The Bharatiya Janata Party and its mentor, the RSS, or a portion of it, are in the middle of an internecine battle. And it is turning out to be a no-holds-barred fight. The gloves are off and the cannons are shooting fire and brimstone. The first salvo was fired by the Bharatiya Bhasha Suraksha Mandal (BBSM) at a press conference where it said it would support an alternative to the BJP. This was followed by a counter press conference by the South Goa MP Narendra Sawaikar, who categorically stated that the RSS leader in the BBSM has lost his bearings. The BBSM came back with another press conference where it accused the BJP of being the ‘baap’ of all liars. Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar
has said his government would not go back on its medium of instruction policy and added that no purpose would be served by passing the MoI bill in the Assembly. The BJP has also asserted that it stood by the promise made in its election manifesto for an amicable settlement to the MoI issue. Of the many questions raised during this slugfest, one is whether the BJP used the BBSM during its 2012 election campaign and the answer to that is a categorical ‘yes’. Irrespective of what it says today, senior BJP leaders, including Manohar Parrikar actively participated in the agitation against the decision of the
then Congress government to give
grants to all English primary schools. While the BBSM spearheaded
the agitation, the BJP and RSS backed it wholeheartedly.
But such a hard stand, the BJP pointed to an amicable
solution to the MoI problem in its election manifesto. Why?
Somewhere between 2007 and 2012 the BJP and Parrikar realized
that the party had to move closer to the centre in order
to build a broader base. This strategy paid rich dividends in
2012 with the party winning 21 seats and its partner the MPG
bagging three. With these numbers the BJP-MGP could easily
have ignored the rest, but Parrikar forged alliances with the
GVP and independent MLA from Navelim so as not to alienate
Salcete. The MoI policy in its present form flowed from the
compulsions of governance thrown up by this combination.
The ongoing political battle is between the extreme right
represented by the BBSM and the BJP which wants to go back
the polls in 2017 with a centrist agenda. The biggest success
of the BJP today is that, in Goa, it is no longer referred to as
a communal party. There are sections of society which might
point to U-turns and broken promises, but charges of communalism
have not been levelled by even the Congress. This is its
real victory. And it is this victory that the BBSM is seeking to
destroy because it cannot implement its agenda in the present
setup. When Narendra Sawaikar challenged BBSM leaders
to enter active politics in order to implement their agenda, he
was probably pointing to the compulsions of governance and
the difficulty in fashioning a broad-based platform in order to
get elected. In the present crisis, the BJP comes across as a political
party with a more inclusive MoI solution as against the
BBSM which seeks to divide society along communal lines.
The MoI policy is not perfect, but it seeks to draw a balance
between the demand to support Indian languages and the demand
of parents for free primary education in English. The
MoI policy is a work in progress and the government is right in
refusing to reverse it.
