Prime Minister Imran Khan may have realized by now that he was wee bit hasty in making that otherwise welcome gesture of allowing a land corridor between Kartarpur on his side of the border and the Sikh population living on the Indian side, a sort of Vatican, to the latter. Kartarpur as you would have learnt is where the founder the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, spent the final years of his life in prayer among the Muslim and Hindu populace, winning many adherents for his creed of universal love. My reservation notwithstanding the fact remains that the unilateral gesture by Pakistan and the joy with which it was received by most, it did irk the Indian ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its Prime Minister, above all, that the Pak Prime Minister should have come out with the offer when they were busy playing the anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan card to the hilt in the ongoing poll campaign spearheaded by Mr. Modi himself; then, that little matter of Modi constantly, so far with some success, trying to play up on Donald Trump’s reservations on Pakistan’s role in the fight against terror. Modi has continuously been playing up on the Trump fear and would therefore not really have been much interested in the Imran gesture about Kartarpur. He would have loved to add that feather to his well-feathered and ever changing head-gear of the campaign trail after it was done and hopefully won on the hate card. Modi as anyone who has followed it would instantly tell you ran a coarse, bitter campaign, remarkable for it’s with sickening (unlawful, I daresay), anti-secular undertones. Undertones would indeed be an understatement. For rarely has India witnessed the kind of vicious poll campaigns (the post-emergency polls of 1977 included) as it has these past few months of the nerve-racking tone set by Mr. Modi and his party chief Mr. Amit Shah. With bitterness at the core of his campaign it would have been highly improbable that Modi would have accepted Imran’s Kartarpur overture or offered to talk some sense on the tangled Kashmir issue. Modi is already in election mode, a run up to next year’s general elections his principal concern even as he keeps up showing up at most foreign visits. To see Imran Khan making a gesture, an anti-thesis of the BJP’s rabid communal politics – given full exposure during the first phase of the poll campaign stretched across the Hindi heartland as much as the North-East, the latter with its strong Christian moorings finding itself oddly cajoled, in the midst of the fire and brimstone spread by the BJP-Sangh parivar : the ochre-robed keeper of the Gorakhpur Hindu math, also the Chief Minister of India’s most populous State, Uttar Pradesh, committed to building the Ram Temple at Ayodhya, no matter how, Mahant Adityanath is visible everywhere, ready to dispense political venom. Wonder what actually made Mr. Imran Khan to come up with Kartarpur, welcome as it is, to choose this moment to open up a corridor line Indian Punjab with Kartarpur nearer Lahore than perhaps Jallandhar or Amritsar. Mr. Modi, still in the poll chose to give the campaign a miss for two days to be with the G-20 leaders in Argentina. Modi hadn’t lost a minute in dismissing Imran’s suggestion for a likely resumption of Indo-Pak dialogue. Instead his subsequent speeches on the campaign acquired a sharper edge nor did the ground reality in the valley show any signs of improvement. On the contrary, Imran surely couldn’t have expected a Modi yes at a time when he was busy sort of putting to sword anyone deemed opposing the great Hindu dream. Mr. Modi in his self-propelled all-conquering incarnation didn’t lose a second in his attempt to turn Kartarpur into a plus point. Ignoring the Imran proposal, Modi took time off to upbraid the leaders of India’s freedom movement for accepting Kartarpur as part of Pakistan. Kartarpur had been cut off from India because of the pusillanimity of Indian leadership of the day. What a sacrilege by Nehru. Quite true that the Radcliffe line delineating the boundaries between the two new States was a rushed job achieved in a month by the British but it had helped New Delhi get ” chicken’s neck- holds” in the Punjab and in the north east. Those with marginally sharper memories will recall the hoo ha that accompanied an earlier Indo-Pak battle somewhere in the Gurdaspur region: yes, that was the chicken’s neck there awarded by Radcliffe to India that initially saved the day for Delhi then.. . Mr. Modi did send two of his junior Sikh Ministers, (not to forget cricketer Siddhu, the Punjab Minister) to Kartarpur but surely not make it memorable. Mr. Modi and his party chief Mr. Amit Shah meanwhile appear determined to continue playing the anti-Muslim card right through the year in the hope of keeping the communal fires burning until next year’s general elections. Kashmir or no Kashmir the fires of hate will stay with us, afire all the way. And to be fair to the BJP let it be said that it has stopped making any bones about its intent. It seems to have granted immunity to the military as well to stop pulling punches. Like we have had a few pronouncements from the Indian top-brass, one suggesting that Pakistan should realize that to be at peace with its neighbor to the East (India) it must learn to be a secular State. The clever man probably doesn’t know that Pakistan is an Islamic State. Or, that we may be sooner than later be asked to pen down an epitaph for Indian secularism. We would all be painted in one colour, like the new buses, the new cars, the road berms etc. etc. The first stirrings were actually noticed in Delhi four years ago, the very night the BJP took over. The capital’s road berms were painted and repainted starting with the RSS” bhagwa’” ending up with a combination recoat. This to confirm that saffron had come to stay… Yes, we would all be saffronised, we would all be Hindu—yes, Muslim, Sikhs, Christians, all good Hindus, sons of Bharat Mata. All Hindus? If you have doubts ask the gow-rakshaks, the lynch-men, the saffron wearing mendicants acting as our rulers in many States and even in New Delhi—all in the Hitlerite mold, your right arm stretched in front of you, a token of might, of oneness. Single file please. That’s not my interpretation. It’s Mr. Mohan Bhagwat’s and that of the organization, a populist juggernaut on the move. Erosion of democratic values manifests itself in the majoritarianism fuelled by religious intolerance, hypernationalism born out of a false sense of insecurity, deliberate erosion of political and judicial institutions and the creeping intervention in the political arena of the military –all negative indicators which only add up deeper divisions and disintegration.
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