Mukul Kesavan: Uttar Pradesh, 2017 - Warming up for war
NB: The single point programme of the RSS/BJP is to consolidate power by instigating communal hatred. We are faced with typically fascist dynamism - nothing will be allowed to rest, there will be no return to ordinary life, not a day will pass without some attempt, big or small, to spread hatred. And all this is being done by the ruling party. Controlled mobs - like the mob of lawyers who assaulted Kanhaiya while he was under police custody - now enjoy state protection. The world should know. DS
The advantage of being
an ideologically majoritarian party is strategic clarity. Parties that depend
on social coalitions have to juggle their political parcels to make sure that
they don't drop any. The Bharatiya Janata Party, on the other hand, knows that
its success depends on Hindu consolidation; consequently its leaders, managers
and foot soldiers are unwaveringly focused on what desi papers
like to call communal polarization.
Polarization is a
euphemism. In the BJP's lexicon it means unifying Hindus by stoking hostility
against Muslims. This can be done either directly through divisive rhetoric
like the recent speech made in Agra by Ram Shankar Katheria, a minister in the
Union cabinet or indirectly by suggesting that the BJP's political rivals are
deracinated anti-nationals who pander to Muslims.
Under the leadership
of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the BJP has evolved into a sophisticated
political machine that is always in campaign mode and it's instructive to
review recent controversies not as discrete events but as elements in a
concerted majoritarian campaign aimed at a series of provincial elections
starting with Assam in June 2016 and culminating in the crucial Uttar Pradesh
assembly election in May 2017.
The UP elections are
pivotal for two reasons. First, this is the state that dominates the Ganga's
plains and, after the rout in Bihar, a win here is essential if the BJP is to
have bragging rights to India's Hindi heartland. Second, as the biggest state
in India, UP sends up the largest number of members of parliament to the Rajya
Sabha, where the BJP urgently needs reinforcements to achieve a majority.
The extraordinary
determination shown by the BJP and its affiliates in going after Rohith Vemula
and Kanhaiya Kumar makes sense if it is understood in this context. The
immediate object was to discredit student organizations other than the Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad as traitorous. This treachery is manifest in their
willingness to agitate unpopular causes like the executions of Yakub Memon and
Afzal Guru. For the sangh parivar this is low-hanging fruit
and the clockwork coordination in both instances between the ABVP on campus,
BJP MPs as go-betweens and Central ministers as executive battering rams, tells
us something about the keenness of the sangh parivar to bring in this political
harvest.
This campaign to
discredit political opposition on campus or in larger political arenas as a
bunch of anti-national appeasers was so single-minded that the BJP seemed
unconcerned about the fact that the principal targets of its political assault
were, nominally, Hindu subalterns. Rohith Vemula was an Ambedkarite radical
raised by his Dalit mother while Kanhaiya Kumar is the son of an anganwadi worker
from a village in Begusarai.
The BJP's campaign in
the University of Hyderabad backfired on account of Vemula's suicide. The sangh's frustration
at being thwarted by Rohith's death was palpable. A Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
affiliated professor complained that Dalit organizations in south India had
been hijacked by the Left and responsible members of the BJP argued,
grotesquely, that since his father was an other backward classes member, Rohith
wasn't a Dalit at all. Still, the political fallout of his death forced the BJP
to back off. The university withdrew sanctions against Rohith's comrades and
the sangh parivar turned its attention to Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
The ferocious zeal
with which the government has used every resource at its disposal to smear
students, their university and any political organization that extended
solidarity, is related to the sangh parivar's determination to
complete Hyderabad's unfinished business. And this is to demonstrate that the
BJP guards the Nation while its opponents work to destroy it. Everyone and
everything - Hafiz Saeed, the police commissioner, Bassi, rogue lawyers,
doctored videos, photoshopped photographs, Durga, Mahisasur and Smriti Irani's
religious beliefs - was pressed into service to establish that India was a sole
proprietorship owned by the sangh parivar.
All of this is grist
to the great political mill supervised by Amit Shah. With elections in
prospect, the party's managers see hypernationalism as an asset, not a
handicap. But a strategy of Hindu consolidation requires that the party
underline the majoritarian character of this nationalism. An event in Agra last
week made the BJP's Hindu affiliations explicit.
According to the The
Hindu, at a "condolence" meeting to mark the murder of a Vishwa
Hindu Parishad member, Arun Mahaur, the BJP member of the legislative assembly
from Agra, Jagan Prasad Garg, the BJP MP from Fatehpur Sikri, Chaudhary Babulal
and the minister of state in the human resource development ministry, Ram
Shankar Katheria, urged Hindus to unite to avenge his murder. There were
references to guns and knives and a call to arms. There was apocalyptic talk of
an all out war in 2017 ("aaar paar ki ladai") coupled with
dire warnings to minorities.
The predictable furore
caused by these remarks was met by either brazen justification or bland denial.
This is the stock-in-trade of the BJP; Hindu consolidation is what it does. The
memory of the Muzaffarnagar riots and the way in which they turned western UP
in favour of the BJP in the 2014 general elections is a reminder, should the
BJP need one, that polarization is a formidable political weapon.
One intriguing
political takeaway from the BJP's recent political behaviour is its willingness
to meet Dalit politics head on. If the government's hounding of Rohith Vemula
and the Ambedkar Study Circle in Hyderabad was one small example of this, the
confrontation between Smriti Irani and Mayavati in the Rajya Sabha was the same
strategy played out in a grander arena. Even as Mayavati asked for a Dalit
member to be appointed to the tribunal probing Rohith Vemula's death, Irani
challenged Mayavati's right to certify who could deliver justice to Dalits.
The sharpness of the
exchange seemed to rule out a modus vivendi between the BJP
and the Bahujan Samaj Party in the 2017 election. In the wake of the Bihar
election, pundits had been quick to point out that there could be no equivalent
'grand alliance' in UP to shut out the BJP, given that the BSP and the ruling
Samajwadi Party were mortal enemies. There had been speculation that there was
an outside chance of the BSP allying with the BJP if she was promised the chief
ministership; Mayavati had, after all, ruled UP in coalition with the BJP
before.
But after that stormy
parliamentary debate, all the speculation was about Smriti Irani leading the
BJP into battle in UP. Closer to the ground in Agra, the sangh parivar
highlighted
Arun Mahaur's Dalit identity. According to The Indian Express, the
VHP warned Akhilesh Yadav that if strict action wasn't taken against his
killers, the whole Dalit community would agitate his death.
Both at the top and
bottom of the saffron brotherhood, the battle for Uttar Pradesh has clearly
been joined. On the one side is the party of assimilation and exclusion, the
BJP. On the other side is a party which has pluralism built into its name - the Bahujan Samaj
Party - whose political trademark is aggregation and inclusion. If the BJP
doubles down on majoritarianism and triumphs, the BJP will fancy its chances in
2019. If the BSP wins, Mr Modi's government will seem a lame duck for the rest
of its term. The stakes could scarcely be higher. Between now and May 2017,
political life in India will be a tense, unending election campaign.
also see
RSS men attacked us, police forced us to forego legal action, say Sonepat Dalits
