Shikha Mukerjee | Faith & ‘purity’ won’t help BJP to deliver governance

When Ajit Pawar changed sides in Maharashtra and joined the Mahayuti alliance cobbled together by the BJP’s successful engineering of splits in two parties, the concept of the washing machine became crystal clear; attacked earlier by the BJP for his alleged involvement in a Rs 70,000-crore irrigation scam when he played second fiddle to Sharad Pawar in the Nationalist Congress Party, the man became overnight squeaky clean.

He, however, was not doused in a punch of Ganga jal and cow urine to purify him, remove the “stains” of corruption. Nor did he undergo conversion as a turncoat to emerge as a “Sanatani” and therefore acceptable, as Congress councillors in Jaipur underwent when they switched sides to join up with the BJP. The bizarre ceremony performed at the Jaipur Municipal Corporation Heritage office was ritual purification turned into a burlesque.

Finding the pathways of hitherto uncharted terrain, the BJP’s rank and file is now in grave danger of getting lost in an incomprehensible morass. Combining “Sanatan”, a concept that has no universal written code on what is correct Hindu practice with the everyday routines of power plays in politics is not easy. While it is perfectly understandable that the BJP will use every opportunity to advocate its Hindutva ideology, it is perplexing why it is going to such lengths to make a parody of purity and orthodoxy, Sanatan Dharma style, by deploying cow urine and holy water in what is routine in its politics: engineering defections.

That is, unless, the BJP has run out of concepts that can electrify the Hindu masses from way up north in Kashmir to the very tip, Kanyakumari, in the south. It is evidently groping for a word, a sign and a unifying idea to flesh out its agenda in the post-Ram Mandir consecration era. Why else are the masses across India, the vast majority of whom have an apparently insatiable appetite for social media chatter, being invited to flesh out a narrative on Sanatan, a concept that has no icon, no end goal and no antecedents?

The leap that the BJP is attempting is in the dark as it searches for the lowest common factor in a narrative around the alleged desecration of laddus produced in the enormous kitchens on Tirupati as sacred offerings to Lord Venkateshwara to Congress defectors in Jaipur, to street food vending carts and roadside eateries in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. The purity bug has the BJP in its grip; protecting the purity of the Constitution from further amendments on caste reservation by

increasing the quotas for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other socially marginalised communities is also part of the same common agenda. How all this fits into the BJP’s story line that Hinduism is in danger is not obvious.

If this is expected to revive the mob frenzy of the religious majority as once the Ram Mandir movement had done in transforming the BJP from a small party into a behemoth that claims to be the largest party in the world, then the designers of this segment of the Hindutva narrative seem to be suffering from a drought. There is nothing less inspiring than a call for restoring the purity of the Hindu faith through the routines of political defection.

Every voter knows that the purpose of switching political sides is simple; it is to weaken rivals and strengthen the host party. It is about power and showing it off. In election season, these transactions and transfers of allegiance gather speed and then dwindle when the heat of competitive politics fades.

The embarrassment and consequently outrage in the Congress Party over the copycat policy announcement by Vikramaditya Singh, its senior minister in the Himachal Pradesh government, is understandable. Having belatedly figured out that peddling soft Hindutva is the worst possible strategy to fight against the BJP’s hard Hindutva platform, Mr Singh’s policy that required eateries to display the identities of owners, managers and operators of street food stalls and roadside eateries, in line

with the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government notification, was a big blunder. With all guns blazing, the Congress leadership, Mallikarjun Kharge and evidently Rahul Gandhi via K.C. Venugopal, his close confidant, have slammed Mr Singh, hauled him to Delhi and delivered a reprimand.

To be seen to be emulating the purity-Sanatan spin on the BJP’s Hindutva agenda is suicidal for the Congress. It crafted a revival evident in its Lok Sabha election performance by campaigning on secularism, defending the Constitution, joblessness and unemployment, inflation and the cost of living crisis packaged together in its slogan “Nafrat ke Bazar mein Mohabbat ki Dukaan”. By separating governance from faith and promising policies that prioritise everyday issues, the Congress has created an alternative to the Hindutva politics personified by Narendra Modi.

Any contamination of the religious kind signified by the outcry over purity would hurt the Congress and benefit the BJP in the crucial elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand and later in Bihar. While the Congress needs to educate its leadership ranks in the states, the BJP is struggling to write up a new chapter to reach out to voters in states where elections are due in the next few months.

It is puzzling why the BJP has hit on food, orthodoxy and purity as the pillars of its Hindutva agenda after the Lok Sabha polls, when it is obvious that voters are not willing to be diverted from the crisis of living issues that preoccupy them. Neither the party nor its great helmsman can escape accounting for the impact of the policies and decisions of the Narendra Modi government over 10 years. The accumulation of grievances affecting the largest demographic of voters in the age group of 18 to 35

years on the one hand and the small trader, small manufacturer in the unorganised sector on the other, coupled with farmers and daily wage-earners, cannot be displaced by talking Sanatan and defiled laddus. If the BJP appears to have lost the plot line in its narrative, the Congress has an entirely different problem; its narrative is whimsical and consequently weak.