Prem Shankar Jha - If Modi Assassination Plot Letter Is Fake, Indian Democracy Is in for Dangerous Time
A two decade-long history of using false allegations, faked evidence, videos and news to manipulate public sentiment proves that the BJP will stop at nothing to ensure its return to power.
The letter allegedly recovered from the house of Rona
Wilson, the Delhi-based public relations secretary of the Committee
for Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP), which details a meeting in
which Maoist leaders ‘decided to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’, needs
to be treated with the utmost of scepticism. This is not only
because of its suspicious convenience, for the discovery has come at
a time when the BJP has lost a string of elections and by-elections to an
increasingly unified, secular opposition. It is also because the letter
contains virtually irrefutable evidence of having been doctored.
Holes in the
narrative: Written by
someone who signs off as ‘R’, it falls into two completely
separate sections with not a single connecting word, reference or idea. The first section –
one single long paragraph – is a “nuts and bolts” discussion of
tactics between “comrades”, where every word suggests that it is a part of a
continuing conversation over day-to-day issues facing the party leader-ship. It
contains numerous references to past meetings and decisions, to the need
to provide relief to Maoist prisoners languishing in jails in Delhi,
Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh and to the legal strategy to
be employed in their defence. It derides a key Maoist leader “Prashant’ and
accuses him of foisting an “egoist agenda” upon the party that has ‘harmed its
larger interests”.
It gives details of a
programme formulated to defend the wheelchair-bound and 90% disabled
professor of English from Delhi University, G.N. Saibaba, who was
sentenced to life imprisonment by a sessions court in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra,
in March 2017 and to mobilise public opinion in his defence. At the end of this
paragraph, the letter switches registers and refers to a meeting that discussed
the need to raise Rs 8 crore to be exchanged for the next batch of M4 rifles
and 400,000 rounds of ammunition, at “the APT crossover”.
This stark jump
continues in the second section, which is a grand, airy, declaration of
strategic aims that is not only devoid of tactical detail, but is filled
with inaccuracies. It begins by saying
that “defeating Hindu fascism has been our core agenda and a major concern for
the party”. This is factually and textually wrong. The aim of the Maoists
has always been “to overthrow the government of India through people’s
war”. Its opponent is not specifically Hindu fascism, but any
“bourgeois” government that oppresses the poor.
Second, while the
first section talks about other senior party members in familiar terms,
using first names like Bijoyda, Prashant, Ashok B., Amit B.
Seema, Siraj and Sirohi, the second contains only one reference to a
specific person. It says, “Several leaders from secret cells as well as
open party organisations have raised this issue very strongly. We are
working to consolidate ties with like-minded organisations, political
parties, representatives of minorities across the country”. It then
goes on: “Comrade Kisan, and few other senior leaders have proposed concrete
steps to end Modi Raj. We are thinking along another Rajiv Gandhi type
incident”.
This allegation does
not contain a single specific reference, but seeks to incriminate
each and every “secular” political party NGO, and human rights activist in
a plot to assassinate the prime minister. But it then makes one gigantic
mistake: It claims that this has been endorsed by one “Comrade Kisan”. The
purported letter writer shows no awareness that Comrade Kisan is the very
person whose “egoist agenda” he has derided a few lines earlier. For Kisan and
Prashant are one and the same person - Prashant
Bose, reportedly the second in command of the Maoist movement in the country.
Why should ‘R’ have
used two different names for the same person in an internal report to a fellow
Maoist leader? It could be that he had a momentary loss of memory. But it
could also be that the second section was drafted by someone who did not
know that Prashant and Kisan are the same person.
An incriminating
record: That is what makes the
letter almost certainly a fake. Had this been a lone episode of its kind, it
would not have been conclusive. But the BJP’s record of concocting fake
videos to slander Modi’s opponents and inflate his image over the past four
years makes it very likely.
