By Swapan Dasgupta
Chief Minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar is an
experienced and consummate politician with a firm grip on the administration of
his economically backward state. As such, his speech to a Janata Dal (United)
convention in Rajgir on October 29 was a masterly performance and constitutes
the most coherent attack on the prime ministerial candidate of his erstwhile
coalition partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Indeed, I would go so far as to
suggest that his articulation of his scepticism of Narendra Modi was more
effective than anything proffered by Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and
his colleagues in the Congress Party.
However, every political intervention has a context.
In the case of the Bihar Chief Minister, that context was defined by the
massive Hunkar rally addressed by Modi in Patna last Sunday. It was not merely
Modi’s combative address and the fact that there were at least five lakh people
from all over Bihar, not to mention the countless millions who heard his speech
on television, which shaped Nitish’s response. Equally significant was the fact
that the rally was conducted in the midst of serial blasts that left six people
dead and nearly 100 people injured.
Having been at the rally and having observed the
proceedings from a discreet corner of the large podium, I would suggest that it
was nothing short of a miracle that the event did not end in a monumental
tragedy where the casualty figures could have been horrific.
In planting 18 or more timer bombs at different parts
of the large Gandhi Maidan, the activists of the Indian Mujahedeen—the believed
perpetrators of the attack—had two principal objectives. First, they wanted to
kill those who were unlucky enough to be situated near the explosion sites.
More important, they placed the explosives in such a way as to create panic in
the crowd and trigger a stampede that would undoubtedly have taken a larger
toll. In the process, the rally would have had to be terminated abruptly,
perhaps even before Modi had the opportunity of speaking to those who had come
to cheer him enthusiastically. The aftermath of the chaos could even have led
to rioting in the streets of Patna.
It is either fortuitous or even an act of providence
that nearly half the low-intensity bombs failed to explode. For example, had
the bomb which was placed just outside the ‘sanitised’ D-area exploded, the
forward rush of a panic stricken crowd would have endangered the podium and
could even have brought it crashing down.
The seriousness of the planned attack cannot be
minimised and Nitish Kumar is too experienced an administrator not to have
realised it. Predictably, there were fingers pointed at the state
administration for the casualness with which it treated security arrangements
for such a huge public meeting. The Bihar Chief Minister knew that the charges
were grave, especially because there were intelligence inputs that suggested
the Modi rally could be targeted by subversives who have scant respect for
democratic traditions.
Under the circumstances, Nitish Kumar did what
adroit, if cynical, politicians are prone to doing: diverting attention from
his area of vulnerability. At Rajgir, he insisted that no intelligence alerts
had been received and that, in any case, he had instructed his administration to
take all necessary security arrangements. Having brushed off the charges
levelled against him and his government, he proceeded to couch his opposition
to Modi in hyperbolic overstatements. Modi, Nitish insisted, was not an
ordinary politician: he was a fascist, a follower of Adolf Hitler who was prone
to using the methods of Josef Goebbels to mislead people.
Mercifully, India has become accustomed to
witnessing political attacks being laced with references from inter-war
European history. In the mod-1970s, it was the Communist Party of India, then
in alliance with Indira Gandhi thanks to Moscow’s strategic partnership with
Delhi, which routinely labelled Jayaprakash Narayan a “fascist”. In the
early-1990s that abuse was hurled at L.K. Advani in the wake of the Ayodhya
movement. And today, Nitish Kumar has deemed it fit to use similar invectives
against Modi.
Whether the popular yearning for a strong leader
automatically reeks of fascism is a worthy subject of debate. However, whatever
may be the Bihar Chief Minister’s understanding of the man on whose account he
unilaterally broke his long-standing alliance with the BJP, the fact remains
that the Bihar administration had an obligation to ensure the safe and peaceful
conduct of the Hunkar rally. He claims to have done so but facts suggest
otherwise.
The conduct of the state administration is
revealing. First, it put obstacles in the way of the BJP holding the rally in
the whole of the Gandhi Maidan. Secondly, it invited the President of India to
be in Patna on the same day as the Hunkar rally, knowing fully well that the
President’s security drill would create near-insurmountable obstacles in the
path of those wishing to attend the rally. Thirdly, in an act of astonishing
churlishness, the Bihar Government let it be known that it neither possessed
bulletproof SUVs or jammers for Modi’s use. In short, the Bihar Government put
out a clear message to its officers that Modi being an unwelcome guest, it
wasn’t necessary to oblige the BJP.
It was this attitude that led to not more than six
constables being deputed for sanitising the Gandhi Maidan on the day prior to
the rally, the complete absence of any CCTV cameras at Gandhi Maidan and the
absence of any senior police officer at the rally site last Sunday. Nor, for
that matter did the Bihar Police have any emergency evacuation plans ready, not
even after the bombs had started going off. There was no bomb disposal unit
present at the venue to even take care of the explosives that had been detected
by the crowd.
ASIAN AGE, November 1, 2013
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