by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
There was never any doubt about the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) anti-minority electoral gambits but the agenda has now been unambigiously and forcefully articulated by the party’s friend, philosopher and guide, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Delivering the organisation’s customary message on the occasion of Dussehra/Vijay Dashami, its chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has left no stone unturned about what the Narendra Modi government should immediately do — which is to start building the Ram temple in Ayodhya even by enacting an ordinance.
By pointedly ignoring the fact that the issue is currently before the Supreme Court, the RSS chief has taken the party and the Hindutva brotherhood to the days of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in the 1990s when the saffron storm-troopers used to say that the courts can have no say in a matter of faith.
Apart from a reiteration of this aggressive “religious” stance, Bhagwat’s directive to the BJP to get down to business and not dilly-dally any longer on building the temple has scrapped Atal Behari Vajpayee’s decision in 1996 to put in cold storage the three “core” issues of the Sangh parivar — building the temple, doing away with Article 370 of the Constitution conferring special status on Jammu and Kashmir, and introducing a uniform civil code
That the negation of Vajpayee’s wishes has been done in the year of his death is not without significance. It remains to be seen whether the RSS will give any “advice” to the government on the two other issues — Article 370 and the uniform civil code.
But why the sudden hurry about constructing the temple? There may be two reasons. One is that it is the last throw of the dice by the party and the parivar in an election season to consolidate its vote bank of communal-minded Hindus at a time when the less than favourable economic scene may make sections of the liberal Hindus, who voted for the BJP in 2014, drift away.
The other is the realisation in the saffron brotherhood that it is now or never where the temple is concerned since the BJP is unlikely to get a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha in 2019. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by it may get it, but it will not be easy for the BJP to persuade some of its allies such as the Janata Dal (United) — which has opposed the BJP’s favourite triple talaq ordinance — and the Akali Dal to endorse a construction programme which cannot but alienate the minorities.
Notwithstanding BJP president Amit Shah’s conviction that the party will reign for half a century, there may be an awareness in the organisation that the 2014 outcome was the result of several unforeseen events — the Congress’s sudden and somewhat inexplicable collapse and Modi’s emergence (against the wishes of several in his party) as some kind of a messiah. From this standpoint, 2019 will not be the same as 2014.
Ever since the party and the parivar sensed that the mantras of neither “achhe din” (good days) nor “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (development for all) is evoking a favourable response, the focus of the saffron propaganda has been on Hindu-Muslim polarisation.
Whether it is extending the scope of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) from Assam to other states or the removal of long-established Muslim names in Uttar Pradesh like Mughalsarai and Allahabad, the BJP’s aim has been to send the message that Muslims will be under pressure to prove the genuiness of their citizenship and that India’s multi-cultural past will be erased as Hindu rashtra takes root.
Along with the direct and indirect offensive against Muslims, the parivar is also intent on confirming its Hindu credentials by opposing the Supreme Court’s verdict allowing women of all ages to enter the Sabarimala temple in Kerala on the grounds it violates centuries-old beliefs.
The Sabarimala episode enables the RSS and the BJP to try and kill two birds with one stone. One is to project themselves as the standard-bearers of Hinduism, and the other is to flaunt a defiance of the Supreme Court.
The court has aroused the saffron lobby’s ire ever since it delivered a series of “progressive” judgments (of which Sabarimala is one) such as the one upholding the rights of privacy, which the government argued was an elitist concept, and the other was to decriminalise homosexuality in a case from which the government recused itself evidently because while the legalisation went against the BJP’s crusty orthodoxy, the party could not afford to be seen as living in Victorian times.
Sabarimala has given an opportunity to the RSS and the BJP to defy the apex court and suggest that it is not right all the time. The defiance may have also been motivated by the #MeToo movement which has claimed the scalp of a Union minister and persuaded another minister to say that those who support the movement are “perverted”.
Among the others who also answer to the description of being perverted are the so-called “Urban Naxalites”, a new form of abuse coined by the RSS and the BJP for the Left-Liberals who have always been called anti-nationals. Not surprisingly, another of the RSS chief’s advice to the government was to keep the “Urban Naxalites” under surveillance.
