| Mukul Kesavan, The Telegraph |
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Much of the conversation around
this election has been driven by the argument that Narendra Modi’s BJP
is a party whose agenda centres on governance and growth, not on
communally divisive and inflammatory issues like the building of a Ram
temple at Ayodhya or the demonizing of Muslims. The BJP’s manifesto,
released on Monday, which had the Ram Mandir and other sectarian staples
consigned to page 41, was cited as more evidence of this evolution.
The
difficulty with believing the BJP’s new ‘governance’ anthem is that Modi
and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, chose during their election
campaigns to sing a succession of the sangh parivar’s oldest
tunes. As political disc-jockeys they showed a marked preference for the
BJP’s bloodiest hits. In Bihar, Modi made speeches where he re-mixed
the cow-slaughter theme song under a new title, the ‘Pink Revolution’.
The lyrics of his cover version went like this: the Congress government
had subsidized cow-slaughter, butchers had grown rich on the back of
meat exports, did Yadavs really want to make common cause with people
who killed the sacred cow?
Amit Shah,
hand-picked to deliver Uttar Pradesh to the BJP in 2014, made even more
viscerally provocative speeches. Majoritarian parties are founded on a
narrative of resentment, in which the majority, the People, tried beyond
forbearance by a devious, predatory minority, strikes back. Last week,
Amit Shah played variations on this theme of vengeance in speeches in
western UP. The political context of these speeches was a region
communally divided by the violence that flared up in Muzaffarnagar last
year between Jats and Muslims.
Amit Shah’s
‘revenge’ speech in Shamli received a great deal of media attention. In
this speech, Shah urged Jats to revenge themselves by voting against the
Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress because these
parties had, allegedly, pandered to Muslims and discriminated against
Hindus during and after the riots. The Election Commission issued Shah a
notice on the ground that he was, prima facie, guilty of
creating mutual hatred, causing tension between different communities
on the basis of religion, and making an appeal on communal lines for
securing votes.
The BJP’s
strategy in these cases is plausible deniability: its leaders skirt the
edges of the law without naming names or saying anything explicit enough
to incur legal penalties. In the case of the Shamli speech, the BJP’s
position was that Shah’s call for ‘revenge’ was no more than a
metaphorical way of asking electors to vote against parties which had
betrayed them. It was a metaphor that had been used before in elections
by Barack Obama himself and it was, therefore, a legitimate word in the
political lexicon of a democracy.
However, a
day after the Shamli speech, Amit Shah addressed a gathering of Jat
leaders in a farm house in Bijnor, where he forgot to take the usual
rhetorical precautions. The Bijnor speech was reported by the Hindi news
channel, Aaj Tak (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PCjYDbwdQsY).
While attacking the BSP and Mayavati, Amit Shah made great play with
the fact that both the BSP and the BJP had fielded exactly the same
number of Dalit candidates in UP. He then moved to his clinching
argument. Mayavati, said Shah, in her eagerness to win the votes of a
particular community (varg vishesh), a community that violated the honour of his assembled audience’s sisters and daughters (jo behen-betiyon…ki aabru pe haath dalta hai), had alotted that community 19 Lok Sabha tickets in the province, more even than the 17 she had given Dalits.
The speech
resulted in the local police lodging a case against Amit Shah. This was
denounced, predictably enough, by the BJP spokesperson, Ravi Shankar
Prasad, as an abuse of police powers and an example of ‘votebank’
politics. In actual fact, Shah’s Bijnor rhetoric was so toxic that even
Prasad’s practiced legal mind would have been hard put to spin it as
something other than hate speech.
While Shah
was careful not to name Muslims in his Bijnor speech, this omission
bought him no wiggle room or strategic ambiguity because by citing the
number of parliamentary tickets the BSP had given to the aforementioned
‘particular community’, Shah effectively confirmed that he was referring
to Muslims. We know that the BSP had nominated 19 Muslims to UP’s Lok
Sabha constituencies in this election, so we know that the community
Shah was referring to, the varg vishesh, which according to him,
oppressed Hindus and violated the honour of their womenfolk, was the
Muslim community. There is no room for doubt here, no plausible
deniability.
Consider the
enormity of the allegations made by Shah in the Bijnor speech. He
described Muslims collectively as a community of oppressors and
predators who preyed on Hindu women. This isn’t even dog-whistling; this
is straightforward communal slander, a textbook example of hate speech.
It’s worth
remembering that the man who made this speech is Narendra Modi’s most
trusted lieutenant, a man who used to be his home minister in Gujarat, a
political operator hand-picked by him to lead the BJP’s campaign in UP,
India’s largest state, a state crucial to Modi’s goal of leading a
ruling coalition after the elections. Amit Shah is not a political
operative gone rogue: he is His Master’s Voice.
Shah and Modi performed a kind of jugalbandi during their election campaigns across UP and India. They are masters, both of them, of the sangh parivar’s
favoured musical instrument, the dog-whistle. Sometimes, though, as in
Bijnor, the dog-whistle was set aside and Shah plainly voiced the ugly
rage that defines majoritarian politics, its loathing of minorities and
its willingness to shape that hatred into a political instrument.
The nature
of Amit Shah’s speech in Bijnor is important not because he has been
summoned by the Election Commission; the judgment that matters will be
delivered by India’s electorate, not its regulatory bodies. The point is
to show that growth might be the centre-piece of Modi’s manifesto, but
his economic agenda comes embedded in an explicitly communal politics.
Gurcharan
Das, corporate India’s most literate spokesperson, acknowledges Modi’s
divisive, polarizing politics but argues that his commitment to growth
ought to outweigh our commitment to a secular politics. “There will
always be a trade-off,” he writes, “in values at the ballot box and
those who place secularism above demographic dividend are wrong and
elitist.” Given this perspective, Das is unlikely to be disturbed by
Amit Shah’s speech at Bijnor. As for Ambani, Mittal, Tata, Adani… well,
businessmen through the ages have always packed long spoons and supped
with everyone, whiffs of sulphur notwithstanding.
Christopher
Marlowe, who was, like Gurcharan Das, a playwright, would have
recognized his ‘trade-off’ for what it is: a Faustian compact where you
give up a cherished value, or scruple or (if you’re Faust) your soul,
and trade it in for the promise of well-being. Modi’s and Shah’s
speeches make the price of this contemporary compact explicit: growth
and prosperity can be ours if we are prepared to ignore the violent
marginalization of Muslims as incidental, collateral damage.
Secularism
and pluralism aren’t just abstractions: they are institutional
commitments intended to protect the lives and rights of individuals and
groups. When we treat them as optional extras, we knowingly license
violence. After Amit Shah’s speeches in Shamli and Bijnor on the eve of
this pivotal election, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.
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| mukulkesavan@hotmail.com http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140410/jsp/opinion/story_18171718.jsp#.U2Dhc6I9klg |
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