Rattled by the 2024 election outcome, the Modi government and the Sangh-BJP establishment are working on a multi-pronged strategy to counter the growing opposition of the people. The budget session found the Modi government somewhat on the back foot. The government had to refer the proposed Waqf Board bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee and defer the idea of legislating measures of control for social media. Even the UPSC was asked to withdraw a circular for lateral entry recruitment to the Union bureaucracy. But we must not overestimate this aspect of tactical retreat or deferment and nor must we neglect the intensified campaign of hate and repression on the ground in state after state.
Ahead of the crucial Assembly elections in Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, the BJP machinery is again trying its best to execute its tested and trusted scheme of anti-Muslim communal polarisation, caste engineering and coerced political defection. This strategy is being played out not just in the poll-bound states but in the various laboratories the Sangh brigade has built up over the years in states like Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh or Assam. From using the traditional festive platform of Kanwar Yatra to spew anti-Muslim venom to seeking out ever new opportunities to terrorise and target the Muslim community, these laboratories work round the clock to keep the communal cauldron boiling.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma has emerged as a key face of the BJP's hate campaign. When heavy rains recently flooded Guwahati, we heard him accuse a private university in Meghalaya owned by Mahbubul Hoque, a Muslim from Assam's Karimganj district, of waging 'flood jihad against Assam'. Last year he had blamed Muslim vegetable growers in Assam for conducting 'fertiliser jihad' against Hindu consumers by chemical overuse. He advises upper Assam residents to stop consuming fish produced by Miya Muslims (a pejorative term used in Assam for Bengali-speaking Muslims) of lower Assam. And now in the wake of the rape of a minor girl in Assam's Nagaon district, he has blamed it on invasion of upper Assam by 'Miya' Muslims. 'We will not let Miya Muslims take over upper Assam' - this was the Assam CM's shocking response to an incident of rape of a minor girl! Could there be a more explicit incitement of communal violence by the elected head of a state government?
Meanwhile another BJP Chief Minister, Nayab Singh Saini of Haryana, has come up with a bizarre 'logic' to explain mob lynching in his state. On 27 August, a migrant worker from West Bengal, Sabir Malik, was beaten to death by a gang of cow vigilantes in Charkhi Dadri. Four days earlier, a class 12 student Aryan Mishra was shot dead by cow vigilantes in Faridabad reportedly on suspicion of being a cattle smuggler. The Haryana CM sees it all as a sign of the firmness of Haryana's resolve to protect cows! 'The people of Haryana are driven by their reverence for the cow and who can stop them', says the callous CM of Haryana. Haryana has been a frontline state in the historic farmers' movement against corporate takeover of agriculture and farmers have also reacted angrily to the Agniveer scheme and the injustice and humiliation meted out to Haryana's women wrestlers. BJP MP Kangana Ranaut's wild allegations against the farmers' movement have only added fuel to this fire. A desperate BJP is now trying hard to redefine Haryana's pride in terms of cow vigilantism and anti-Muslim communal hate.
In Jharkhand, a key mineral-rich state the BJP is desperate to win to complete its 'Adani triangle' after its recent victories in Chhattisgarh and Odisha, the BJP is banking on roping in disgruntled JMM leaders to the party. After former JMM CM Champai Soren, another dissident JMM MLA, Lobin Hembrom, has also joined the BJP. The Modi government had already gifted the Godda power plant as an exempted special economic zone to Adani for exporting power to Bangladesh. Coal sourced from Adani's Carmichael Mine in Australia is being burnt in Godda to produce power for Bangladesh and now that the future of the power agreement with Bangladesh has run into uncertainty following the downfall of the Sheikh Hasina regime, the Modi government has quickly jumped to bail out the Adani group by allowing the Adani group to sell the Godda power to India's domestic grid.
In West Bengal, the BJP is desperate to hijack the popular outrage that has erupted in the wake of the horrific rape and murder of a young postgraduate trainee doctor in Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. While the feminist movement and progressive civil society have been in the forefront of the ongoing "Justice for RG Kar" campaign, the BJP tried to hijack the movement under the fictitious banner of "student community of West Bengal", subsequently calling a 'Bangla bandh' in the party's name to protest the police high handedness. The BJP has the worst track record for providing political patronage to perpetrators of violence against women. Even as the party was trying to cash in on the anti-rape mass anger in West Bengal, the party in Uttar Pradesh was felicitating the BJP IT cell organisers accused of sexual assault on a student of IIT (BHU) as they came out on bail. The hypocrisy has not however been lost on the people of West Bengal and the BJP continues to be rebuffed in its attempt to hijack and derail the 'justice for RG Kar' campaign.
The battle for democracy in today's India will have to advance by foiling this multi-pronged BJP strategy and championing the growing aspiration for comprehensive justice and guaranteed constitutional rights for all, against all odds.
