Mihir Sharma: The BJP has become a Janus like monster

by Guest Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:14 am

For a shining example of the Narendra Modi-era BJP's ability to be two things at once, look no further than the parivartan rally in Allahabad that effectively launched the Uttar Pradesh election campaign. At practically the same time you could hear, with unusual clarity, the two sides of the BJP: Narendra Modi, the "development-minded" Prime Minister, declare that UP just needed to grow once to catapult India into the first world; and Amit Shah, the "tough-guy" party president, further the party's core agenda of ensuring that every Hindu remembers that they are constantly threatened by Muslims.

Almost simultaneously with Modi reminding his party to be committed to "service, balance, restraint, coordination, constructiveness, sensitivity and dialogue", Shah gleefully broke several of these Seven Commandments by warning the voters of UP that they had better sweep the BJP to power in Lucknow unless they wanted a repeat of the "exodus" of Hindus from the town of Kairana. It was an "eye-opener", he said, "no ordinary event".

What earth-shattering event was Shah talking about? Well, the sequence of events is instructive. More than a week ago, the local member of parliament for the west UP district where Kairana is located, one Hukum Singh - watch the name, he's both villain and hero of this story - declared that Hindus were leaving the area, changing its demography permanently. The BJP set up a fact-finding mission to investigate Hukum Singh's startling claim. (With the attention to institutional strength for which the party is justly celebrated, it was reported at first that the team examining Hukum Singh's claims would be led by - Hukum Singh.)

Singh's accusations certainly were startling. He said Hindu families had been forced to sell their property at reduced rates; that some were outright grabbed by Muslims; and that this process, which certainly sounded like ethnic cleansing the way he told it, was spreading from the town of Kairana to the surrounding countryside....

So the message was so clear it doesn't even deserve to be called subtext: Hindus "in their own country" are under threat from aggressive jihadi Muslims who want to turn Western UP into Kashmir. (And pinko liberal media in Delhi doesn't want you to know.)

Unfortunately for the junior Home Minister, the BJP president, various functionaries of the Sangh Parivar, and all those apoplectic tweeters, the story soon fell apart. The first few reporters to reach Kairana discovered that the place was in fact in the grip of various local gangs, and the law and order situation was terrible - but there wasn't really a Hindu vs Muslim angle to it. According to one report, at least 150 Muslim families had moved out of the crime-hit town too. Then the list of ethnically-cleansed Hindus that Hukum Singh released was discovered to have various cringe-inducing errors - people who were dead, or still in the town, or had left a decade earlier. News reports began to be filled with delightful quotes from locals, along the lines of "What, him? No he hasn't gone anywhere, unless it's the liquor store. He's bound to be back after dark", and that kind of thing.

The upshot of all this was that just as a high-powered BJP team arrived in the area, poor Hukum Singh had to bend to the facts and say that he was shocked - shocked! - that people were giving a "communal angle" to things. "This is not a question of Hindus and Muslims," said the poor MP. "It is about law and order."

This, incidentally, is why Hukum Singh is both villain and hero of this story - for, after all, who in today's politics is actually willing to change their mind when presented with facts? Not Twitter, which, when I last checked, was trending #MediaLiesOnKairana...

What we just saw was the harbinger of what will in fact happen unless UP politics reverses course. Both the BJP and the SP benefit from polarising voters. The SP needs to keep Muslim voters on its side and prevent them from defecting to Mayawati - which means they need to feel insecure, and confined to their own ghettoes.

And the BJP needs to remind Hindus that they are constantly under threat, and that only the Sangh Parivar is awake to the dangers posed to Hindus in "their own country". Shah's party will carry this message aloft on their trishuls through India's largest state - the world's fourth-largest democracy - as it prepares for its election.

And in the middle of it all, Narendra Modi will talk serenely about development.

http://www.ndtv.com/opinion/kairana-as-kashmir-the-bjps-farce-with-impending-tragedy-1419578?pfrom=home-opinion