Author and academician Aditya Nigam said the coalition of Hindutva and Corporates is the real challenge confronting India. This coalition emerged as the secular parties have failed in delivering their promises. He was addressing a pubic meet on ‘Economic and political challenge confronting India’ at Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Headquarters in New Delhi on 15 April.
Explaining how the coalition of Hindutva and corporates came into existence, Nigam, who is Professor at CSDS (centre for the study of developing society), said that Narendra Modi’s coming to power at the Centre was not all of sudden. It was well-planned long ago by corporate sectors. Earlier the corporate sectors were getting lands to expand their businesses anywhere they wanted. But with the incidents like Nandigram, they were not getting land easily. It was a curb on their business expansion. At the time, then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi tweeted to Ratan Tata that he was ready to give land to them. By that time, the corporate sectors started to highlight Narendra Modi as Prime Minister candidate. So this is the coalition of Hindutva and corporates. They emerged as prime challenge confronting the country.
Criticising secular parties, he said that before 2014, the politics of so-called secular parties like Congress, Left and SP failed. Actually they did not do anything except some symbolic things. If we see the Sacchar Committee Report, we get that whether it is the 34 years rule of Left or 60 years rule of Congress, nowhere any serious step has been taken for the minorities. Whether it is the issue of education or government jobs, nothing has been done. Only when election comes, they take some Muslim leaders and Imams into consideration. Sometime the fear of RSS is shown for securing votes from Muslims. This was the last 60 years politics of so-called secular parties.
Talking on the vote bank politics, he said that BJP came to power in 2014 by doing vote bank politics, which was being earlier done by so-called secular parties like Congress, SP, etc. In the recent UP elections, BJP took over the vote bank – Dalit and other backward castes – of SP and BSP. But the matter of worry is that they did not even realise when they lost their vote bank. Neither SP and Akhilesh nor BSP and Mayawati realised that their social base is going off.
On cow vigilantes, he said that when cow vigilantes were attacking Muslims, there was no such intense outrage. But when Dalits were flogged by cow vigilantes in Una, there was serious agitation against cow vigilantes. Then we had a little hope that the situation will get better. But after UP elections, it seems that the situation is getting worse.