The Narendra Modi Govt is pitting Indian against Indian--till the last election is won

by Guest Thu Jun 16, 2016 7:12 am

How many men were in the mob that killed Mohammad Akhlaq in September 2015? The chargesheet says 15.
How many people, Union minister and BJP MP from Muzaffarnagar Sanjeev Baliyan wants to know, might have eaten a cow alleged to have been slaughtered in Bisara village, Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, around the time of the murder? “A cow weighs nothing less than 150 kg and one person alone cannot consume it. There should be a probe into what happened and who were involved in the crime,” he said. The party’s general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya has sought action against the murdered man’s family, because “everyone is equal before the law. You cannot have privileges simply because you belong to a minority.”
The sum of the BJP’s response to the definite murder of a 50-year-old Muslim man has been to equate it to the hypothetical slaughter of a 150 kg cow. How did we get here?

If politics is the art of the possible, in a democracy, language is the politician’s most important tool. It is how the demagogue whips passion, and the wise leader brokers peace. It is through the thrust and parry of debate that a leader puts forth his worldview, persuades his voters and brings around his rivals to a pragmatic compromise. In the two years since the Narendra Modi government came to power, the consensus that underpins the language of public life is in danger of breaking down, one toxic statement at a time...

Many BJP leaders twisted themselves into impossible asanas after the Dadri lynching. It did take some contortions, verbal and moral, to justify a village turning against its own by invoking the wounds of “Hindu hurt”. Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar was one of those who were shocked at Akhlaq’s death. He also announced that “Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef. The cow is an article of faith here”. The mild-mannered Bihar leader Sushil Modi outlined the us versus them binary more clearly during the assembly polls: “The election is a choice between those who eat beef and those who would ban cow slaughter.”...There was Union Minister of Culture Mahesh Sharma, who certified that former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, “despite being a Muslim” was a nationalist and humanist. He is also on record saying that while he respected “the Bible and [the] Quran, they are not central to [the] soul of India in the way Gita and Ramayana are.”...

In a complex country like India, politics and rhetoric have to play an accommodating and mediating role. Pushing the polity onto a path of constant polarisation and confrontation, through a language of divisiveness, will pit Indian against Indian — till the last election is won.
It is a path that will lead down to Bisara, where language has broken down so utterly, where the fault lines are so gaping that while a man has been murdered, it is a cow that is being accounted for.

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/narendra-modi-nda-government-two-years-bharatiya-janata-party-bpp-muzaffarnagar-dadri-2853149/