Although Union home minister Rajnath Singh declared only the other day that he did not know what “love jihad” was — shame on the Intelligence Bureau and other agencies that serve him — the reality is that provocative, polarising and poisonous rhetoric on this precise subject by Hindutva hotheads belonging to his own Bharatiya Janata Party and others in the Sangh Parivar has become both more widespread and louder than before. Sadly, the most important reason for this is that neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi, nor BJP president Amit Shah, nor any other senior leader of the party has done anything to restrain the wrongdoers, leave alone denounce them. No wonder they felt encouraged and raised the ante.
There was a time when BJP leaders used to argue that since “irresponsible remarks” were made only by “fringe elements”, there was no need for the Prime Minister or any other senior leader to react. But this facile pretence cannot wash any longer. For those spouting venom are not non-entities but hold important positions in the ruling establishment. For instance, the “love jihad” issue was vehemently raised at a recent meeting of the executive committee of the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit, by the committee’s chairman, Laxmikant Bajpai, and Yogi Adityanath, a five-time BJP member of the Lok Sabha who was in charge of the campaign for the 12 byelections to the state Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats in the politically key state.
Mr Bajapi went so far as to threaten that for every Hindu girl “lured by a Muslim into marriage and conversion, we will convert a hundred”. The saffron-clad Yogi claimed that in any area where the proportion of Muslims is 35 per cent or more, “non-Muslims are not safe”. In Madhya Pradesh, Usha Thakur, a BJP MLA and vice-president of the state unit of the party, stated that young Muslim men somehow managed to enter the prolonged Hindu festival of garba and entice Hindu women. No one knows how she came to this conclusion, but she asserted emphatically that every year after the garba festival, four-and-a-half lakh Hindu women were converted to Islam.
Then Sakshi Maharaj, another saffron-clad BJP MP, pronounced not only on “love jihad”, but also on “education of terror”, declaring that terrorism was “taught in madrasas” and the students there were “motivated for ‘love jihad’ with offers of cash rewards — Rs 11 lakh for an ‘affair’ with a Sikh girl, Rs 10 lakh for a Hindu girl and Rs 7 lakh for a Jain girl”. To cap it, Union Cabinet minister Maneka Gandhi proclaimed, citing a UP police report, that the “profits made through the trade of slaughtered animals financed terrorism”. She, therefore, demanded a total ban on the slaughter of all animals.
In heaven’s name, don’t the rulers of this country, who have won a stable majority of their own for the first time in 30 years, realise how dangerously divisive the consequences of this unending flow of bigotry can be? Hopefully, the Uttar Pradesh electorate’s total rejection of the polarisation strategy in the byelections will put some sense in the heads of this strategy’s authors. After all, the “Modi magic” has been dented somewhat. Not only has the BJP bitten the dust in Uttar Pradesh (where the Congress has drawn a blank), but has also lost some seats to the Congress in its bastions in Rajasthan and even Gujarat. Unless the saffron party abandons its electoral strategy and style, it will also suffer heavily in the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana due next month, to be followed by the Assembly polls in Jammu and Kashmir when the after-effects of the gargantuan deluge have been overcome.
In any case, a critically important factor in the overall situation must not be ignored. After the demolition of Babri masjid in 1992, there were so many communal riots in this country that the International Herald Tribune editorially raised the question: “Has India gone mad?” This, incidentally, was well before the egregious outrage of serial blasts in Bombay (now Mumbai) whose main perpetrator, Dawood Ibrahim, continues to be Pakistan’s “honoured guest”.
Since then we have been victims mainly of cross-border terrorism though there are home-grown terrorists, too, who call themselves Indian Mujahideen.
However, radicalisation of Muslims has hitherto remained appreciably low. In view of the horrendous rise of extremism in the Muslim world, shouldn’t our duty be to maintain communal harmony rather than to promote communal conflict? BJP leaders have a point when they say that in this respect and every other, the record of the Samajwadi Party government in UP has been appalling. All political parties and the Union government particularly should take note of a seminal article by Rajmohan Gandhi where he underscores that today’s Uttar Pradesh is “like Punjab in 1947”.
There are many more painful problems troubling India, but let me mention only three. The newly elected chief minister of the new state of Telangana, K. Chandrasekhar Rao, is threatening to “bury” the media if it crosses his path. He is also proclaiming that he is like Hitler. Someone should tell him about Hitler’s end. Secondly, the mercurial Trinamul Congress Chief Minister in West Bengal, Ms Mamata Banerjee, is in deep trouble over her alleged links with the Saradha chit fund, now called “cheat fund”, whose depredations have robbed the life’s savings of lakhs of poor investors, amounting to Rs 2,000 crore. Mercifully, the Central Bureau of Investigation is closely examining the scam’s murky details while Didi’s answer is to hold demonstrations by the faithful, led by her law minister, against the investigators.
Thirdly, and ironically, the CBI’s own chief, Ranjit Sinha, is under the Supreme Court’s scrutiny on charges that the apex court itself has described as “serious” but Mr Sinha denies emphatically. This reminds me of an old Punjabi saying which is best translated as: “When the fence begins to eat the field, what can the poor farmer do?”
