India's PM invokes communal divisiveness in an election that was meant to talk up development
NB: This is India's Prime Minister and RSS propaganda in action. Shameless hate-mongering amongst his fellow Indians - to attain supreme executive power; and to sabotage the Constitution and the justice system. If we fall for this brutal nonsense we will have only ourselves to blame for the consequences. DS
Express Editorial: Stoop to conquer
Express Editorial: Stoop to conquer
Campaign 2019 is off
to a nasty start. And the intemperance flows from the top. Mere days into
electioneering, in a speech in Wardha, Maharashtra, on Monday, Prime
Minister Narendra
Modi brought the acquittals of the accused in the Samjhauta blasts
case into his attack on the Congress. He dismissed and denied “Hindu terror”,
blamed the Congress for coining the term, and invoked the spectre of “Hindu
anger”, which, he suggested, was the reason why Congress president Rahul Gandhi
had chosen Wayanad in
Kerala, with a large non-Hindu population, as a second constituency. The PM’s
assertions are unbecoming of his office. For one, it is misleading to say that
“Hindu terror” is a political formulation.
More importantly, the PM’s
intervention on the Samjhauta acquittals politicises and potentially perverts
an already imperilled due process in a set of cases where members of radical
Hindu outfits have been accused of violence and terror. On the Samjhauta case,
PM Modi ignores the court’s anguish — on the record — at letting off the
accused because of the NIA withholding evidence. He disregards the fact that an
NIA court had earlier, in 2017, convicted three ex-RSS pracharaks in the 2007
Ajmer dargah blasts case or that the Maharashtra ATS, in 2018, under a
government led by his own party, chargesheeted 12 linked to hardline Hindutva
groups under the anti-terror law, UAPA.
If his comments on the
Samjhauta case can be read as politicisation of due process in a sensitive
security matter, the PM’s characterisation of Wayanad as a constituency where
“the majority is in a minority” and his references to “Hindu awakening” are
communally polarising. It has long been a strategy of the BJP to talk up Hindu anger
and stoke Hindu fear as two sides of the same mobilisation. By promoting a
sense of siege in the majority, and by inciting resentments, the party has
sought to unify and consolidate a scattered and diverse community. But at the
same time, the BJP’s appeal has also extended beyond this contrived binary. Its
political-electoral success has also been a result of its ability to sell
dreams of change and of a better tomorrow to an aspiring and largely young
electorate. Those dreams and expectations will now be tested against the
delivery by the Modi government in the upcoming election. The PM’s
majority-minority talk, however, signals a BJP intent to change the subject
from a potentially awkward stocktaking of the government’s record and to openly
play the Hindu-Muslim card to do so.
When a PM stoops to
conquer, as he leads his party into the election, it is dispiriting for the
entire democratic polity. It can also be taken as a cue for others who seek to
cross the line, lower the discourse, like UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath,
who has described the army as “Modi ji ki sena” in his own election speech,
with impunity. April is the cruellest month, said the poet. This one could very
well be the longest too.
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/stoop-to-conquer-5655381/
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