Masque, A Sequel

Kumar Ketkar January 08, 2001 00:00 IST Masque, A Sequel -0001-11-30T00:00:00+05:53

PRIME Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has finally thrown away the mask he was wearing for the past three years. It must have been truly suffocating to go places with that mask. Moreover, the mask had served its purpose. The purpose was to fool the gullible middle class which was living in an ideological vacuum for over a decade.

IN the Eighties, the Bharatiya Janata Party swore by the name of Gandhian Socialism. That mask split almost instantly. Neither the middle class nor the masses could identify the Sangh parivar with Gandhi or with socialism. The bjp was reduced to just two seats in the Lok Sabha. So the paRTY threw the Gandhian mask as well as Vajpayee.

THAt is how Lal Krishna Advani camE Centrestage with his rath yatra. The idea of militant Hindutva caught the imagination of the urban-upper caste-upper class. On THat wave, the bjp rode and increased its stock from just two seats in 1984 to 160 in 1996. The Babri demolition had provided lustre to the cause of Hindutva. Yet the Nagpur politburo of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh realised the bjp would not go much...