Agreed, the BJP would have taken along a few hundred party flags along with the one Tricolour they hoisted. It is obviously a political strategy, an attempt by the BJP to drive another nail on the Congress' coffin lid, already weighed down by scams. However, to say that their intent was to heighten tensions and provoke violence is childish and myopic.
Pulverised in the General Elections, the BJP has tried to re-define itself, pushing the not-in-vogue hindutva and related agendas to the background and retaining only the political contrariness typical in an opposition party. The true test of this attitude has been the Ayodhya verdict. A foolhardy party would have seized the opportunity to revive the Ram Mandir issue, its veterans could have grabbed at it for another shot at glory. But all that the BJP displayed was a smug acceptance and token protests on a few points in the judgment. The party has been here long enough not to commit the immensely counter-productive 'historic blunder' of polarising religion and provoking violence.
The editorial also referred to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as an ally and quoted his disapproval of the yatra. The only context in which Mr. Kumar can be called a BJP ally, is numbers. He is hardly the example to use when attempting to point out sudden ideological differences arising out of foolhardy strategy.
As an employee of The Hindu, this editorial embarrassed me. Not for the point it made, many times over, or the stand it took. What troubled me was that it obscenely exposed to the reader the kind of journalism the daily employs.
A senior colleague of mine once said that every newspaper, like every individual, had a right to affiliate itself with a particular ideology or polity. True enough. However, as an entity, a newspaper is rather more exalted than an individual, for the reason that it is meant to be the voice of more than one individual. Consequently, a newspaper does not, in my opinion, have the luxury of ranting, however-much belligerence an issue evokes.
It is no secret that The Hindu leans to the Left, or that it will never publish a report on China the Chinese government doesn't approve of. And of course, anything remotely non-critical of the Hindu religion and anything else connected to it is treated like a fishy bit of news, which is given space with extreme reluctance. But this stance is usually not very blatant. There's usually a thick coat of articulacy, or at least ambiguity. Reading this editorial was like looking at the real face of an ageing actress without makeup - every line of paranoia and neurosis laid bare.
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