Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s copybook, BJP president Amit Shah on Wednesday, taunted the opposition in the ongoing Uttar Pradesh elections, and added up their initials to form KASAB, the lone surviving Pakistani gunman who brought Mumbai to its knees in the 2008 attacks.
Ye Uttar Pradesh ki janata is baar ke chunav mein is ‘Kasab’ se mukti paa le. Main phir se bolta hun, Uttar Pradesh ki janata is baar ke chunav mein is ‘Kasab’ se mukti paa le. ‘Kasab’ se mera matlab kuch aur mat nikaliyega. Kasab se mera matlab hai: Ka se Congress, Sa se Samajwadi Party aur B se… (BSP), (The people of Uttar Pradesh should rescue themselves from ‘Kasab’. Meaning, Ka for Congress, Sa for Samajwadi Party, and B for BSP).Amit Shah at a rally in Chauri Chaura, 22 February 2017
‘BJP Has Become Desperate’: Ashis Nandy
Only last week, in Fatehpur, Modi told in an election rally that governments should stop appeasing minorities and discriminating between castes. This is what the Samajwadi Party has been doing for the last five years, he added.
“Agar gaon mein kabristan hai, toh shamshan ghat bhi hona chahiye. Agar Ramzan pe bijli milti hai, to Diwali pe bhi milni chahiye…(if there is a graveyard in the village, then there should be a cremation ground too; if electricity is freely available during Ramzan, then it should be freely available during Diwali too)” the PM said, communalising the pitch of the election campaign.
But he had set the pace on his first rally in UP itself, on 4 February, asking people not to vote for SCAM, the acronym referring to the Samajwadi Party, Congress, Akhilesh and Mayawati.
“The BJP has become desperate,” renowned sociologist and political thinker Ashis Nandy told this reporter, adding, “India is an old civilisation. The people don’t get taken in. The honeymoon period lasts for about three years. If they don’t see change within this time, they move on.”
Also Read: With Polarisation in West UP, Will BJP Repeat Its 2014 Landslide?
Perfecting Timing of Communal Metaphors
Truth is, the PM is still very popular in UP. But in the state election, the BJP doesn’t have one local face who could be the Chief Minister. There’s Uma Bharati, Keshav Prasad Maurya, Kalraj Mishra, Yogi Adityanath…the list is endless.
Check the dates of these speeches. Modi made his speech just a day before the third phase of the UP election on 19 February, when the central Awadh belt – from Mainpuri and Etawah to Sitapur and Lucknow went to the polls. Amit Shah’s speech on 22 February came one day before the fourth phase voted in the Bundelkhand region.
The third phase was critical for the BJP. The first two phases had large Muslim populations, so Modi-Shah were not willing to risk a division of the spoils. In the third phase, in the heart of the Akhilesh Yadav fiefdom, the BJP leaders clearly decided to go for broke. Modi’s #Kabristan-Shamshan and #Diwali-Ramzan metaphors were intended to polarise the third phase.
Also Read: By Mythical Sarayu in Gorakhpur, a Shamshaan Ghat and a Kabristan
‘Tipu’ Akhilesh Yadav’s Reaction
But Akhilesh Yadav, having challenged his own father for the throne of UP, knows he has to beat his powerful opponent at his own game. Within a day, the Samajwadi Party government had issued a list of 11 religious shrines, cutting across religious lines, which get electricity on a 24-hour basis from the government.
These are : Jain Mandir in Hastinapur, Deoband, Shukratal in Muzaffarnagar, Panch Pyaara in Hastinapur, Dargah Najab-i-Hind in Najibabad, Bijnore, Deva Sharif in Barabanki, Vrindavan/Mathura, Nami Sharyan in Sitapur, Dargah Kichona Sharif in Ambedkarnagar, Sarnath/Varanasi, and Kasia, in Kushinagar.
Question is, whether this is a pointer to the SP-Congress alliance losing some of its steam? And whether the rest of the campaign will witness a further degeneration of language, sometimes a manifestation of how the wind is turning?
Climbdown from 2014’ ‘Vikas’ Pitch
Clearly, both Modi and Shah don’t want to leave any stone unturned. In 2014, the slogan that captured the Modi wave was a positive, forward-looking one-liner : Abki baar, Modi sarkar. The people of UP voted with both their hands, giving BJP 71 seats out of the 80, and added another two to their kitty, when the Apna Dal merged with the party.
An unprecedented combined vote share of 43.3 percent in UP enabled the storming of the Parliament citadel. Breaking down the elements of that vote, it was clear that the BJP, ably supported by the RSS, was seeking a reverse communalisation of the Hindu vote. As Modi campaigned across the state, “vikas” or development became the code for plea that the voter’s Hindu identity should be a key element in his voting behaviour.
A senior RSS functionary admitted as much at the time. “All of you talk about how UP’s 19 percent Muslims will never vote for Modi or that its 21 percent Dalits prefer Behenji Mayawati,” he said, referring to the BSP chief. “But we showed you that we don’t need the Muslims to win an election. And that we persuaded the Dalits to believe that they are Hindu first,” he said.
Also Read: UP Will Vote for Those Who Practice New Kind of Politics: Ashutosh
Both BJP and SP Aware of Shortcomings
As the UP election moves towards the Poorvanchal, the BJP view is that the election is tied neck and neck, at about 90-95 seats, each for itself and for the alliance. The party knows it cannot match its vote share or seats it won in the 2014 election, while the SP is aware it will be difficult to come close to the 224 seat win it had crafted in 2012.
Uttar Pradesh is still up for grabs. SCAM or KASAB, the alphabet soup of political abbreviation has clearly not been exhausted by the BJP’s seniormost leaders.
Also Read: Inside Mayawati’s Quest to Unite UP’s Dalits
(The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi and writes on the overlap between domestic politics and foreign affairs. She can be reached @jomalhotra. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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