Vajpayee made it very clear that he would not criticise the Congress government when on foreign soil. ‘We may have our differences at home but once we leave the shores of India, we are all Indians’, was his surmise.
People would expect anyone who has held an exalted position in the country to conform to a model code of conduct; a conduct that upholds the dignity and honour of the country as well as the decorum of the position that they once occupied. Has Vice President Hamid Ansari lived up to those high standards or is the ire and concern of the BJP to a degree justified.?
There has been a long history of distrust between the BJP and ex Vice-President Hamid Ansari. When he was the Vice-President and thus the Ex-Officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the BJP saw him to be deliberately obstructive to their legislative goals.
And the first salvo in the current slanging match was fired by the ex-Vice President himself.
In January this year, while speaking in a virtual panel discussion organised by the Indian American Muslim Council (an organization that has consistently strived to get India blacklisted by the USCIRF), he made common cause with anti-India US lawmakers like Ed Markey and Jim McGovern, Andy Levin and Jamie Raskin to denigrate India by calling into question its commitment to democracy, secularism and even the rule of law.
Hamid Ansari pointedly decried the current government: The former Vice President said that in recent years, the country has “experienced the emergence of trends and practises that dispute the well-established principle of civic nationalism…and interposes a new and imaginary practice of cultural nationalism. It seeks to present an electoral majority in the guise of a religious majority and monopolized political power. It wants to distinguish citizens on the basis of their faith, give vent to intolerance, insinuate otherness, and promote disquiet and insecurity…”
Elaborating further he remarked: “Some of its recent manifestations are chilling and reflect poorly on our claim to be governed by rule of law. It’s a question that has to be answered. These trends need to be contested and contested legally and contested politically.”
First the Vice-President should not have been in a panel discussion sponsored by an organisation that has consistently tried to undermine India’s image abroad. Second, he should have been conscious of the fact that he was speaking on a foreign platform in the presence of foreign lawmakers, who are well known for their anti-India animus. His words, with all due respect to him, do not behoove a former Vice President of a country.
In this regard, the deportment of BJP leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani comes to my mind. I had the opportunity to meet with leaders like Advani and Vajpayee several times as a part of a small like-minded group, when they visited New York. Not once did they badmouth the Congress Party despite having been jailed by Indira Gandhi during Emergency. I remember explicitly what L.K. Advani said during one such meeting. Despite the fact that he was interacting with a group of avid BJP sympathisers he made it very clear that he would not criticise the Congress government when on foreign soil. “We may have our differences at home but once we leave the shores of India, we are all Indians”, was his surmise.
Next, with regard to the assertions of Nusrat Mirza (the Pakistani journalist who claims that he visited India several times during Hamid Ansari’s tenure as Vice-President, attended terrorism related conferences and transmitted sensitive information back to the ISI), the government is duty bound to investigate this matter of national security.
Calling the allegations, “a litany of falsehood”, Ansari claimed: “It is a known fact that invitation to foreign dignitaries by the Vice President of India are on the advice of the Government generally through the Ministry of External Affairs. I had inaugurated the Conference on Terrorism on December 11, 2010, the ‘International Conference of Jurists on International Terrorism and Human Rights’. As is normal practice the list of invitees would have been drawn by the organisers. I never invited him or met him [Mr. Mirza].”
It is important to note that this controversy involves two distinct conferences: 1) The International Conference of Jurists on Terrorism and Human Rights held at Vigyan Bhawan on 11 and 12 December 2010, and 2) the International Conference Against Terrorism organized by Jama Masjid United Forum in New Delhi at Oberoi Hotel on 27 October 2009.
The denials by Hamid Ansari and the Congress Party appear to be a subtle attempt to obfuscate the controversy by referring to the first government sanctioned meeting and not the conference organised by the Jama Masjid, which was not vetted by the government, as Adish Aggarwala, Chairman, All India Bar Association indicates.
In a statement Aggarwala clarified, “The statements made by Hamid Ansari and Jairam Ramesh and other Congress functionaries are clearly distorted, completely untrue and condemnable. It is astonishing that a former Vice President of the country indulges in covert activities and then tries to hide behind another unrelated incident to mislead the public. To uncover the truth, I repeat that Hamid Ansari and his friends were befriending Nusrat Mirza at the Jama Masjid United Forum conference.”
Further Mr Aggarwala claimed: “When the conference (The International Conference of Jurists on Terrorism and Human Rights held at Vigyan Bhawan on 11 and 12 December 2010) was being organized, the invitation to participate in it was sent to Hamid Ansari as the Vice President of India. Ashok Diwan, who was then the Director of the Vice President’s Secretariat, informed me that the Vice President wanted Pakistani journalist Nusrat Mirza to be invited to the conference. However, we could not accept the request as Mirza was from Pakistani media and we had not invited judges or lawyers from Pakistan.”
The BJP has also released photos showing Hamid Ansari and Nusrat Mirza sharing the dais at the Jama Masjid organized conference.
These are serious infractions that could involve national security and must be addressed. In the running battle between the BJP and Hamid Ansari, the BJP cannot be faulted for safeguarding the country’s interest as long as it is objective and not vindictive. A façade of decency and public protocol cannot be invoked to protect erring individuals regardless of the position they occupied in the past if it involves national interest.