Modi ki Guarantee: There will be hate

What we are seeing is the prelude -- an increasingly beleaguered BJP holds out the promise of more, and worse, to come

Photo Credit: The Hindu

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami, addressing a mega conclave of Hindu priests at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in New Delhi on 22 April, exhorted people to vote for the BJP to ensure that the Centre is led by Ram bhakts.

The Representation of Peoples Act expressly calls out appeals on the basis of religion as a Corrupt Practice. Section 123(3) says that appeals by a candidate, or any other person with the consent of a candidate, to vote or refrain from voting on the grounds of religion, race, caste, community or language is a ‘Corrupt Practice’. The related Section 123)3A) proscribes any attempt by a candidate to promote feelings of enmity or hatred among citizens on these grounds.

And yet BJP candidate Bansuri Swaraj who, as a lawyer, should really have known better, was right there on stage (extreme left) enthusiastically waving not the party flag but the saffron of hardcore hindutva.

You can’t blame her, really — when Modi has openly pivoted his campaign to a naked majoritarian appeal, and the Election Commission of India shows no inclination to take him to task for repeatedly flouting its Model Code of Conduct, why should lesser lights (like Pune’s Muralidhar Mohol) adhere to the rules, assuming they even want to?

Unnoticed in this brouhaha is that the Congress and other opposition parties (not to mention the four Sankaracharyas) had pointed out at the time that the Ram temple inauguration in Ayodhya was a political event. They were condemned for it; Modi even referred to their no-show as an “insult to Ram” during the campaigns in the first phase of the elections — and here we are now, in a place where Modi and every single BJP leader and candidate is basing their appeal on the Ram temple.

Adding a layer of unintended irony to the situation is this ad in today’s papers, courtesy of the ECI:

I WAS in Tamil Nadu before and during the first phase of the elections, walking the streets, hanging out near polling booths, in tea shops and other places where people congregate, just listening (and trying to cope with the intense heat). What struck me most forcefully is that there was no talk — zip, nada — about ‘Modi ki guarantee’ and the BJP’s poll agenda.

But then this is TN, where the people have made an indoor sport of making the hashtag ‘Go Back Modi’ trend every time The Man came visiting. So I called people I’d met during previous trips to the north, particularly as part of the India leg of Pulitzer-winner Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, and found the same story. People across the economic and societal spectrum knew some at least of the promises the Congress/Opposition had made in their manifestos — particularly the ones relating to employment for all, and money for all women — but couldn’t off the top of their heads recall a single one of Modi’s “guarantees”.

This is obviously an anecdotal, unscientific way of understanding the pulse of the people. But then there is this: as far back as 4 March, news reports said that a confident Modi had exhorted his bureaucrats to start making plans for a third term. He is also reported to have told his ministers to exercise restraint in their speeches, “in what appeared to reflect the leadership’s concern about a pattern of provocative utterances deflecting attention from Modi’s focus on development and growth”.

Now here we are, in a place where every single BJP speaker — beginning with the prime minister himself — has cast off all restraint, all norms of civilised discourse. What does that tell you about the faith the party has in its development plank and in the efficacy of ‘Modi ki guarantee’ to woo voters?

The prevailing school of thought is that Modi’s unbridled hate speech of 21 April has backfired so badly that he has been forced to back-pedal. Here is one example, of many, of such triumphalism.

Those who subscribe to such a line of thought point to his speech the very next day, 22 April, when he waxed eloquent about his Muslim brothers and sisters.

I don’t know so much. The speech was made in Aligarh where, as per the 2011 census, the Muslim population is 42.64% (Hindus 55.36%). The speech is just Modi being his usual Janus-faced self, tailoring his appeal based on the demographics of wherever he happens to be.

In passing, even in Aligarh Modi was lying through his teeth.

"Earlier, due to less Haj quota, there used to be a lot of fighting and bribery was also prevalent there and only the influential people would get the chance to go to Haj. I had requested the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia to increase the Haj quota for our Muslim brothers and sisters in India. Today, not only has India's Haj quota increased but visa rules have also been made easier. The government took a very important decision. Earlier our Muslim mothers and sisters could not go alone for Haj. The government also allowed women to go for Haj without Mehram and I am being blessed by thousands of sisters whose dream of going for Haj has been fulfilled."

“Haj quota has increased”? Tell me the other one.

In 2019, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had announced the increase in quota for Indian Haj pilgrims to 200,000, in the wake of Modi’s visit to that country. In 2023, the Indian government announced that the country’s Haj quota had been fixed at 175,025. In January of this year, the two countries signed the annual bilateral Haj agreement, which fixed the quota for India for 2024 at — wait for this — 175,025.

