Tavleen Singh: BJP losing Delhi will be just punishment for shameless attempt to divide and rule
Never has an election
campaign in Delhi been as ugly as the one just ended. Never have senior
ministers of the government of India spent so much time on what is essentially
a municipal election. Never before have we seen so open an attempt to make it
an election to divide Hindus and Muslims. Despite the ugliness
and venom that defined the BJP’s
campaign, opinion polls indicate that it is unlikely to win Delhi. It
deserves to lose.
I speak as someone who has spent more than half a lifetime in this city and who cherishes its syncretic culture. It horrified me to hear senior BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath make the word ‘biryani’ a term of abuse and to hear other BJP leaders speak of this election as a choice between ‘India and Pakistan’. Horrified to hear a minister in the government of India urge his audience to ‘shoot traitors’ and to hear Home Minister Amit Shah say at a rally that he wanted voters to press so hard on the ‘button’ that registered their vote that it would send a shock all the way to Shaheen Bagh.
I speak as someone who has spent more than half a lifetime in this city and who cherishes its syncretic culture. It horrified me to hear senior BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath make the word ‘biryani’ a term of abuse and to hear other BJP leaders speak of this election as a choice between ‘India and Pakistan’. Horrified to hear a minister in the government of India urge his audience to ‘shoot traitors’ and to hear Home Minister Amit Shah say at a rally that he wanted voters to press so hard on the ‘button’ that registered their vote that it would send a shock all the way to Shaheen Bagh.
Had he bothered
instead to actually go and talk to the women in Shaheen Bagh, he would have
discovered that they are not Pakistanis or traitors. All they want from him
is an assurance that he will not implement, as he has threatened more than
once, a nation-wide National
Register of Citizens. Sadly, Prime
Minister Narendra
Modi, instead of controlling his troops, has actually encouraged them. Last
week in the Lok Sabha, he accused opposition leaders of spreading lies about
the new citizenship law. And, during the campaign for Delhi, he said much too
often that he saw
in the Shaheen Bagh protest a sinister attempt to spread anarchy in India.
If he examines the
protests without prejudice, he will discover that the protesters have genuine
fears that if an NRC is held, they will be unable to produce the documents that
prove that they are Indian. He may also discover that their fears have been
exacerbated by the sort of speeches that were made by BJP leaders during the
election campaign for Delhi....
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/fifth-column-delhi-assembly-elections-campaign-amit-shah-bjp-6258183/see also
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