It will be interesting to know what those “secularists” who interacted with the RSS recently like former President Pranab Mukherjee and the business tycoon, Ratan Tata, think of the pitch for the temple and the castigation of “Urban Naxalites”.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The BJP on Monday accused the Congress of trying to build a momentum against the construction of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya and asked party President Rahul Gandhi to clear his stand on the issue.
“They are trying to build a momentum against the construction of Ram Temple. We want an early verdict but they are trying to delay,” BJP Spokesperson G.V.L. Narasimha Rao told a press conference.
His comments came in the wake of the reported remarks of Congress leader and Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor. who said on Sunday that while a vast majority of Hindus believe that Ayodhya was the birthplace of Lord Ram, no good Hindu would want to see a Ram temple built by demolishing somebody else’s place of worship.
Rao said Tharoor’s comments is yet another attempt to somehow “muddy waters” at a time when the Supreme Court is likely to take up this issue on a fast-track basis.
“Linking construction of temple to demolition of the structure several years ago is an attempt by the Congress to indulge in vote bank politics,” he said.
Rao said that the BJP hopes for an early verdict in this regard while many of the Congress leaders are again and again giving statements against the construction of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.
Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal had earlier demanded that the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute should be heard after the 2019 general elections which triggered a major political storm.
Rao, a Rajya Sabha member, also took on Rahul Gandhi accusing him of indulging in vote bank politics.
“Rahul Gandhi sometimes turns into a Shiv Bhakt and then goes to meet the intellectuals to say that they are a party for the Muslims. He should answer whether he is a Hindu or not. Will Rahul clearly speak about his party’s stand on Ram temple,” he said.
On his part, Tharoor accused the media of distorting his words vis-a-vis the Ram temple issue and stressed that whatever he said was his personal opinion and not his party’s opinion.
“I condemn the malicious distortion of my words by some media in the service of political masters. I had said, ‘Most Hindus would want a temple at what they believe to be Ram’s birthplace. But no good Hindu would want it to be built by destroying another’s place of worship’,” Tharoor said in a tweet.
“I was asked for my personal opinion at a literary festival and gave it as such. I am not a spokesperson for my party and did not claim to be speaking for it,” he added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
Representational Image
By Amulya Ganguli,
The advent of the festive season has brought good luck for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After Mayawati’s imperious scuttling of any chance of an alliance with the Congress in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the BJP can rest easy with the thought that the projected “mahagathbandhan” (grand alliance) of the national opposition may be now dead and buried.
After several by-election successes in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the Congress appeared to have taken it for granted that the two states were already in its bag with the possibility of winning in Chhattisgarh as well on the basis of an anti-BJP wind blowing in from Madhya Pradesh.
But the Congress hadn’t taken into account its own internal fissures along with an ingrained arrogance and deviousness. One manifestation of the cracks within the party was the palpable gulf between two senior leaders in Madhya Pradesh, the party chief in the state, Kamal Nath, and the former chief minister, Digvijaya Singh.
Even as Kamal Nath teamed up with Jyotiraditya Scindia and “negotiated” with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), thereby hogging the limelight, Digvijaya Singh, perhaps feeling left out, decided to make his presence felt by throwing a spanner in the unity efforts.
True, the first chink in the mahagathbandhan was caused by Mayawati when she left the Congress in the lurch in Chhattisgarh, forming an alliance with the breakaway Congress leader, Ajit Jogi, and even announcing contesting 22 seats on her own in Madhya Pradesh.
But there was no immediate need for Digvijaya Singh to see her move as a scared response to the investigations against her by various government agencies.
Although this interpretation was being aired in the media, it was evidently unacceptable to the temperamental BSP czarina to find a senior Congress leader echoing the views of some analysts.
Hence, her huffy departure from any talks with the Congress on the grounds of the party’s arrogance and underhand manoeuvres of those like Digvijaya Singh whom she accused of acting at the BJP’s behest.
It is also possible that she believed that a tie-up with the Congress will benefit the latter rather than the BSP, not least because she suspected that the Congress was trying to regain its lost position among the Dalits as in the hoary days of the Congress’s Brahmin-Harijan-Muslim base decades ago.
This was the reason why she was not too pleased with Rahul Gandhi’s earlier practice of spending nights in Dalit villages, alleging that he soaped himself copiously on returning home.
Since then, her attitude has not only changed but, as she said even after the break-up with the Congress, both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi were sincere in their desire for an alliance with the BSP.
