Peddling Hate In Polltime Hindustan !
BY
R.K.MISRA
History
repeats itself -first as a mistake, second time as stupidity and thereafter as a
tragedy-invariably with lethal costs.
It
began in 2002 as an experiment in crass communal cleaving
to win elections in Gujarat and has endured
up to February 2020 as the BJP pulled
out all stops in ethnic animosity to wrest India’s capital, Delhi from the Aam
Admi Party(AAP) only to fall flat on its face. A recap would be in order.
If
AAP chief minister Arvind Kejriwal sought votes for his work, BJP toiled to unseat him
through a vicious witch-hunt. The Prime Minister termed the ongoing Shaheen
Bagh protests in Delhi, a proliferating mindset which needed to be checked. His
Home Minister Amit Shah wanted voters pressing the saffron button so hard that
those protesting the CAA(Citizens
Amendment Act) and NRC(National Register of Citizens) scamper home by counting evening . Again Union
minister Prakash Javadekar termed Kejriwal a terrorist and BJP’s Uttar
Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath named
Pakistan 8 times in 48 seconds during
his Delhi election rally.
When a debate is lost, slander becomes the
tool of the loser. Poison dripped every time the country’s rulers opened their
mouth seeking to equate muslims with Pakistanis and hindus or any other who voiced support as anti-national. The violence
at Jawaharlal Nehru University(JNU) and Jamia Millia Islamia, both central
universities, was used to queer the pitch as hotbed of anti-national activities.The
entire exercise was aimed at communal polarization for electoral gains.
The
answer to the bang-bang campaign came in
the results on February 11 with just one resounding thud from the people of
Delhi . The BJP was washed away-a mere 8 seats to the AAPs 62 in a 70-member Delhi
Vidhan Sabha- and their voluble leaders left
tongue-tied, Shah included. The Congress blanked out again.
Narratives
may be pliable but facts are stubborn. The propagation of communal polarization as a poll strategy was
initiated by chief minister Narendra Modi in 2002 in Gujarat and continues
unchanged through numerous elections countrywide as he navigates his second
term as Prime Minister.
The
state has been the crucible of many
political experiments from Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent Dandi salt satyagraha in March 1930 to the
Navnirman students agitation in 1974 and Narendra Modi’s Gujarat Gaurav yatra
in 2002.
Gandhi’s
civil disobedience movement which commenced from the Sabarmati ashram in
Ahmedabad to Dandi in South Gujarat created the building blocks for the
country’s eventual independence from British rule in 1947. The Navnirman
andolan(reconstruction stir) of 1974,termed as a crusade against corruption led
to the fall of the Chimanbhai Patel led Congress government and found echoes in
the national movement led by Sarvodaya leader Jayprakash Narayan which
installed the first non-congress government in India led by another Gujarati,
Morarji Desai in 1977.Ironically ,Chimanbhai Patel who had been expelled from
the Congress returned as chief minister heading a Janata Dal-BJP
coalition government(so much for BJP s corruption crusade).
The
state became the harbinger of another
political experiment after Narendra Modi took over as the chief minister
in 2001.The statewide communal riots, that followed the 2002 Godhra train
carnage left over a thousand people dead, a majority of them from the minority
community. However, in the Gujarat Gaurav yatra taken out through the state,
the target may have been the then Pakistani President Pervez
Musharraf(Mian Musharraf) but the imagery sought to be evoked was focused nearer home. Similarly the name
of the then chief election commissioner James Michael Lyngdoh would be spelled out in full to evoke Christian
comraderie with Congress President Sonia Gandhi whose Italian origins were also
marked out for special mention. Minority bashing stood turned into a potent,
poll campaign tool.
The
2002 Gujarat State Assembly election
was the first example of a cleaving poll campaign-it now goes by the name of majoritarian
politics- undertaken by chief minister
Modi and reaped handsome results . The
BJP steamrollered to 127 of the total
182 seats in the Gujarat state Assembly with Congress reduced to 51,JD(U) 2
and independents 2. Thereafter it
evolved into a signature tune of the party under Modi-Shah leadership, unrecognizably
distant from the Jan Sangh-BJP of the
Atal Vajpayee era.
A
cleaving campaign in such a context is when the majority community – through
direct or indirect methods-is suggestively led to believe of an enhanced threat from
a minority. The political objective is to unite a religious majority
under the shadow of a perceived threat to vote a party on religion, caste or
creed considerations.
Modi
ruled Gujarat for over 13 years and helmed the state through three
Assembly elections with each one of them targeting the Congress, which ruled the Centre and was the main
opposition in the state, as
anti-Gujarat and pro-muslim. Modi
was portrayed as the quintessential
hindu ‘hriday-samrat’ who was being targetted by Pakistan based terror
groups ,the messiah of development who had turned Gujarat into a model state
and was the subject of angst and envy .
After
Modi took over at the Centre in 2014
with Amit Shah as his party president, majoritarian politics has been
the centre-piece of every election whether state or central. If it was ‘ Mian Musharraf
‘ in 2002, it has been the ‘tukde-tukde’ gang
thereafter or the ‘Kabristan-Shamshan’ issue raked up in Uttar Pradesh
elections 2017 and now ‘Shaheen Bagh’ in the
ensuing Delhi polls.
What is the intended implication of union minister Anurag Thakur’s missive that invited a ‘shoot
the traitors chant’ except to widen the communal chasm for electoral advantage.
BJP MP from West Delhi, Parvesh Sahib Singh even did away with the fig leaf of a pretense
altogether as he warned people that those gathering at Shaheen Bagh
in South-East Delhi will ”enter your houses, rape sisters and daughters and
kill them”. It was a reckless communal pitch that was taken to a crescendo by the BJP in the Delhi
Assembly election.
Since December 2018,the BJP has been vanquished
in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, outmaneuvered in
Maharashtra ,is hanging onto the
coattails of the Janayak Janta Party(JJP) to retain power in Haryana and has now
been roundly thrashed in Delhi. Predictably repetitive, it is just not
yielding the desired dividend, at least not in state elections.
Clearly, cleaving communities and hawking
hatred on the streets for petty poll
gains is a dangerous game with frightening
national repercussions.
Those
who seek a place in history should well remember that the distance between a
victor and a villain is just a shred of time !
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