Violence in Tripura

TRUE to its election-time slogan of Chalo Paltai (let us overturn), the BJP has put its battle cry into practice even before an elected government could be sworn in. The overexcitement among its cadres has given way to frenzy. A statue of Lenin was overturned and several CPM offices were torched or vandalised. The BJP activists seem to have borrowed the idea of bulldozing Lenin’s statue from Eastern Europe where thousands of Lenin and Marx statues were pulled down rowdily as a joyous expression of the end to a deeply prescriptive and intrusive ideology. Matters ended at that. The practice has continued in Ukraine more because it is a country deeply at odds with itself and vandalism of the other’s cultural and political symbols is part of the tit-for-tat violence that has engulfed the land.

But in India, the vandalism of the Lenin statue and the larger script of political violence sit uneasily with the traditional Indian practice of cohabiting with opposing binaries and philosophies. The true Indian willingly imbibes the essence of the atheistic-materialistic Charvak as well as the Sanatan Dharma’s spirit of renunciation and embedded ritualism. Rather, the BJP betrays comfort with static ideas much like its vanquished opponent when it rationalises the demolition of the statue of a “foreigner”, overlooking the continued relevance of his ideas.

Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh needs to be commended for quickly sensing the vacuum in governance and instructing the police to take charge of the situation. At the real-politic level, he would be conscious that the BJP has so far only successfully peddled a dream. It needs to summon the spirit of cooption and cooperation even for its partial realisation; though the Left Front lost the polls, it drew in a significant 45 per cent of the vote. The BJP’s cadres should also realise that the pattern of wins and losses in a democracy are cyclical and so is retributive violence; good governance, by which it swears, will be the casualty if mayhem in the bazaars of Tripura is allowed to continue unchecked.