The reason is that I am going to say today in absolutely clear language that the Prime Minister is demeaning himself and India with the latest twist that his campaign has taken.
Writing a political column is fraught with difficulties in these days of social media. Two-rupee trolls who manage to string one sentence together think they have become political commentators and spend their time attacking people like me. Perhaps because they believe they should be writing a column in The Indian Express? Who knows? If I write something that sounds like criticism of the Congress Party, I am accused of ‘hatred’ for the Gandhi family. If I write something that sounds like criticism of Narendra Modi, the charges become scarier. They range from being a ‘Pakistani agent’ to being anti-Hindu and anti-India.
Now that the Lok Sabha election has begun, the trolls have become virulently verbose. Critiques of this column are sometimes longer than the column itself. Since they are always written with the supreme confidence that only fools have, they sound credible to those who have no idea what political analysis is. So, there are many on social media who dare me to respond to these diatribes. This is never going to happen. Last week, it was Congress trolls who vented their fury at me. By this evening, I anticipate that it will be the Modi fan club that is going to be in belligerent mood.
The reason is that I am going to say today in absolutely clear language that the Prime Minister is demeaning himself and India with the latest twist that his campaign has taken. I could hardly believe my ears last week when I heard him say that Pakistan wants the Congress ‘Shahzada’ to win. He based this bizarre charge on the premise that some obscure politician who was a minister in Imran Khan’s government had praised Rahul Gandhi. This obsession with Pakistan gives the Islamist Republic more credit than it deserves. And it negates the years of diplomacy spent by us on trying to de-hyphenate India from Pakistan. We are no longer on the same playing field. If Modi wants to show that he is truly a leader with a ‘56” chest’ then let him take China on instead.
More worrying is the way Modi has demonised our own Muslim citizens. This has debased the Prime Minister’s office. India has the world’s second largest Muslim population, after Indonesia, so calling our Muslim citizens ‘infiltrators’ is irresponsible, untrue, and very dangerous. Then there was Modi’s comment on how the Congress Party was going to steal gold and ‘mangalsutras’ from Indian women and redistribute this wealth to those ‘producing more children’. This comes from his Alma Mater. I once had many RSS friends and discovered over many post-shakha Punjabi breakfasts in Delhi that they were paranoid about India becoming a Muslim majority country because Muslims bred more children than Hindus. What an ordinary Sanghi can say cannot, and must not, be said by the Prime Minister because he is supposed to represent everyone. Not just Hindus.
Usually, it is women living in desperate poverty who have many children. Usually, it is because they are less literate and usually it is because they are coerced into loveless arranged marriages and coerced into producing lots of children. It is true that there are many more illiterate and desperately poor Muslim women in India, and this is because Islam has a peculiar allergy to women being educated. The extreme form of this is visible in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power.
Another reason why more Muslim women live in dire poverty is because in the glory days of ‘secularism’ when the Congress Party ruled supreme, Muslims were frightened into becoming a Congress vote bank but given no benefits. When Modi’s team bangs on about ‘tushtikaran’ (appeasement), they deliberately ignore this ugly reality. There was a moment when the Prime Minister himself admitted that there were Muslim communities who were ‘pasmaanda’ or backward and it seemed as if he would go ahead and help these sections with special schemes. This did not happen.
The real question is why Modi has suddenly rediscovered the nastiest and most divisive aspect of Hindutva? If it is to consolidate the Hindu vote for the next five rounds of polling, then he is doing exactly what Congress did. He rails against ‘vote bank politics’ but is playing the same game. What should worry Modi is the charge from Rahul Gandhi that he is resorting to communal politics because he has ‘gone into a panic’. The man who appears confident that on June 4 the results will bring the Congress Party back to power recently said that he has information that the BJP will be reduced to 150 seats in the next Lok Sabha.
This is not what the polls indicate. It is not what I have picked up on my travels but who knows what can happen? Indian voters are notoriously secretive about who will get their vote. But for the moment, Modi appears to be throwing away his own lead in this election, by bringing up issues that matter only to the worst kind of Indian voters. If this election has a single big issue, it is Modi himself. People who plan to vote for him say it is because they believe he will keep his promise of making India a developed country. Those who will be voting against him say this is because they believe that he has failed to deliver on that promise of ‘achche din’ that he made in 2014.
