Zabaan Sambhal Ke

Varun Gandhi has arrived. And how! He strode on to the political battleground with a vacuum for brains and a loose cannon for a mouth. Noxious combination, this. And while we screamed hoarse on blogs and feverishly worked on the Lead India '09 campaign, here was a man who grabbed all the headlines - major and minor - albeit for all the wrong reasons. As long as our 24x7 news channels went crazy over him, who in the wide world cared what actually happened? Everyone from Riyadh to Rohtak and Paris to Palakkad knows the man who spewed deadly venom all over the nation. Mission accomplished - hook, line and sinker.

At an emotionally charged rally in his constituency Pilibhit, this new pin-up boy of the very saffron BJP posed a serious threat to Gujarat CM Narendra Modi. He seems to have surpassed the veteran when it comes to violating the very nature of the Indian Constitution. But what comes as a nasty sting is where Varun comes from. He is not an uncouth bahubali who speaks only the language of abuse and profanity. Nor is he a bumbling buffoon caught in a situation he is not equipped to handle. He is an educated and suave young man who is expected, at the very least, to know what he can say and what he must not. He carries the lineage of a secular great-grandfather, a fiery grandmother, a dynamic uncle, an intelligent aunt, polished cousins and a distinguished mother. This LSE-alumnus represents India's first and most well-known family, but 'Feroze' Varun Gandhi displayed utter disregard for the sensibilities of India and her law as he happily cussed and cursed in a manner reminiscent of C-grade Bollywood. For this kin of a family who scripted India's history, he has conveniently forgotten that the people he judges on faith and asks to leave India had made their choice way back in 1947 - they chose India. For this son of a mother reknowned for her compassion and humanity for animals, branding a part of India with the choicest contempt and the vilest slurs is as unimaginable as it is unforgivable.

In a nation with India's sheer size and interwoven diversity, it would be logical to assume that development and social upliftment should be the ideal planks for winning an election. Sadly, things never were that way and have not changed either. We thrive on hate, which is still widely believed to be a huge and popular driver of votes. If not that, it at least guarantees full media attention. Thus said, it was not really surprising for Varun Gandhi to use this tried-and-tested technique for his share of the spotlight. He played his cards perfectly and dealt the three aces which clinched the air-time: dynasty, religion, and emotional manipulation. He says he is "a Gandhi, a Hindu and an Indian in equal measure". It is not just the order he places these personal identities in that bothers.

For a country that prides itself on a rich culture and was the first civilsation, the one obvious lesson we have learnt to never learn is this - hate can only take us so far. It may inflame sentiments and ignite passions, but it will always create a resentment that will have its own pre-determined backlash. We, the Indian voters, want solutions in these especially trying times. We want to know if our money in the banks is safe. We want to know if we will still report to work tomorrow. We want to know if we will be allowed a life where we don't spend every mooment wondering if we will get back home alive to see our family smile at us. We want to know if we as women have as much right to freedom and happiness as the men do. We want to know whether we and our children will have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe. This is what the politicians, more so the new-age ones, should ideally be focusing on.

That may yet be mere wishful thinking. Once again, we, the Indian voters, will be asked to choose not between good and evil but between hate and progress. Gujarat's new roads will cover the bloodstains of Godhra yet again. That is the saddest part. Hate may yet again win. But that would not be the moniker of winning an election; it would be an aberration of democracy. Barack Obama won his election on hope. He suggested a change for the better and promised a future steeped in consonance. Our leaders learnt nothing from this historic event and choose to adopt a path of dissonance where hate is aggressively marketed to the masses. They promote trepidation and vehemence rather than equanimity and sanguinity. The basic lesson marketing teaches us is that customers buy benefits. Indian politics has bucked the trend.

The youngest Gandhi, along with others of his generation, represented the hope and faith we had in the young and dynamic Gen-Next leaders we thought would change the face of India. Well, this one does seem to be doing just that - changing India from a secular democratic republic to a hardliner fundamentalist religious entity. The BJP fervently projected Varun as the new face of Hindutva in the hope to free their treasured ideology of its pariah image. The idea was also, more sinisterly, to defeat the secular model of Nehruvian political project - and what better way to hit back at Nehru than to have one of his own question the very essence of his legacy. Varun’s rhetoric that made the Thackeray patriarch proud (if not blush) actually came as no surprise. Neither does his choice of a dias - his mother’s constituency, a region with a substantial Muslim population. This was no desperate attempt by a wannabe to secure his 15 minutes of fame. It was the emergence of a member of the Nehru-Gandhi clan wholeheartedly embracing the Hindutva mission. If this is not a historic incident, I wonder what is.

Varun's timing to take up a divisive campaign may seem far from judicious, especially when his party leadership has been struggling to look beyond temples and mosques to try and focus on governance. The simple answer is that he probably thought he could get away with it. In fact, had it not been for an alert media and an active Opposition, he probably would have got away. Heck, he actually will eventually get away, and in all probability even win his election from Pilibhit. Once the dust settles, Varun Gandhi may well become the icon for those who believe it is necessary to show the minorities 'their place'. This is the inexorable price we must pay for having long allowed our politics to degenerate into a bloodbath of divide-and-rule. Yet, if we have any faith in the nation as a secular democracy with an inclusive society and a republican constitution, we must not allow Varun to get away at all, at least not so easily. More importantly, our Muslim population must not validate his ludicrous invectives by actually reacting and thereby substantiating this depravity, which is what his party expects them to. That’s the least India and her founding fathers would expect of us.