It is obvious, therefore, that the Congress should have been far more careful in its dealings with Mayawati, with Rahul Gandhi himself playing a more proactive role to placate the oversensitive BSP leader, who is already under considerable strain because of the emergence of young challengers from within her own community like Jignesh Mewani and Chandrashekhar Azad “Ravan”.
The Congress’s mistake was to leave the task of talking to her only to the faction-ridden Madhya Pradesh unit, especially when disgruntled elements like Digvijaya Singh were lurking in the background, fearing that he would be further marginalised if Kamal Nath and Scindia managed to clinch a deal.
Now that the idea of a mahagathbandhan has collapsed for all practical purposes, it remains to be seen whether, if at all, the Congress is able to pick up the broken pieces.
Its dependence on a “grand” combine was based on the realisation that the only way the national opposition could take on the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah electoral machine was by acting in unison.
This arithmetical approach — one “strong” opposition candidate against the BJP in every constituency — was a concession to the fact that the opposition lacked a charismatic leader who could effortlessly draw crowds and articulate an inspiring vision.
Since the Congress and the opposition fail on both counts, the least they could do to offer a credible challenge to the BJP was by ensuring that the different parties developed a close understanding among themselves which took into account the idiosyncrasies of individual leaders and their apprehensions about being deceived.
However, the problem in the non-BJP camp is that it has only local leaders with little national appeal — Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Chandrababu Naidu — while the “naamdars” (leaders with a lineage), to use Modi’s sarcastic word for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, are too preoccupied with rebuilding and even altering their own shattered images by visiting temples to undertake the arduous task of building a coalition brick by brick.
Mayawati’s desertion of the secular camp in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh was, therefore, waiting to happen. All that the Congress and the other parties in the national opposition can hope for at present is that the gathbandhans (alliances) elsewhere, notably in Uttar Pradesh, remain intact.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions, Politics
By Amulya Ganguli,
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) hope of avoiding the nightmare of a united opposition may well be fulfilled.
After K. Chandrashekhar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi poured cold water on the idea of a federal front floated by him and Mamata Banerjee some time ago, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) czarina, Mayawati, has scuttled the possibility of a united opposition battling the BJP by charting out her own course.
By forming an alliance with breakaway Congress leader Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh and unilaterally announcing the names of 22 BSP candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Mayawati has virtually dumped the Congress and exposed the hollowness of the bonhomie which the non-BJP leaders had displayed at the swearing-in of Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy in Bengaluru last May.
All eyes will now be on Uttar Pradesh to see whether the understanding between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the BSP, which paid rich dividends for the two in recent by-elections, will last till 2019.
Given Mayawati’s disinclination to go along with the Congress and her demand for a “respectable” share of seats in an electoral arrangement, it is open to question whether the Uttar Pradesh tie-up will survive the strains of her mercurial temperament.
Several reasons have been cited to explain her hesitancy to be a part of a broad-based anti-BJP front. One is that she is under pressure because of the pending cases against her being pursued by the Enforcement Directorate and other government agencies.
The other is that she wants to assert her hold on the Dalits at a time when young leaders of the community like Jignesh Mewani and Chandrashekhar Azad “Ravan” are coming to the fore.
A third factor is her known unrealiability as an ally which was in evidence in Uttar Pradesh in the mid-1990s when she dumped the SP in favour of her sworn enemy at the time, the BJP, and then ditched it as well.
More recently, she is back to an understanding with the SP which, too, had become a sworn enemy following the so-called circuit house incident in Lucknow in 1995 when she faced a serious threat from a group of Samajwadi Party “goons”.
However, what the latest uncertainties in the wake of her politicking suggests is that a far more concerted attempt to form an alliance of the national opposition parties is needed than the present desultory initiatives that are being undertaken by leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar.
For this purpose, an occasional dinner or a march to “save” the Constitution are not enough. There have to be regular meetings of the leaders of parties whose commitment to take on the BJP is unequivocal — a test in which the BSP has failed.
Among the parties whose “secular” credentials and reliability can be trusted are the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party, the National Conference, the Left parties and the Nationlist Congress Party — although Sharad Pawar’s comment that the people do not doubt Modi’s intentions on the Rafael deal will bother the Congress.
