Jharkhand poll result a wake-up call for BJP

Saba Naqvi

Senior Journalist

THE Jharkhand Assembly election outcome should shake the BJP national leadership’s belief that the NRC-CAA could be the next big ideological issue in its journey to the 2024 General Election. Even as the result came in, state BJP leaders admitted that the 27 per cent Adivasis of the state, plus migrants on Jharkhand’s border with West Bengal, were as spooked at the idea of producing documentation to prove citizenship as Muslims are believed to be. In other words, Home Minister Amit Shah’s obsession with NRC-CAA damaged the BJP electorally instead of helping it.

When you follow a Google map route to the Hindu Rashtra, sometimes the vehicle can land in a ditch as roads in the Indian countryside are not clearly mapped and new dirt lanes keep appearing. Having abolished Article 370 and put Kashmir in a lockdown in August, having got the go-ahead for Ram Mandir in November and enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December, the BJP may have thought it was cruising towards that Hindu Rashtra.

Things may have been on course from the BJP till the overkill began with the police action on the Jamia Millia campus on December 15 in Delhi. As videos of choking, bleeding, terrified students were circulated, a nationwide and spontaneous protest began on campuses, led by outraged young people. The next encircling of a campus within 24 hours, that of Aligarh Muslim University, was therefore done after an Internet shutdown.

The psychology that has brought India to this brink thinks of Hindus and Muslims in absolute monolithic terms. That is why the first mistake was made in Assam where the problem is between the Assamese and Bengalis, thereby making the regional identity more significant than the religious. Yet the BJP has persevered, and erred in seeing everything from a Hindu-Muslim prism, not recognising that the poor, regardless of faith, are scared of the very idea of more documentation.

The ongoing protests by students and citizens alarms the BJP precisely because it is not framed in sectarian terms. First, some of the BJP’s own supporters were not happy seeing young students brutalised. Second, it were not just the Muslims who were out there, but ordinary citizens, be it historian Ramachandra Guha, the epitome of high-caste liberal intellectual, or the gritty Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad. Even celebrity writer Chetan Bhagat, normally generous to the BJP, was complaining and asked the party to fix the economy instead!

The traditional ‘enemy’ — Muslim clerics and community leaders — were hardly fanning the fire but were in fact trying to play the government’s hand by cautioning the people against protesting. In fact, nothing was happening on the basis of the usual binaries.

But in the second stage of the protest, the BJP has returned to familiar territory. In Uttar Pradesh towns, there is a crackdown in Muslim areas and around 20 people are reported to be dead. The cadre of the Sangh Parivar has been mobilised to organise counter rallies and counter attack, with the help of the police. There is a clear design to what is unfolding: Deaths have so far only been reported from the BJP states though the protests continue nationwide.

Where does the BJP itself believe it has landed? Party insiders insist that in the long run, the CAA fits into the ideological agenda and there are over four years left for the Modi government. They say that in UP, the blowback against the Muslim community is gestating through WhatsApp groups as the sight of angry Muslims protesters reinforces Hindu sentiment. They say that the violence unleashed on Muslims has popular sanction and the cadre is now motivated to fight back. They add that after a riot-like situation, it is always the Muslims that are disenfranchised while the BJP always benefits.

In a nutshell, the BJP has used the protests as a pretext for clamping down on Muslims and disenfranchising them in the nation’s largest state. In a move that has even more frightening consequences than an NRC, UP CM Yogi Adityanath has declared that property and assets of rioters would be seized, this in a situation where it is hard to make out who is the rioter or is a protestor being profiled as such or merely an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time? It also leaves the ordinary Muslims at the mercy of a state that is already hostile to them and a police force that has traditionally discriminated against them.

In communally sensitive Muzaffarnagar, that saw vicious riots in 2013, the state has, according to news reports, begun the process of sealing minority-owned shops in two localities, where violence took place, after the BJP and RSS cadres descended. The administration has also declared that it would use the draconian NSA in the state. With some determination and use of state machinery, the BJP has partly succeeded in making this about Hindus versus Muslims.

Yet the students still insist it is not so and they too appear to be determined. Across India, they are raising slogans about saving the country for everybody. They are stressing the diversity of India, the federalism of the Union. They are reading from the Constitution, carrying printouts of the preamble.

For all the bravado, the BJP knows that the script is not in its control. The underwhelming performance in Jharkhand comes at a time when India’s pre-eminent party has just been dumped by its closest ideological ally, the Shiv Sena, in Maharashtra. In political terms, there are consequences in NDA allies speaking up against the CAA and refusing to implement NRC in their states. Will Bihar CM Nitish Kumar stay within the NDA or demand a bigger share of seats after the Jharkhand result?

There are consequences too in the international condemnation and strained relationships with neighbours in the region. That is why the PM spoke out at a Delhi rally on Sunday and appeared to step back from the hardline position on NRC/CAA, repeatedly articulated by Home Minister Amit Shah.

What the BJP has now been confronted with is the multiplicity of Indian identities and it is still trying to brazen its way out of the maze. Fundamentally, the NRC-CAA debacle emerged out of Assam and was targeted at West Bengal where the BJP has ambitions of toppling the Mamata Banerjee regime when the Assembly polls take place in 2021. A BJP strategist shares the following calculation: In Bengal, the BJP would like to see one crore people (Muslims) disenfranchised through NRC while 50 lakh (Hindus) could become citizens through the CAA, all before the Assembly polls. But if Jharkhand is an indicator, it may be politically naive for the BJP to even attempt the NRC in West Bengal.