Chargesheets And Ministers

So the argument goes on. Laloo won't go because he is not yet proven guilty. The NDA justifies Advani's own continuation as Dy Prime Minister in the previous government in spite of a chargesheet against him, by saying 'Ayodhya was a "political movement"'.

As The Hindu calls it here, the argument is specious. It was not a harmless movement. People died as a result of the political movement. As one journalist writes

For a month, the subcontinent was plunged into another communal bloodbath, which took around 1,500 lives, with worse aftershocks to follow, in Mumbai and elsewhere.

There were other consequences too. As this article says, it

made minority-bashing and the expression of religious prejudice respectable, even in educated, middle-class society.

And what was the political movement all about? Using the emotive issue of a place of worship to divide the country into 'them' and 'us'? Causing a large group of people to feel that they were not true Indians because of their religion? And for what? Political gain, as this article (via BBC) notes?

The internal contradictions of the Hindu nationalist project are obvious whenever caste becomes an issue in Indian politics, with the BJP's appeal limited largely to the upper castes.

As a result, communal feelings were deliberately encouraged in order to avoid any divisions among Hindus on the basis of caste.

Rather than the image of a tolerant, secular nation, attempts began to portray India using the Hindu symbols of the trident and crown.

And Mark Tully, an Indophile without doubt, says this, recalling the incident on its tenth anniversary:

I witnessed those and many other tragedies often involving people whose names will not be recorded in history, but, asked to recollect one incident I reported for the BBC, I've chosen Ayodhya because it was a denial of something which I regard as quintessentially Indian.

The culture of India is by its very nature accommodating, and for centuries it has allowed all the great religions of the world to make their homes here.

Hindus traditionally accept there are many ways to god and, as one 20th Century Western scholar has put it, "for the dogmatic certainty that has racked the religions of semitic origin Hindus feel nothing but shocked incomprehension."

So India with its Hindu majority should be the last place to find religious fanaticism. It should be an outstanding example of religious pluralism in a world where people of different faiths still so often find it difficult to live with each other.

As he also notes: "... Lal Krishan Advani ... (was) ... then in the opposition and the leader of the campaign to pull down the mosque and build a temple".

If intangibles are, well, too intangible, we could even probably put a rupee figure on the cost of this political movement to India - then we would see if it is actually higher than what Laloo took away by his corruption. The cost of lost lives, of energies misdirected, of the shift of focus away from the real needs of the country. If the BJP had its priorities right - say, highlighting the prevalent corruption, lack of development of a majority of people over fifty years since independence - which is a pretty strong argument anyway - it would have probably taken a bit longer for it to come to power, but it would have eventually I think.

However that may be, I for one would rather not hear any more about this distinction between chargesheets for political movements and those for corruption.