Daily Times

The news was numbing for the kind of nationalists India has been coping with ever since November 26. The Mumbai police had proclaimed a shutdown of New Year parties in the hotels of the metropolis at 12:30 am on January 1, 2009.
As if that were not enough, a segregation of sexes was the order of the day at the Gateway of India that has seen more glamorous and mixed celebrations on the same occasion in the past. And no firecrackers to light up the night sky, please.
The poor, brave city — or, more correctly, the not so poor section of its population — had been put through yet another gruelling ordeal. But the party crowd was prepared to pay the price of its patriotism. They had displayed the spirit in the days that shook the financial capital in street demos by celebrities like the faded star decrying the traitorous ways of people in slum tenements. They did so again now by resolving to cut short five-star bashes and compensate for them in family-hosted private parties.
Terrorists could truncate their parties, but not take them away. The patriotic unity of the partying classes was a marvel to behold. A similar spirit was strikingly evident in the other metropolitan cities as well. A strong rebuff to terrorism was forthcoming from revellers in New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai, who could afford admission to telegenic parties.
To the common man, the swingers and sashayers in the deafening ambiance of discos may not seem to represent the real India. But the “mainstream” media thinks so, and that’s what matters. And, on that assumption, when the media pronounces 2008 as the Year of Terror, who are mere mortals to dispute the description?
The class and character of the crowd make it clear that Terror with a capital ‘t’ had a very specific connotation. The terrorists behind the Malegaon blasts of 2006, for example, are in a different category, calling for less stern disapproval than the monsters from the country’s largest minority. Similarly, victims of communal violence in Gujarat, Orissa and Karnataka are not those of the Terror that these admirable party animals are taking on.
The terrorism of serial blasts (as distinguished from violence committed with lesser weapons, never mind the victims’ numbers), which the tenaciously partying tribe is determined to tackle through their binges, has a definite political complexion. It is the same terrorism as defined by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its demented Parivar (the Far-Right ‘family’).
To the party and its most prominent leader, Lal Krishna Advani, the proclamation of 2008 as the Year of Terror is all the more politically important for its preceding 2009, the Year of the Election. The BJP leader barely makes any secret of the connection in his New Year message to the nation.
Says Advani: “The most important lesson that the outgoing year teaches us is that India cannot afford to have a government in which the Prime Minister has no real authority, and the leader who has the authority has no accountability.” The second part of the sentence is a swipe at Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president and the Chairperson of the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
Advani adds: “(The events of 2008) have taught an important lesson to India: to have a strong leader.” The allusion, less ambiguous in this case, is to the former Deputy Prime Minister himself, labelled by his party as the Lauha Purush (Iron Man).
The BJP and its “strong leader” have chosen to reject the lesson from the results of recent state assembly elections, which belied their hope of a post-Mumbai, “anti-terrorist” landslide. They expect to draw larger mileage from the issue in the forthcoming elections to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s Parliament).
Interestingly, 2008, too, opened with the BJP and two of its “strong leaders” holding centre stage. Narendra Modi had won a big electoral victory in Gujarat and set off a national debate. On December 28, in these columns (“Understanding Modi’s victory”), we noted: “The…victory…has come as no clinching argument or compelling advertisement for democracy. Militarists all around can now mock those who have been talking of democracy as a diet of peace and progress.”
Advani’s grim New Year greetings, too, must make the nation think of what its democracy should mean, when confronted with the claims of those who advocate a strange divide-and-develop strategy.
In January 2008, Advani got himself anointed as the “shadow Prime Minister” by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Commenting on the development in this column again (“Advani’s shadow”, January 25, 2008), we noted: “the shadow of communal strife that Advani’s perceived ascent (along with Modi’s) is already casting across the country”. The prognosis was to prove regrettably right.
If 2009 becomes the Year of the Strong Leader or the Year of Advani for the Parivar, it will truly become the Year of Terror for the minorities, and not for them alone.
To the party crowd in Mumbai and elsewhere, however, Advani may have only sent out a simple message: vote BJP and, come next New Year, you can boogie all night!

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint