(This story was originally published on 19 February 2020. It has been republished from The Quint's archives amid debate over implementation of the Uniform Civil Code in light of the Law Commission's report and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's subsequent remarks in Madhya Pradesh.)
When a government becomes a victim of trust deficit, people start believing the nastiest speculations about it. And so it happened on the day (February 11) of counting of votes in the assembly elections in Delhi. All the exit polls, without any exception, had projected a clear win for the Aam Aadmi Party led by Arvind Kejriwal. They had also predicted a poor performance by the BJP, whose campaign was macro-planned and micro-managed by none other than Leader No. 2 in the party and the government.
On the eve of counting day, the supremely confident Leader No. 2 had even told a gathering of journalists in the capital—and this I’ve heard from unimpeachable sources—that the BJP was going to win “45 seats” in an assembly of 70. It ended up with eight.
Nevertheless, speculation surfaced on Twitter on the night of February 10—that Narendra Modi’s government was going to bring in the oft-promised Uniform Civil Code (UCC) the following morning. Many Twitterati suggested it was part of the government’s strategy of “headline management” (the famous words coined by Arun Shourie, one of the government’s trenchant critics). UCC, they reckoned, would knock the AAP off the media headlines the next day. In the end, it turned out to be a false alarm.