In other words, not only has Modi’s good friend MBS not lived up to the headline-grabbing promise of 2019, but over the past two years, the quota has not moved upwards by a single digit.

Now see the second part of the excerpt from Modi’s speech quoted above. The “government took a decision”, he says; what he does not specify is which government he is talking about.

It was the Saudi government that in 2021 relaxed existing rules and, from the following year, allowed women to go on the Haj pilgrimage without a male escort/guardian. The Indian government had nothing to do with the decision, which by the way is applicable to Muslim women of all countries, not just Modi’s India.

So no, the “pivot” that is being widely celebrated is no pivot. The coming days will see more — and more vicious — iterations of the same, because that is all there is left now for a party that finds itself unable to defend its 10-year record.

From all that I have been able to gather, the first phase of the elections did not go well for the BJP. Tamil Nadu, where it was hoping to make major inroads, is the biggest blow — even local-level BJP leaders there told me they will be “lucky” if they win two seats (and no, state BJP chief Annamalai’s Coimbatore is not one of the seats their hopes are pinned on).

The second phase includes Karnataka where, in 2019, BS Yedyurappa led the BJP to a sweep of 25 of the 28 seats on offer, an increase of eight seats from the 17 the BJP had won in 2014. The Congress on the other hand dropped from nine to a solitary seat in 2019; victims of the BJP sweep included current Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, from Gulbarga.

This time around, BSY is almost entirely absent from the campaign; he is busy defending Shimoga, where his son is in a tough contest against rebel BJP leader KS Eashwarappa. In BSY’s absence, the BJP has no state-level leader of stature to lead the campaign, and it is showing in the party’s lack-lustre performance on the ground. Calling an election is a fool’s errand at the best of times, but I’ll stick my next out and say that Congress will win between 12-15 seats in this election cycle from the state (14 of the 28 seats are on offer in the first phase).

Kerala’s 20 seats are also up for grabs in the second phase on April 26, and the BJP is getting blanked out there. Of the other states polling in phase two, the BJP is battling headwinds in Maharashtra (8 seats in phase 2), Rajasthan (13 seats) and Madhya Pradesh (7 seats).

The BJP’s patented formula of stretching elections out over multiple phases, carefully calibrated so its star campaigner can focus his attention on specific areas in each phase, appears to be back-firing badly. It is giving the Congress/Opposition more time to do exactly what Modi wanted to do — run focussed campaigns in specific areas; meanwhile, the BJP’s lack of substance in its campaign is increasingly being perceived by the ground level voter.

I don’t know about you, but I can only see Modi and his cohort getting more vicious, more pointedly communal, in the days ahead. Just today, the Karnataka unit of the BJP put out a post making the most ludicrously false claims about the Congress manifesto. To wit:

• Hijab Enforcement in Educational Institutions.

• Wealth Distribution to Muslims.

• Special Reservations to Muslims.

• Freedom to Practice Personal Laws.

• Muslims to be Directly Appointed as Judges.

• Mandate to Public & Private entities to hire Muslims.

None of these is true; all of these are indicative of the gaslighting tone and tenor this campaign is now taking. And then there is Adityanath, in Amroha today, not only repeating Modi’s absurd claims about Manmohan Singh’s intended “redistribution” in favour of Muslims, but for good measure adding that when the Congress comes to power it will introduce Sharia. (I’m not sure what Adityanath is thinking, though — Amroha is a Muslim-majority constituency where the minority community outnumbers Hindus approximately three to one.)

So — brace up. There is a heat wave coming, and it has nothing to do with climate change.

PostScript:

#1: The ECI is distributing saplings “to promote a clean and ethical electoral process”

#2: Under the ECI’s watch, the BJP secured its first seat in the 18th Lok Sabha when two Congress candidates found themselves disqualified and the others all withdrew, handing the Surat seat to the BJP on a platter.

#3. Over 17,400 concerned citizens (I am one of them) have written to the ECI, protesting Modi’s nakedly communal gaslighting of 21 April. The ECI spokesperson, who appears to be labouring under the misapprehension that he is the PR person for the ruling party, said he had “no comments to make”.

#4. The ECI sent a notice to Uddhav Thackeray asking him to excise the slogan ‘Jai Bhawani’ and the word ‘Hindu’ from its latest anthem. Uddhav Thackeray told them to stick the notice where the sun don’t shine. ‘Yay, that will show the ECI what’s what’ seems to be the popular reaction. In actual practice, this is a perfect example of how an institution collapses: One person — Modi, to give him a name — defies its diktat with entitled impunity. Others decide they can do so as well, and pretty soon what we have is a hollowed out shell of what was once the steel frame that held our democratic process together.

And that, for now, is that.