Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s government, of course, has found it expedient to comply with the directive of the Central Election Commission (CEC) to ban the "pad-padshahi yatra", but that has hardly deterred the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) from innovating other provocative plans to polarise society along communal lines and rally the majority community behind Modi and his "Hindu-wadi" (pro-Hindu) party.

The VHP and the Bajrang Dal (BD) now plan to organise a "Jan Jagran" (public awakening) programme in the State to spread the message of Hindutva. The VHP’s star performers—Pravin Togadia, Acharya Dharmendra, Sadhavi Ritambhara and Ashok Singhal—will now address "dharma sabhas" (religious congregations) and organise other mass contact programmes in villages to "reawaken" the Hindus. The objective of the campaign obviously is to work for the victory of the "Hindu-wadi" forces at the polls.

Both the VHP and BD naturally are dismissive of Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani’s declaration in the Lok Sabha that India can never be a Hindu State. So, in fact, is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organisation of the parivar. The RSS has all along been appreciative of the BJP’s compulsions in holding its "Hindu agenda" in abeyance to preside over the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Hence the parivar’s plans to rally all its forces to work for securing, at the earliest, an absolute majority for the party in the States and at the Centre so that it is not inhibited in implementing its "Hindu" agenda, or even "reviewing" the Constitution, if necessary. The setback suffered by the BJP’s earlier efforts in this regard still haunts them.

Even Advani and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee have never made secret of the fact that their party has not given up its "Hindu agenda" and that it has only held it in abeyance in deference to the wishes of its NDA allies. And since both are proud of their membership of the RSS and are adherents of its ideology, there is no reason to doubt their allegiance to the concept of "Hindu rashtra."

Viewed in this context, one wonders whether Advani was not merely stating the NDA’s position while declaring that India can never be a Hindu State. For, he cannot take that position as a loyal RSS swayamsevak. It is another matter that BJP and RSS leaders have so perfected the art of doublespeak that they can now refer to Hinduism as a synonym of Indian-ism, that is, the pluralist Indian way of life, and then talk of it as if it were an organised religion.

If Hinduism were just a synonym of Indian-ism, for example, the reference to J. M. Lyngdoh’s Christian antecedents in pejorative terms would be un-Hindu, if not anti-Hindu, conduct for, in that case, he would be as good an Indian as any other national of the country. The pejorative remarks against him are made by a Modi or a Togadia only as followers of an organised Hindu religion hostile to Christianity which, in their view, is a foreign faith, since India is, or should be, exclusively Hindu, or a Hindu state.

Vajpayee and Advani may have intervened and tried to soften Modi and the VHP leaders with the help of the RSS top brass, but they have never seriously tried to discipline them. Had they disapproved of the below-the-belt attacks on the CEC by Modi and other BJP and RSS leaders, who accused him of carrying out the bidding of "fellow Christian Sonia Gandhi", they would not have made the presidential reference to the Supreme Court but, instead, removed Modi as chief minister.

That the Sangh parivar and Chief Minister Modi continued to make similar remarks against Lyngdoh even after the Supreme Court answered the reference in favour of the Election Commission shows the kind of respect they have for the Constitution and the democratic constitutional institutions. And that neither Vajpayee nor Advani considered it fit or proper to save this constitutional institution from such intimidatory attacks by their followers by taking prompt exemplary action against them clearly betrays the limits of their professed adherence to "raj-dharma."

The election campaign in Gujarat, thus, appears poised to stoop to the lowest limits of communal and sectarian propaganda against the minorities. The Sangh parivar appears hell bent upon communalising the campaign with a view to consolidating the Hindu vote and rallying it behind the BJP. The argument obviously will be that they are not political parties and are, hence, not covered by the CEC’s directives against such campaigning. Preposterous, maybe, but that is how the Sangh parivar argues.

All that the Election Commission and the State administration may succeed in ensuring, in the circumstances, is to curb open and loud intimidation of the minorities through such stratagems as the "yatra" that would have kept them off the polling booths.