WikiLeaks: need to look at the bigger picture

So Julian Assange’s Wikileaks has set off one more round of political hysteria in India.

The cables sent by US ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, to the state department contain a comment made by Rahul Gandhi about how Gandhi was worried that Hindu radicals might spark off more discontent amongst radical Muslims.

Hardly some vastly original or outrageous thought and still so many of our venerable politicians and commentators have gone off the deep end.

It also makes you wonder why the Bharatiya Janata Party should take exception to the words ‘Hindu radicals’. The term refers to a specific group of people.

It does not qualify all Hindus as radicals — a far cry from the Sangh Parivar’s normal ploy of equating all Indian Muslims either with Pakistan or with terrorism or usually, both. In their usual sneering, polite manner, they also equate Sonia Gandhi with all Christians and portray all Christians as proselytising demons.

Well, many Indians who are not fans of the Sangh Parivar might even object to the Parivar equating itself with all of Hinduism and springing to its defence.

And in fact, many Hindus do. How many new recruits does the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh get every year, these days? And what is the vote share which the BJP manages to get across India?

It is no one’s case that India does not face a threat from either Islamist terrorism or from terrorists trained and armed by Pakistan.

The whole world today acknowledges that India has suffered terribly at the hands of terrorists from across the border. But that does not change the fact that there is a threat not only of Hindu radicals taking to violence but also of the violence which has already happened.

And the world is aware of that too, or else the posterboy of the BJP’s violent Hindutva, Narendra Modi, would find it easier to get a visa to much of the western world. As it happens, he finds it difficult to get a visa even to Bihar.

This knee-jerk reaction to everything that is said is why Indian polity today seems so lacking in maturity. Even when we have matters of enormous national importance to discuss, we manage to sidestep debate and indulge ourselves in petty grandstanding.

The country is being raped and robbed by our political classes. So please watch the glee with which they have jumped on to this so-called crisis only in order to take the spotlight off themselves and their iniquities.

There is reason, however, to take exception to young Gandhi’s remarks as reported in the Wikileaks cables and that is in the flip connection between provocative Hindutva radicalism and a corresponding Islamist backlash.

Had the response from Islamic radicals within India been as violent as many had feared, we would be in far worse trouble as a society. Instead, as the cables themselves have pointed out, India’s Muslims have benefited greatly from living in a secular democracy.

If the BJP and its master organisation feel that the Congress is behaving in its normal appeasement manner, then the extreme reaction is even more inexplicable.

Just what is it about the Congress’s vote bank politics that surprises anyone any more and just which election is the Congress about to win just now?

Sometimes, you wonder whether this daily hysteria is fuelled by constant television coverage or whether we are really in a state of permanent outrage? How about looking at the bigger picture and practising some good old Hindu calmness of mind?