Poll-time Politics : A Spectator Sport That Weaves To Cleave

 FROM R.K.MISRA

Poll time politics is a spectator sport played  in present times with popular perception for a predictable outcome .

And it is this perception which is sought to be stitched together into a facile fabric to clothe electoral ambitions before the State Assembly polls due in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh later this year.

 As the pendulum oscillates  from factchecker Zubair through former vice-president Hamid Ansari to Congress leader late Ahmed Patel, bringing  them into the cross-hairs of controversy and conspiracy, the sequence of events corroborate to an emerging narrative that weaves to cleave. Every election held in Gujarat after Narendra Modi took charge as chief minister of the state in 2001 has seen permutations and combinations of this electoral arithmetic implemented to secure primacy in numbers at the hustings. The results have been favourable for the BJP which is reason enough for  a continuing encore.

Mohammed Zubair has a Gujarat connection. He is the co-founder of Alt News, an Ahmedabad based Indian non-profit ,fact checking website founded in February 2017 and run by a software engineer Pratik Sinha. Alt News rose rapidly in popular esteem to acquire international respectability, as it burst many a misinformation bubble that understandably spooked the political establishment of the day.

 Pratik Sinha is the son of Mukul Sinha, a human rights activist and a lawyer who incessantly battled the Modi establishment but fell to the viles of cancer in 2014. A physicist from IIT Kanpur, he founded the Jan Sangharsh Manch which legally represented the victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat and even secured the conviction of politicians and police officers. Sinha also represented the victims before the  Nanavaty-Mehta judicial inquiry commission set up by the Modi government to probe the Godhra train carnage and the communal violence thereafter in which over a thousand people perished, largely from the minority community. CDR(call data records) secured by an IPS officer and its citing as corroboratory evidence  by Sinha played a crucial in some high profile convictions in the Naroda patiya massacre case of Ahmedabad.

The Commission gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government led by then chief minister Modi. It’s report was tabled in the Gujarat Assembly in  December 2019, five years after it was submitted to the Anandiben Patel government.

Apparently, fact-checker Zubair was a soft  target. He was arrested by the Delhi police which is now headed by a Gujarat cadre IPS officer, Rakesh Asthana, for a four year old tweet, allegedly for hurting hindu sentiments. A Delhi court which granted him conditional bail on July 15 , made some telling comments in its order.

“ A voice of dissent is necessary for a healthy democracy. The Delhi police has failed to identify the twitter user who had been offended by the tweet in 2018. No statement of any offended person has been recorded either. Merely for the criticism of any political party, it is not justified to invoke Section 153A and 295A ,IPC”, additional sessions judge Devender Kumar Jangala said. Section 153A pertains to promoting enmity between different groups of religion, race, place of birth, residence while 295A is about deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.

The text for which Zubair is undergoing this ordeal at the hands of the Delhi police is about a tweet of an image from a 1983   hindi movie “kisse se na kehna” which showed a Hotel’s name was changed from Honeymoon Hotel to Hanuman Hotel. The text of the tweet  said, ”Before 2014:Honeymoon Hotel. After 2014:Hanuman Hotel”. “ It is the case that the accused(Zubair) is stated to have used this to point towards a political party. In Indian democracy, political parties are open for their criticism”, the court observed.

The Court ruled that the film was certified by the Central board of film certification which is a statutory body of the government of India and is available for public view  ever since. “No complaint is  stated to have been filed till today that the said scene of the movie has hurt the feelings of a particular community of society. Hindu religion is so tolerant that its followers proudly name their institutions/organisations /facilities in the name of their holy Gods or Goddesses,” the Court observed.

Retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur is on record stating that” it is difficult for our criminal justice system to sink lower than this” while another former supreme Court judge Deepak Gupta was similarly quoted as terming the arrest  by the Delhi police, a prejudiced one. There is egg on the face of the police and the yolk is still dripping.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court  on July 20,2022  granted Zubair interim bail in all the FIRs lodged in Uttar Pradesh against him and any future ones concerning the 2018 tweet, saying it finds no reason or justification for the deprivation of his liberty to persist any further. The top court refused to restrain Zubair, as sought by the UP government, stating can a lawyer be restrained from arguing.

  There seems to be little discrimination in tear and smear as things go. If Zubair ,faces an establishment out to tear him , a distinguished former vice-president of the Indian union is at the receiving end of a smear campaign, where the BJP has thrown all propriety to the winds. A foreign service officer of 38 years standing who was the country’s ambassador to numerous countries and topped it with a ten year vice-presidential stint from 2007 to 2017,Dr Hamid Ansari  faces the ludicrous charge of being in touch with an agent of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence(ISI). Two press conferences and a newspaper write up later, the line is still being peddled despite the Pakistani journalist(On whom this was based) clarifying that he has never met  the  then VP . This raises the question, why? The only  answer is to influence public discourse.

