All that the government needs to do is adhere to the prime minister’s developmental agenda to the exclusion of every other distraction engineered either by the opposition parties or members of the saffron brotherhood. If it did so, it wouldn’t have had to prove its credentials to the Hindutva camp by deplaning an NGO activist lest she gave an “anti-Indian” speech abroad.

While the obstructionism of the opposition parties is understandable in a country where they routinely do the opposite of what they advocate when in power, it is Modi’s need to cater for the wish-list of the saffron brigade which is posing a threat to his image.

To be fair, he has partially succeeded in taming hotheads like Yogi Adityanath and others who had crawled out of the woodworks immediately after the BJP’s assumption of power to spew hatred against the minorities.

It cannot be anything other than Modi’s intervention which has led to the stoppage of the ghar wapsi and love jehad campaigns which the Hindutva Gestapo had unleashed with great vigour. Even the attacks on churches have stopped after Modi summoned the Delhi police commissioner who was in the habit of dismissing the incidents as the acts of thieves.

While the fundamentalists have been reined in – at least for the time being – the government has not been too scrupulous in the matter of the selection of the various heads of institutions.

It started with the choice of a virtually unknown “historian”, Y. Sudarshan Rao, to be chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) simply because he subscribes to the saffron view of history. The Hindutva lobby followed it up this controversial appointment with the nomination of others on the basis of their saffron connections rather than merit.

Among them are Pahlaj Nihalani, a maker of “B” grade Bollywood films, who was put at the head of the censor board to the dismay and consternation of acknowledged directors and producers, and Gajendra Chauhan, who has been appointed chairman of the Film and Television Institute.

While Rao’s appointment only led to the resignations or dismissals, the selection of Chauhan, who played the role of Yudhishthir in the television serial, Mahabharata, has led to vociferous protests by the institute’s students. They want to know the “process” by which these choices are made – whether it is because of their talent or sycophancy to the Sangh parivar.

It is obvious that a considerable portion of the government’s and the BJP’s time will have to be spent in fending off these accusations. If previous governments didn’t have to engage in such fire-fighting, the reason was that the earlier chairmen of the ICHR were well-known historians like R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib, and of the film institute like Girish Karnad and Mahesh Bhatt, who do not need any introduction.

If the latest appointments suggest the customary distribution of the loaves and fishes of office to waiting aspirants, the targeting of NGOs, including reputed ones like Greenpeace and Ford Foundation, is probably motivated by Modi’s grievances against the autonomy of organizations of this nature ever since some of them probed the Gujarat riots of 2002 or offered relief to the victims.

Related to these acts of outlawing these outfits on the lines of the Pakistani ban on Save the Children organization is the Union home ministry’s refusal of permission to the supposedly autonomous CBI to question police officials in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case. The denial is yet another instance of official interference in the criminal justice system despite Modi’s promise of ushering in an era of “minimum government and maximum governance”.

If the objective of these instances of overzealousness on the government’s part is to prevent any skeletons from tumbling out of the BJP’s cupboard, the latest emphasis on yoga is an example of pushing an agenda whose saffron shade could be seen in not making Christmas Day a holiday in government offices.

It appears from these endeavours that Modi is trying to play both sides. Knowing that he first deviated from the anti-minority ideal of making Gujarat a laboratory of Hindutva experiments and then toned down the vehemence of the saffron militants, Modi is apparently trying to reassure the RSS that he hasn’t become as much of a moderate as Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was urged by the RSS sarsanghchalak, K.S. Sudarshan, to make way for the younger generation soon after the BJP’s defeat in 2004.

In the process of such a delicate balancing act, Modi is courting the danger of falling between two stools because it is extremely difficult to fit the square peg of saffron sectarianism into the round hole of modern governance which does not divide citizens into mutually hostile categories or seek to curb institutional autonomy. (IPA Service)