On February 11, 2016,
the Delhi police had arrested Kanhaiya Kumar, the then president of the
Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union on the charge, itself questionable, of
raising anti-India slogans during a speech on the campus two days earlier. In a
forensic examination carried out at the beginning of March by Truth Labs in
Chennai, the video was found to have been doctored, with voices of people who had not been
present at the meeting overlaid upon Kanhaiya Kumar’s at a crucial point. By
then, Kanhaiya Kumar had been beaten up and humiliated by lawyers belonging to
the RSS’ Adhivakta Sangh in a police station while the police stood by and
watched, and spent 17 days in jail.
In June last year,
when the prime minister was on a visit to the US, and had been invited to a
“working dinner” by President Donald Trump, the image makers of the BJP
uploaded a video of Modi’s cavalcade driving through the empty, heavily-policed
streets of Washington DC to the White house with a caption claiming that this
was how Modi had made the US respect a nation of 1.3 billion people. The video
was later found to have been of a cavalcade of former US
president Barack Obama driving through the streets of San Francisco in 2010.
Finally, two fake
videos surfaced on the eve of the Gujarat assembly elections in December
last year. Days before the final round of voting, a fake video began
to circulate on YouTube, showing Rahul Gandhi signing his nomination papers at
the party office in front of a portrait of Aurangzeb. The video had been
morphed from the real footage which showed that the portrait was of
Mahatma Gandhi. Hard on its heels, on
December 4, NewsX aired an ‘exclusive’ of a Facebook post which purported to show a retired
“Pakistani army Director -General who served in its intelligence” – one Arshad
Rafiq – declaring gleefully that ‘their man’ Ahmed Patel was soon going to become
the chief minister of Gujarat. The post contained a clip of Rahul Gandhi
wearing a Muslim skull cap and saying “Mubarak”. When contacted by
the Indian Express, Rafiq, who once posted a photo of himself
holding a cigar and telling ‘all smoking friends’ that smoking after keeping Roza
(fasting during Ramzan) was a pleasure not to be denied, said that he
had not written any post on Ahmed Patel, but added “Par agar Modi saheb
apney shikhast ka sehra mere sar pe bandhna chah rahey hain (if Modi
wants to give me credit for his defeat), he is most welcome”.
These doctored videos
and posts show that the BJP will stop at nothing to ensure its return to
power. But they do not reveal how far Modi, in particular, is prepared to
go to maintain his grip on power. To grasp that, one needs to go back to the
aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002, when he was the chief minister and Amit
Shah was his home minister. Modi’s handling of the riots, in which a thousand
Muslims were killed in a matter of days, is mired in controversy till today.
But what is not in doubt is the callous ruthlessness with which he stoked
Gujarati chauvinism even while the killing was going on, and claimed that the
nation’s condemnation was an attack on Gujarati pride and on Hinduism.
Not only did he
refrain from restraining the mobs, but he advanced the state assembly elections
by four months to checkmate the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s move
to remove him from the chief ministership of the state.
Having succeeded in
doing this, he continued to shore up his position within the party and the
nation by using the bogey of a Pakistan-aided attempt to assassinate him in
revenge for Ahmedabad, to keep Gujarati chauvinism at fever pitch. One
consequence of this was a carte blanche to the Gujarat
police to kill Muslim suspects picked up under suspicion of malfeasance. This
turned some of its elements into a killing machine: over the next
four years, there were no fewer than 22 such “encounters” at least four of
which were subsequently found to have had nothing whatever to do with killing
Modi, or taking revenge for the 2002 riots.
It is this cynical,
two decade-long, use of false allegations, faked evidence, videos and news
to manipulate public sentiment that makes the current allegations against Rona
Wilson and the other ‘Naxals’ arrested by the Maharashtra police in a BJP-ruled
state so disturbing. The Shiv Sena journal Saamna called them
‘laughable’, but if Modi remains true to form, then this allegation could be
only the beginning of a witch hunt designed to remove rivals from the
field on charges of sedition, treason or waging war against the state, as a
prelude to raising Hindu chauvinism to fever pitch before the 2019 general
elections. If that is indeed the
plan, then Indian democracy’s most dangerous moments lie only months ahead.
See also
Assassination of Gandhi