“Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro salon ko.” Shoot down the bloody traitors of the country.
This Hindutva battle cry has echoed across Delhi over the past months. It has come from the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules the country. The slogan is aimed at anyone protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, which critics say discriminates against Muslims and could be use to disenfranchise them. The slogan was first used by Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader in the Capital. On Monday, it was picked up by a minister in the Modi government, Anurag Thakur, and chanted during a campaign rally for the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections.
The incendiary slogan had an immediate impact. Four days after it was deployed by Thakur, a teenage boy fired a pistol at a crowd in Delhi protesting against the citizenship initiatives on Thursday, even as the police watched passively. His bullet injured a student.
Information accessed by Scroll.in showed that the teenage shooter was associated with Hindutva causes. His Facebook page shows how passionately he identified with the ideas propagated by the saffron ecosystem. Messages posted by the shooter on social media just before the attack asked friends to “do my funeral rites with me covered in the saffron flag” and threatened demonstrators at Shaheen Bagh that “the game is over”.
Shaheen Bagh is the centre of the protests against the citizenship initiatives in Delhi and demonstrators there have been sharply attacked by the BJP as part of its Delhi election campaign, which is attempting to divide the electorate on religious lines. On Thursday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said at a rally that the Aam Admi Party was “with Shaheen Bagh” while the BJP stood with “Sanjay Colony”. On Tuesday, a BJP MP claimed that participants in the women-led agitation at Shaheen Bagh will “rape your sisters and daughters”.
Only communalism
The faltering economy and the significant missteps made by the BJP to boost it, such as demonetisation and the botched-up introduction of the Goods and Services Tax, has meant that the party now depends solely on emotive issues such as communal polarisation to win elections. To this end, the BJP has passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, introducing a religious criterion in India’s citizenship law.
Delhi, which votes on February 8, is basically a city poll, with an electorate smaller than that for the Mumbai municipal elections. Yet, even for this small territory, the BJP has sharply communalised the atmosphere in a bid to defeat the Aam Aadmi Party. It is unclear what the BJP’s plan is – or even if it has one, beyond simply winning the next election.
However, as Thursday’s shooting shows, the party’s inflammatory rhetoric has been burnt into the minds of some sections, who are now willing to take the law into their own hands to attack people who the BJP has marked as “anti-nationals” or enemies of the state. The party cannot hope to control its radicalised supporters from carrying out the violent tasks that their leaders have openly articulated. The BJP’s short-term desire to win elections could have incendiary, long-term consequences for Indian society.