Reckless rant

Being level-headed is an attribute one expects in our leaders, especially when it comes to dealing with communal relations in this country.

Being level-headed is an attribute one expects in our leaders, especially when it comes to dealing with communal relations in this country. That, alas, was something not on display in the last few days. It is one thing for our parliamentarians to pose before cameras holding anti-George Bush signs and wearing red Gandhi topis and paper caps. It is quite another to guide anti-Americanism and link it to the notion that Muslims everywhere are being targeted by the ‘Great Satan’. Indians, like people in any democratic nation, are free to express their opinions about anything, including about the volatile issue of the US invasion of Iraq. But what one is witnessing is not so much a legitimate protest against American policy, but about using diffused popular anger and discontent to firm up one’s own power base. In other words, it is incitement.

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A brief glimpse of how dangerous such rank opportunism can become was provided in Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Uttar Pradesh on Thursday. Anti-Bush protestors in Sultanpur district morphed into an angry mob that tried to force the closure of shops. This ‘protest rally’ turned violent with ‘members of another community’ (read: Hindus) retaliating against the mob. To see SP and Left leaders turn their neurotic ire against Mr Bush’s America into a clarion call for Indian Muslims to rise and stand against the ‘hegemon’ is lighting a fuse that can blow up in the nation’s face.

Instead of calming nerves in a country that has a history of Hindu-Muslim antagonism, these leaders are goading India’s Muslims into a darker terrain. Even before Mr Bush’s visit, we have seen the irrational nature of sectarian politics in the form of Muslim protestors against the infamous Danish cartoons also raging against America. Fusing anger against the cartoons with protests against ‘Barbarian Bush’ makes as much sense as fusing all Muslims with Islamic terrorists. Instead of untangling such confusions, opportunistists are helping to propagate them. If there have been charges in the past from certain quarters of ‘Muslim appeasement’, our parliamentarian rabble-rousers do nothing to contain them.