The Big Story: The BJP script

As the Congress and the Samajwadi Party joined forces to fight the Uttar Pradesh elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party stuck to the old Hindutva script. Uttar Pradesh has always been the playing ground for the saffron party’s worst impulses. In the 2014 national election campaign, while the BJP talked development and aspiration across the rest of India, star campaigners in Uttar Pradesh such as party president Amit Shah and Gorakhpur MP Adityanath spoke the language of hate and conjured up the spectre of a majority under siege. Does the party’s return to its old ways signal a nervousness about an election it claimed would be a shoo-in?

On Saturday, the BJP released its poll manifesto, where promises of freebies and development were laced with something more toxic. Apparently attacking the Samajwadi Party government for its failure to maintain law and order, the BJP invoked the alleged exodus of Hindus from Kairana in Western Uttar Pradesh, a region that was sharply polarised by the Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013. On the thousands of Muslims displaced by those riots, the manifesto remained silent. It also went on to promise restrictions on cattle slaughter, helicopter rides to Hindu religious sites and a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, with the caveat that it had to be within the Constitutional framework. In an interview shortly afterwards, Shah followed this up with promises of creating an “anti-Romeo squad” to protect girls from the depredations of amorous men. Many have seen the comment as a veiled reference to that old BJP canard of love jihad, a purported campaign by Muslim men to lure away susceptible Hindu women. And, as if on queue, BJP MLA Suresh Rana claimed there would be curfew in the Muslim areas of Kairana and Mordabad if he won.

Is the BJP running out of ideas in UP? According to observers on the ground, the party’s development promises are now wielded to greater effect by Akhilesh Yadav, while the attack on law and order and corruption has lost steam. The euphoria about demonetisation has lifted, leaving a tremendous surge of anger about the hardships it has caused. The BJP’s other trump card, surgical strikes on Pakistan and the hyper-nationalist rhetoric that accompanies it, may not be enough to counter the disappointments. That leaves caste arithmetic, the personal appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and, of course, Hindutva. But can Hindutva cover up the absence of a positive agenda?

The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day’s big story

Dhirendra K Jha reports on the rebellion of Gorakhpur MP Adityanath’s outfit against the BJP.

Political pickings

  1. Even as Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav join hands, veteran Mulayam Singh Yadav says he will not campaign for the Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance.
  2. As United States President Donald Trump clamps down on immigration, a Baroda-based businessman has reportedly been arrested at a US airport and booked for “terrorising”.
  3. For Mann ki Baat on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi exhorted students to treat examinations as a “festival” not a test.

Punditry

  1. In the Hindu, Ramin Jahanbegloo on how Gandhi’s brand of “resistance” and protest could be an antidote to the crisis in contemporary democracy.
  2. In the Indian Express, SY Qureshi on the transience of electoral promises and the persistence of voter memory.
  3. In the Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan on how Donald Trump’s immigration ban closes the gap between US rhetoric and US action.

Giggles

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Ikhtisad Ahmed on the human cost of Bangladesh’s garment industry, where 5,000 were sacked for demanding higher wages:

“In addition to demanding an end to harassment and oppression in the workplace – more widespread than the middle and upper classes of Bangladesh are willing to acknowledge – the workers wanted the minimum wage of Tk (Bangladeshi taka) 5,300 (approximately Rs 4,500) to be raised three-fold. Given that the current rate is less than one-fifth of the living wage – the minimum income required to meet one’s basic needs – and that inflation has held at over 5% since the last wage rise in 2013, this is not an unreasonable demand.”