The world awaits new BJP government's first move

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Atal Behari Vajpayee, who will be sworn in tomorrow as India's prime minister, likes to be called a 'nationalist', and a moderate one at that. But practically every other Indian political party has referred to his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as 'fascists' in the past, and Vajpayee's own keenest supporters reject the slander that he is a 'moderate'.

"The BJP is a creation of the RSS cadre," said Madan Das, joint secretary of the paramilitary National Volunteers Force (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - RSS), as the BJP took the lead in last month's election. "Mr. Vajpayee cannot be a moderate. He was born, brought up and grown up in the RSS. He just presents our thoughts differently."

That is precisely what worries people: that the respectable, poetry-writing, 71-year-old Vajpayee may be just the acceptable facade of an aggressively nationalist, deeply intolerant and ruthlessly authoritarian gang of fascists who are now taking over the world's second-largest country. Nobody knows for sure, of course -- but then back in 1933 nobody was quite sure what Hitler and the Nazi Party portended for Germany either.

To be fair, 'One nation, one people, and one culture', the BJP's election slogan, is not exactly the same as the Nazi 'Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer'. But it isn't entirely different, either: after all, insisting upon 'one culture' in a country with 18 official languages and six major religions is a pretty transparent euphemism for suppressing the minorities.

"The BJP is not a classic right-wing group," explains Rangesh Rangarajan, a political scientist in New Delhi. "Its priority is culture, not economics." Or as one enthusiastic BJP voter put it: "It's time the real Indians were given an advantage over the foreigners here."

'Real Indians', in this typical BJP usage, means people who follow the Hindu religion -- so all non-Hindu citizens of India, including the Sikhs, the ancient Parsee, Christian and Buddhist communities, and above all the 120 million Indian Moslems, become 'foreigners'.

This is an historical travesty. Almost all Indian Moslems, for example, are descended from local people who converted to Islam, for spiritual or practical reasons, after various Moslem invaders conquered large parts of the sub-continent. But it is a lie that appeals to many Hindu nationalists (especially in the Hindi- speaking north) who share the view that India is a 'wounded civilization' that must somehow reclaim its soul.

The Nazis talked the same kind of trash, and attracted the same core clientele: lower middle class city-dwellers and the rural upper caste. The BJP also mimics the fascist line on the economy and foreign affairs: it touts a protectionist economic nationalism, and promises to develop and test India's nuclear weapons.

Other items in the BJP's traditional platform have now been suppressed in pursuit of broader electoral support, but they still worry those with long memories. They included revoking the special constitutional status of Kashmir (India's only Moslem- majority state), abolishing separate personal laws for Indian Moslems (dealing with marriage, inheritance, and so on), and building a Hindu temple on the site of the ancient Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya destroyed by Hindu zealots in 1992.

So why, given all this, are hordes of would-be political refugees not besieging the doors of foreign embassies in New Delhi? Why are China and Pakistan, the prospective targets of Indian nuclear weapons, not gibbering with fright? Why, indeed, is the entire world not transfixed by the prospect of one billion people, in a country with the scientific and industrial capabilities to do almost anything it wants, falling under fascist rule?

The entire world may simply be wrong. Most people were not that worried by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany either, because in 1933 it was hard to believe how far they would go. But another reason for not panicking about India is the thought that the BJP is probably not capable of doing what it would doubtless secretly like to do, because it won't be able to hang on to power long enough.

Since the long-ruling Congress Party went into decline in the late 1980s, Indian politics has spawned dozens of narrowly regional and ethnically-based parties, with the result, as columnist Inder Malhotra observed in The Hindu newspaper last Sunday, that "horse-trading is a hopelessly inadequate description of what goes on in Indian politics." The coalition cobbled together to boost the BJP into power is a prime example of that process.

The coalition now entering office under Vajpayee includes parties like the Sikh separatist Akali Dal, and the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (AIADMK), the personal vehicle of former movie star Jayalitha Jayaram, who turned to politics after making 115 Tamil-language films -- and joined the present coalition in order to get corruption charges against her dropped.

"Politics is the art of the possible, and that's what this is all about," said Subramaniam Swamy, formerly Jayalitha's deadly rival and now her candidate for finance minister. And if that's really all it's about, then there's no cause for worry.

Optimists argue that the BJP may not last in office much longer than the mere 13 days Vajpayee had as prime minister after the last election. Its allies are utterly unreliable, other parties refuse to have anything to do with it, and a reinvigorated Congress under a popular new leader, Sonya Gandhi, just waits for it to stumble. So maybe it will be all right.

And maybe it won't.