Hawking Hatred To Hog Elections !
BY R.K.MISRA
Is communal
cleaving still the weapon of choice for
the BJP to win an election ?
The poll process
underway in the five states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and
Manipur seems to suggest so. As does the ‘build up’ going on in states due for polls next- Gujarat December 2022 and
Karnataka mid-2023.
What is common
between Gujarat and Karnataka ? Both are BJP ruled states and both are at this
moment ‘staging’ areas for the cleaving forays in the election bound states.
Emanating from
Karnataka, ‘hijab’ has hogged headlines
nationwide while in Gujarat civic bodies targeting street food carts
selling non-vegetarian fare made news in November. Similarly if the murder of a
Bajrang dal activist in Shivamogga, Karnataka this month was a “jihadist
conspiracy” by an “islamist” organization which led to state-wide protests by
the VHP, so was an inter-religion
shooting and death in Dhandhuka town in January , a trigger for similar
Gujarat-wide demonstrations by sister outfits of the Sangh Parivar.
Interspersed are
a plethora of incidents which include
charges of conversion against Missionaries of Charity, Vadodara and numerous Muslims for similar activities towards their faith as
well. Cops routinely ‘unearth’ links to subversive organisations ensuring headlines. Conversion
to Hinduism is labelled ‘home-coming’ while from it to another faith, an
offence. Discriminatory use of the Disturbed Areas Act, the anti-love jihad
laws enacted in 2003, amended in 2021 with some of its sections struck down by
the Gujarat High Court subsequently, keeps the judiciary busy and the news
pages occupied.
Is it a mere
coincidence that in an era of over-arching media reach these two states, which
themselves will be going to polls soon after ,were witnessing communally
cleaving follow-up of events in the run
up to as well as during the present
elections ? Uttarakhand which is part of
the poll process had already had a hate-spewing ‘Dharma Sansad’ at Haridwar
last December.
If the BJP
is a radically altered outfit today and has enjoyed its longest - ever
continuous stint in power at the Centre, the credit goes singularly to Modi. But it was Gujarat that nurtured this
one time RSS pracharak on deputation to
the BJP, who had never even contested a panchayat election before he was
appointed chief minister . It assented to his leadership with a record 13 year
plus stint and saw him off as Prime Minister in 2014. He , in turn, cradled
Amit Shah who, past his ordeal behind bars, is the country’s Home Minister
today. Much of what is being implemented countrywide was experimented in
Gujarat and evolved as the Gujarat Model. And that includes the
theory of ‘How to influence people and win elections’ through a cut, cleave and conjoin process.
Karnataka
remains the uneasy but the only BJP
gateway to the South. The BJP is stuck
at the gates where the pendulum has been oscillating between the Congress,
Janata Dal and itself .
The 2018 Vidhan
Sabha elections, saw the BJP secure the highest seats but stood outnumbered by
the Congress-JD combined tally so did what it is now best doing- poaching through muscle, might
and money. And thus has a government there. Elsewhere Puducherry is a sleight
of the hand which will slip the day BJP loses its central perch. Tamil Nadu,
Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana still remain a distant dream.
The March 10,
2022 results of the polls to Uttar Pradesh and four other
states are a critically important
barometer to test the Prime
Minister’s timbre for the all- important
2024 Indian election orchestra.
But more importantly, it will prove how many strings of Modi’s mandolin stand soiled by over-use. A quarter century
of ruling Gujarat and a quarter of this quarter in the national saddle, the
Narendra Modi led BJP is yet to come up with a surefire solution other than
this incendiary mix.
Appointed Gujarat chief minister in 2001,he
first evolved this poll potion in the
aftermath of the Godhra train carnage and the communal violence that followed,
leaving over a thousand people dead , mostly minority community members.
The polarizing
experiment began with his statewide Gujarat Gaurav yatra of 2002 and has been a
constant part of BJP poll battle plans in election after election in Gujarat
thereon. After Modi’s elevation to lead India ,post the 2014 Lok Sabha
elections, it’s national replication
began. His backroom boys have been
working out numerous permutations and combinations of
this nationally destructive but electorally productive theme.
Nevertheless,
what was once a potent force multiplier , no longer seems to carry the element
of surprise in poll warfare. At least that is what seems to be the biggest
takeaway from the frenzied poll campaigning underway in Uttar Pradesh so far.
In fact, It’s over use seems to have
made it predictable, even jaded, allowing the opposition to devise effective
counter-measures as the Akhilesh Yadav-Jayant Chaudhari combine have done in
Western Uttar Pradesh where the BJP had swept the region in the 2017 elections
through pure polarization after the communal violence of Muzaffarnagar.
Union Home
Minister Amit Shah’s desperate cleaving effort when he initiated his door to
door campaign with a visit to the displaced hindus of kairana or Chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s
80-20 per cent talk hinting at the muslim minority and alluding to the opposition
siding with terrorist elements remain
some of many cogent examples. Interspersed are recorded and reported
speeches of his party MLAs threatening to turn beards
into ‘chottis’ and skull caps into ‘tilaks’ even seeking disenfranchisement of Muslims.
The Prime
Minister was’nt found wanting either. Addressing a rally in Kanpur Dehat he
charged the opposition with preventing hindu consolidation. “Is this democracy
? you are openly saying you want to divide hindu votes. Then whose votes are
you trying to gather”, he questioned. The intention of all these remarks
is obvious and the Election Commission’s
response expectedly juiceless, a far cry from the times of chief election commissioner(CEC)
T.N. Sheshan who made the most powerful
of politicians shiver in their boots.
Gujarat has been
termed the laboratory of political experiments from the times of the Mahatma to Modi.
Ironically it was Chief Minister
Narendra Modi’s ‘Gujarat Gaurav Yatra’ of 2002 where hawking of hatred was
turned into a fused art of obfuscation.
His speeches, would be littered with references to ‘Miyan Musharaff ‘ though
the identified target were the minorities. The speeches carried references
galore to ‘hum panch, hamare pachees’ or
the one which said ‘should we run relief camps? Open child producing centres?’.
His own police
Intelligence chief, R.B. Sreekumar wanted polls postponed and was sidelined,
The then CEC became James Michael Lyngdoh pronounced with an extended drawl to
underline his Christian identity and linkage to ‘Italian’ Sonia Gandhi and her
Congress party’s conspiracy to ‘defame’ Gujarat. The elections that followed in
a polarized Gujarat provided him a steamroller majority and a confirmed conviction that the formula
works so the unhindered replication to
this day.
And so when hate
hangs heavy, be sure, it is election time in present day India !
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