Supporting the BJP

Many of my friends are horrified that I have now come out of the closet as a supporter of the BJP. The same people I once branded as Hindu fanatics and mass murderers now seem to me to be the only people who can save the country. I disagree with many of their ideas, but I find it hard to deny that the other alternatives are infinitely worse. This is a nation with urgent problems that can only be solved with drastic measures. The Congress will never serve us as the harbinger of those measures; the party’s days of genuine service came to an end three generations ago.

Consider the country’s problems for a minute – It is one of the most corrupt nations in the entire world, with millions of crores of Indian rupees stashed away in foreign banks as black money. There are regular intrusions into Indian territory by an unabashed Chinese army and the ruling elite hesitate to even lift a finger in protest. Pakistan continues to use a bulk of the billions of dollars it receives as aid to fund a proxy war in Kashmir. Corporate interests from the West affect public policy, leaving millions homeless or dead. The next generation are still taught bogus history in schools despite evidence to the contrary. The country is treated by the ruling party like a family heirloom to be passed from parent to child. Naxalism is on a murderous rampage. Different communities are governed by different laws. I can do this all day.

These are the problems citizens should actually be considering when they vote, not stories about a dozen people getting beaten in a pub and couples not being allowed to celebrate Valentine’s Day in a particular street. Those are issues too, but those are not the issues that should shape India’s future. Is the BJP flawless? No. Can the BJP solve all of the nation’s problems? Impossible. No party can solve all these problems. But it certainly has a better chance of doing so than any of its political rivals. It is a party, unlike the Congress, that has not been completely rotted by power yet. They can still get the job done before the rot sets in.

“But what about the bigotry?” people always ask me when we discuss this. “What about pogroms aimed against minorities?”

Are pogroms under the BJP worse than those the Congress has orchestrated for decades? Officially, 2000 muslims were killed in Gujarat in 2001 (under a BJP government) and 5000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi in 1984 (under a Congress government). The extermination of any life is a crime, so is the latter not much worse than the former? Yet, it would be difficult to find a sentence about Narendra Modi in the mainstream media without “Godhra” or “mass murderer” in the same sentence, while Rajiv Gandhi is celebrated as a visionary leader whose tragic death didn’t allow him to grow to his potential. There is almost nobody in the media who seems ready to admit that, even by their standards, Rajiv Gandhi was twice the mass murderer that Modi is. It is this kind of hypocrisy that has turned many, including myself, to the BJP. Even the destruction of the Babri-Masjid, where nobody was killed, was preposterously compared by the media to the vicious terrorist campaign that was launched in response.

What this country needs is not reformation but a revolution. Big words, but true. Future generations must not carry the same burdens as us by being fed nonsense about how the people of India originated in different parts of the world and are actually two different civilisations called Aryans and Dravidians. Corrupt politicians and greedy industrialists who illegally stock billions of rupees in secret accounts must be brought to justice and their money confiscated. National security should not be made to play second-fiddle to community appeasement. Any conflict between any two Indians must be settled according to the law of the land and not the law dictated by somebody who lived in another land from another time, shariat law for example.

The BJP is not likely to be our saviour. But it is far more likely to act as a predecessor to our saviour, if there ever will be one, than the Congress or the rest of the political rabble. That is enough for me to lend my support.