The prime ministerial ambitions of some the leaders like Mamata Banerjee are known, but these motivations need not come in the way of bringing together like-minded parties on a common platform, leaving the leadership question for the future. But to do so, there is a need for someone to assume the responsibility of doing the hard work of networking.
Can Rahul Gandhi be the person since Mamata does not quite have a pan-Indian persona while Sharad Pawar at 78 may not have the energy to do the running around a la Amit Shah?
The West Bengal Chief Minister’s other difficulty is that she is apparently facing considerable problems at home. As the violence during the panchayat elections showed, there are widespread misgivings about the law and order situation in the state where the Trinamool Congress cadres are seemingly emulating the earlier lawlessness of the Marxists.
Since the unsettled conditions are being exploited by the BJP to establish itself in the state, the Chief Minister faces a political challenge as well. She may not have the time, therefore, to stitch together an opposition combine by reaching out to the various leaders across the country.
The Congress president is better placed in this respect. He is relatively young at 48 and is not burdened by administrative duties. He is also now far more energetic than when he was caught napping in parliament.
His disadvantage is that he is not a “natural” politician like his sister Priyanka and is generally seen to be standoffish and ill at ease with the leaders of other parties, especially the elder ones among them.
But it is now generally agreed that he is becoming more adept at interactions. Given the challenges which the Congress is facing in the wake of Mayawati’s cynical manoeuvres, Rahul has no alternative but to leave no stone unturned in the quest for forging a viable opposition unity.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Politics
Raghubar Das
By Brajendra Nath Singh,
Ranchi : With BJP deciding to focus on identity issues in the coming elections, Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das says there is need for a National Register of Citizens (NRC) in his state also to check infiltration from Bangladesh because Hindus have become a minority in some districts.
He also favours job reservations on the basis of economic backwardness and called for a consensus on the issue.
“We will take all Bangladeshis out one by one. There is no doubt about it. In Pakur, Hindus are now in a minority. Bangladeshis are more than 50 per cent in Pakur while the numbers have increased significantly in Sahebganj, Godda and Jamtara districts. We will implement NRC in Jharkhand,” Das told IANS in an interview during a visit organised by the BJP’s Good Governance Cell.
The Jharkhand government has approached the union Home Ministry in this regard and is waiting for its response for initiating the exercise.
The Chief Minister accused the political parties of patronising Bangladeshi infiltrators across the state and said the issue needs to addressed at the earliest.
“It is very unfortunate that Congress has been doing votebank politics even after 67 years of our independence. All these problems are due to Congress’ votebank politics. They did politics for breaking the country while we (BJP) are doing politics to unite the country,” he said.
He alleged that Sahebganj, Pakur, Godda and Jamtara are the worst-hit districts where hundreds of illegal migration of Bangladeshi infiltrators has taken place in Jharkhand.
Seeking job reservations on the basis of the economic criteria, the chief minister demanded a national-level discussion on the issue to evolve a consensus.
“I am in favour of reservation on the basis of economic condition. In society, everybody is not rich. It is not that all those belong to upper caste are rich. I am in favour of it. There are poor people in every society. The issue needs to be discussed and a consensus needs to be evolved, he said.
The Chief Minister also backed the idea of ‘One Nation, One Election’ but rejected any advancing of dates for the Assembly polls in Jharkhand along with the Lok Sabha polls in 2019. Assembly polls are scheduled in Jharkhand six months after the Lok Sabha polls.
“I am also in favour of one nation, one election. The Prime Minister has given a call for debate on the issue. An atmosphere in its favour must be created by debate and discussion. It is not that we want and they want. It’s a matter of consensus. It needs to be passed by parliament. If a consensus is evolved, there may be simultaneous polls of Lok Sabha and Assemblies in 2024, he said.
Asked whether he would go for Assembly polls together with Lok Sabha polls, he said: our election will be at its scheduled time and Lok Sabha elections will be at its scheduled time. There are no ifs and buts. Why would I go for early polls. My condition is not bad.”
The Chief Minister said that there would be no impact of the grand alliance in 2019 and claimed that the BJP under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would again emerge victorious.
“Whether it is alliance or grand alliance (mahagathbandhan), we are not worried at all. Can oil and water mix together? Even when you mix oil and water together they will still separate. Our focus is on strengthening the organisation. We have a leadership like Modiji, on whom the people of the country have strong faith.”
(Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted brajendra.n@ians.in)
—IANS
