen in the sweep of the democratic systems where alternatives to leadership and political parties were always an option. The question was how and why were some eminent public figures choosing new alternatives and exercising new options on the eve of the traumatic Lok Sabha poll. In this process, the Think Tank team of The DayAfter, looked at one of the boldest and anti-establishment leaders from Muslim community, Arif Mohammad Khan, to understand what made him join Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani’s Bharat Uday Yatra.

He argued that democracy did not mean merely the right to vote and it implied availability of alternatives and choices. He quoted from one of his own articles in a national daily and said, " In a situation where a community has an uneasy relationship with one of the two main parties, the choice is reduced to one party alone leading to distortion and unhealthy trends in the exercise of democratic rights. It is this growing realisation that will help sustain the trust of those who are already supportive of BJP and are keen to ensure that the Muslims, like other Indian voters, have the freedom of choice and are not merely treaty as ‘Vote Bank’.

When editor Sunil Dang and the Think Tank Director Yogendra Bali asked him about the poll perspective, he expressed his agony and realisation at the false secularism being practised by political leaders and said his decision was part of a process of thought and realisation that the minorities could not meet their own challenges and problems by sticking to a single rut. He said, "Even when I was out of the Congress by choice and opposed to it, I toured Gujarat for 219 days after the Godhra holocaust and openly criticised the Narendra Modi regime and the BJP and spoke in favour of Congress campaign. But the last nine days of that traumatic tour of Gujarat made me start rethinking. I was aghast and disgusted when I realised that those who made statements from New Delhi about the plight of our people in Gujarat, had not found even a day to visit the scenes of disaster. It started me thinking. My decision was part of a thought process and reasoning."

He pointed out, "You recall my speech in the Parliament in 1991, when VP Singh Government had fallen which was listed by the media, specially the Hindustan Times and BBC as a significant speech in the Ninth Lok Sabha. It was a noisy debate and the House was surcharged with stormy exchanges and interruptions between the treasury benches and the Opposition. But when I got up to make my speech, I was attacking the BJP. So a few times the BJP members tried to interrupt and heckle me. And then the Rajmata, one of the great leaders of the BJP, lost her patience and was on her feet in anger to signal to the BJP MPs to stop it. She said "First listen to what he is saying". In that speech of mine quoted from the Upanisaads and from Kabir again and again and asked the question, "How should I understand Hinduism? I would do that from the Upanisaads..I had argued that the same ultimate power was worshipped in its visual form in the temple and in its formless form in the mosque. When mediapersons asked Madan Lal Khurana, now Governor of Rajasthan, outside Parliament, how he felt about what Arif Mohammad Khan said", Khurana said, "Well, he said what was right". The immediate question was "Then why did not you accept what he said", Khurana had answered with a question, "He had spoken the right things even in 1986 too, but did the other side (the Congress) accept it?