When sense goes out of sensibility, a Jayant Sinha rises

At an Independence day lecture in Mumbai in 2015, Jayant Sinha, then the union minister of state for finance, walked in late, with a dashing swagger. Then RBI  governor Raghuram Rajan was speaking on the economy, and the NPAs that he was worried about even then, and Sinha was meant to grill Rajan on various issues. Sinha was late because Parliament had been discussing the National Judicial Commission. Sinha made out it was a historic Bill that was all set to change the country forever in so many positive ways. Of course, nothing of the kind happened. The Supreme Court knocked down the bill and things were back to normal. But were they, really?

Nothing was normal in India after that Independence day lecture. When Sinha mentioned he and Rajan had been classmates and known each other for long, there was an audible sigh of relief from large sections of the audience, many of who even then thought it was only Rajan who stood between the government and economic collapse. But with a sensible man like Sinha batting for Rajan in government, he was expected to make sense and with his own superior qualifications prevent the economy from collapse. But it was early days yet for the Modi government—the first case of cow vigilantism erupted in Dadri only a month later. Now that is the new normal—such lynchings are par for the course.

However, Sinha was still expected to be among the most sensible ministers in the Modi government. When his father Yashwant Sinha broke away from both Modi and BJP, the sensible course for the man would have been to stand by his father and thumb his nose at everything that has gone wrong with the BJP. But it is utterly shocking that his sensibilities led him in the opposite direction and not only did he end up garlanding convicts of lynching but even justified the same by stating, outrageously, that he was merely honouring the due process of law.

It is now clear that all sense and sensibility has left the BJP and the party has clearly gone over to the dark side. We may dismiss the lesser beings in the BJP like Giriraj Singh and sundry godmen and women as fringe, but when a Harvard-educated economist chooses deliberately to side with criminals who have lynched people on suspicion of cow slaughter, two things are very clear—Singh was ingratiating himself with Narendra Modi and Amit Shah for a ticket forthe next elections, and it is clear to him that that is the way the BJP is headed.

But what frightens me about Jayant Sinha's act is that he was one of those educated persons in the Modi cabinet who were supposed to know better. A man who impressed a discerning audience at a posh Independence day lecture. Not someone we might expect to brandish a sword and trishul and not be able to make a difference between crime and its punishment.

However, I should not have been too surprised—at least Singh had a ticket to work for. I have had to battle equally unsensible people in sophisticated drawing rooms in upmarket metros of this country over the past months, people openly expressing pleasure at seeing minorities being lynched. Subramanian Swamy's rantings are their favourite pastime. They are glued to their television sets when the shady president of the BJP comes on air and they lap up every word as gospel truth.

They applaud Goa and curse Karnataka, quite unable to accept that what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. It is as though they have lost their powers of reasoning and these include friends as well as family, all with sophisticated degrees from top-notch universities who see nothing wrong in the destruction of law and order in the country just because the targets are minorities.

But they are still just common citizens who may not even take the trouble to stand in line and vote at the next elections. However, with so many sensible options before him, including the torch lit by his father, when people like Jayant Sinha choose to tread the darker path, it clearly indicates how insidious the Modi brand of politics has become and how much harder we need to fight to safeguard the democratic and pluralistic interests of the country. But in some ways it is best that this poison should flow out of the chalice at this moment. It makes our choices easier.

To quote Bill O’ Reilly, 'reasoning with fanatics is a fool’s errand. Avoiding them is mandatory. The BJP now clearly is a party of fanatics. People like Jayant Sinha should now not be welcome in circles of reason. For I think there are still enough of those kind left in this country to make a difference and restore the nation to its original moorings.