Sandeep Sahu
April 22, 2024
When I saw those print advertisements with the caption "Will you trust this man?" along with the picture of a bearded Sikh taxi driver in Congress advertisements published in leading English dailies during the campaign for the 1984 elections (which was also the first election I covered as a journalist), I had thought communal rhetoric during electioneering cannot get any lower.
But I was wrong!!
Prime minister Narendra Modi has left that veiled slur against Sikhs in the 1984 advertisement designed by Rediffusion miles behind with his brazen, outrageous and no-holds-barred tirade against Muslims at a campaign rally in Rajasthan’s Banswara yesterday (April 21). He not only demeaned the exalted office he holds, he also sought to paint the over 20 crores Muslims (we don’t know their exact population since Modi ji has made sure there was no Census in 2021) as enemies of the nation!
BJP spokespersons and apologists of the party are trying to explain away the out-and-out communal speech of the Prime Minister by claiming it was directed at ‘infiltrators’ - and not Muslims per se - are simply bluffing. As anyone (anyone who hasn’t joined the burgeoning tribe of Bhakts yet, that is) who has heard the speech can see, what he said was directed at the entire Muslim community in India and not any particular section of it. The reference to Dr Manmohan Singh’s 2006 NDC speech where he had said the ‘the minorities, particularly the Muslim minorities, have the first claim on resources’ and linking it to the promise of redistribution of wealth made in the Congress manifesto for the 2024 polls left no room for any doubt on that score. He insinuated that the Congress, if voted to power, will ‘snatch away’ the gold jewellery (including their ‘mangalsutras’) of Hindu women and distribute them among those who ‘produce more children’ and ‘infiltrators’! Apart from being the crassest case of fear-mongering, it was also a plain lie because the Congress manifesto makes no such promise. All it promises is a ‘nationwide socio economic and caste census’ and ‘strengthening the agenda for affirmative action’ based on the data thrown up by such a census. Talking of redistribution of wealth, was it not Modi himself who promised, in the run up to the 2014 elections, to bring back all the black money stashed away in Swiss banks and having Rs 15 lakh deposited into the account of every Indian’ (something that his able lieutenant Amit Shah sought to pass off as a ‘jumla’ later)? And we have given him two successive mandates for failing to keep that promise. I was as opposed to Dr Manmohan Singh’s 2006 statement as anyone in the BJP. But I am appalled at what the Prime Minister of the country has just said. With this statement, he has stooped to the level of the Akbaruddin Owaisis – not Asaddudin Owaisi, mind you.
While the Prime Minister’s statement is cringeworthy, the Election Commission’s timid “No Comments” response raises serious questions about the credibility of the Commission and its commitment to a ‘free and fair’ election. If it has ‘no comments’ to offer – and no plans to act, by extension – on this blatant attempt at communal polarisation, I wonder if there is a need for such a body. If it acts and behaves like a government department, then it might as well be wound up. And if this does not constitute ‘hate speech’ and a violation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), which is supposedly in place, I wonder what does?
The Congress has been guilty of ‘minority appeasement’ in the past whenever and wherever it has been in power. No questions about that. In fact, the polarisation of the country’s electorate along communal lines and the consolidation of the ‘Hindu vote’ today is a belated collective response to the appeasement policies followed by the Congress and many of its fellow travellers in the INDIA Alliance for decades. The Sangh Parivar and the BJP, its political offshoot have been harping on this theme for as long as they have existed. But it is only in the last few decades that it has started paying political dividends. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani laid the foundation for the Hindu vote, Narendra Modi has built a whole skyscraper on it! But unless the people of India – the vast majority of them Hindus – stop in their tracks and do a course correction, they would have prepared the ground, unknown to themselves, for civil war and another vivisection of the country!
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