Meanwhile  to complete the third angle of this triangular narrative, Congress leader from Gujarat, late Ahmed Patel has been pulled out of the grave and charged  by Gujarat’s hurriedly constituted  Special Investigation Team(SIT) with a conspiracy to pull down the Modi government in Gujarat,  20 years ago.

With the Modi- led BJP government deciding to seize the opening provided by the Supreme Court judgment on the Zakia Jaffri case and get even with their opponents, instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, a whole new chapter is sought to be re-opened.

With elections in Gujarat slated for later this year, short term gains at the hustings have guided the move as is witnessed in the familiar route events are taking -constituting of the SIT, the arrest of Teesta Setalvad  and former Director General of  Police, R.B.Sreekumar - and the police theory that it was a political conspiracy engineered by the Congress and cash was paid by Ahmed Patel at the behest of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to destabilise Modi’s government 20 years ago.

Setalvad has trashed the charges in court during the hearing on her bail plea, the Congress has rubbished the claim and  Patel’s daughter, Mumtaz has  asked Modi what he was doing all those years as the chief minister, if the government had all the information. The SIT, on its part, is going  out of its way to ensure maximum media coverage. The  perceived end has now turned into a new beginning.

Is it a mere coincidence  that all three personalities in the line of fire happen to belong to the minority community ? That all three are sought to be publicly hauled over the coals for something that happened in the distant past. Zubair’s tweet reference is four years old from a movie made 40 years ago and nobody sought fit to complain until late last month. Ansari has been out of office for half a decade now,  and  the might of the country’s intelligence under Modi functioning for a good seven years had nothing to say so far . And how efficient a set-up did the same cops run , under the present prime minister  when he was in Gujarat, if they failed to sniff the Ahmed Patel  conspiracy while neutralizing- through encounters- numerous others by various jehadi groups targetting Modi during his 13 years plus chief ministerial stint?

Come polls in Gujarat, the polarising pile-driver surfaces with ‘religious regularity’ . Was it not Ahmed Patel whom  the Pakistani establishment wanted installed as chief minister of Gujarat just before  the 2017 State Assembly elections in the state?, India’s Prime Minister is on record saying so at an election rally at Palanpur in Banaskantha district, also raising questions about a ‘media reported ‘ meeting at  Congress leader Mani Shanker Aiyer’s house attended by the Pakistan High Commissioner, a former Pakistan foreign minister, India’s former vice-president(Hamid Ansari) and former prime minister Manmohan Singh creating the perception of a ‘Pakistan’ inspired conspiracy to unseat the BJP government of the time in Gujarat.

The issue was drummed-up by the party’s poll propaganda machinery to derive maximum mileage. Lost in the cacophony was the fact that it was the Indira Gandhi- led Congress government which went to war in 1971 and split  the neighbouring country. The elections over , finance minister Arun Jaitley was left to turn  things around in the Rajya sabha with a statement on December 27,2017 that there was no intent of Prime Minister Modi to question the commitment of the former PM to the country. The battle of perception had been won, the remainder was trash for the cans!

 Another step back in time. The 2007 election campaign reference to ‘maut ka saudagar’(dealer of death) by Mrs Sonia Gandhi was similarly linked to the Sohrabuddin case by  the then chief minister, and by implication, to the continuing conspiracy against the ‘hindu hriday Samrat ’ (hindu heart-throb) by jihadi terror groups. Whether it worked or not remains a moot point but Modi was re-elected to power with a decisive mandate. The 2002 state Assembly elections where the Christian origins of the chief election commissioner, were weaponized by the simple expedient of publicly  pronouncing his full name with a jibing drawl -James Michael Lyngdoh, links with Sonia Gandhi’s religion of birth and therefrom to the Vatican  and the Pope. Modi’s ‘Gujarat Gaurav ‘yatra,  around the same time , which covered over 160 of the 182 Vidhan sabha constituencies in Gujarat, primarily focused on ‘Miya Musharraf’ but it was common knowledge who was being alluded to. A  questionable ‘fatwa’ asking muslims to vote the Congress to defeat the BJP -three days before voting- was just the sucker punch needed for the kill. Modi steam-rolled to power.

 The elections are upon us again and while history repeats itself so does the fascination for the familiar. And therefore the unfolding encore.

(https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-gujarat-model-of-electioneering-1128676.html )