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IT is time the BJP and its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) realised that in the guise of governing the country, they are in fact incurring the odium of trampling democratic values underfoot, and throwing all scruples to the winds. If they are not stopped in their tracks, the damage they are causing may well become irreparable. For much of the havoc, the blame lies squarely on the BJP, with its other partners in the crazy-quilt coalition playing the role of eager accomplices. Whether this is because of total obliviousness of the so-called allies to what is going on, their lust for power or the NDA serving as a convenient platform from which to build and enlarge their own power base by dispensing favours to their cronies, their names, in the eyes of the people, are also being dragged in the mud along with the BJP.

There were many, including this scribe, who at one time were willing to give the benefit of doubt to the BJP, even if they were not fully taken in by its proud claims that it was a party with a difference. They gave it a long rope, attributing even an outrage like the destruction of the Babri masjid to the fanatical sections of its parivar and suspending judgment on the question of its leadership having any direct hand in it. They believed that its deviant behaviour as the driving force of the Government was due more to its being new to power and consequent inept political management than to any deadly design to tear down the Constitutional edifice.

The BJP ought to know that there is a rapidly growing fear about the future of the country in their hands even in the minds of those who were for giving it a chance to prove itself. Indeed, discerning people have already begun talking of the country being in the grip of a second, and surreptitious, emergency. The impression has gained ground that the BJP, with the connivance of its partners, is wantonly trifling with citizens' lives and liberties, the inviolability of the media, the purity of public life, the credibility of institutions and the very pillars of the Constitution.

Its omissions and commissions seem to fall into a pernicious pattern which can no longer be ignored: The persistent and brazen defence of Mr Narendra Modi and the Gujarat Government in the face of the widespread belief in their complicity in the gruesome aftermath of the Godhra massacre; the harassment of Mr Alex Perry on flimsy grounds for writing a stupid article on Mr Vajpayee's state of health and mode of functioning; the petrol pump scam in which the goodies went mostly to the kith and kin of the big shots of the party; the blatant attempt to deny the citizens of the country their right to information on the candidates seeking their votes; and the cruel persecution of Tehelka slapping on it a witches' brew of charges and unleashing the CBI hounds at the slightest pretext reminiscent of what Sanjay Gandhi did during the infamous emergency of 1975. (Whoever heard of the CBI, groaning under an overload of cases of a grave nature, taking up a poaching case with such alacrity?)

Unless the BJP mends its ways, it may meet the same fate in 2004 as the Congress did in 1977. Deservedly, too!

B. S. Raghavan

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