While five states – two of East and three of South – are going to polls in the coming summer, the Bharatiya Janata Party is concentrating more on Assam and West Bengal and less on Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry.
On January 23 and 24 Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah toured Assam and West Bengal and virtually kick-started the election campaign. The saffron party apparently does not want to show that it was running away from the battleground states of South, but the party is not expecting much success in that part of the country.
In the East, especially in West Bengal there are many icons whom the party wants to appropriate, even though they were ideologically opposed to the views the BJP and RSS try to spread. Be it Swami Vivekanand, Rabindranath Tagore, and Netaji – or other 19th century Renaissance heroes of the then Bengal – they all preached a totally different philosophy.
But in the era after what some scholars call “End of History” it is really difficult to say as to how much respect the people really pay to the heroes of the past. Or they really get carried away by sloganeering.
Anyway, Assam and West Bengal are heading for a more interesting battle than that in the South where the BJP is not a big player, even though it is trying to make some inroads in Kerala and Tamil Nadu – in the latter in alliance with the ruling AIADMK.
In Assam both the Prime Minister and Home Minister avoided to touch the contentious issue of Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens even though the All Assam Students’ Union, which spearheaded the Assam movement against the outsiders in early 1980s, staged protest demonstration and burnt the copies of CAA. Incidentally, it was the first visit of Prime Minister Modi to Assam after the enactment of CAA.
The anti-CAA movement, which started within hours of Parliament passing the law in December 2019, turned violent leading to several deaths. The Centre had to abruptly cancel a Summit level meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his then Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, in Guwahati in the middle of December. Japan was to invest Rs 13,000 crore on the infrastructure sector in the North-East.
The recent visits of Modi and Shah might have galvanised the BJP workers in Assam, but at the same time revived the anti-CAA movement which had subsided after December 2019.
The enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act virtually split Asom Gana Parishad, the party which came into existence after the Assam Accord was signed between the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and AASU on August 15, 1985. It was the AASU leaders who formed AGP which later came to power. It was the AASU leader, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, who became the youngest elected chief minister of the country.
Ironically, the AGP is now in alliance with the BJP. The party is facing crisis with the leaders who are not in power demanding that the AGP should contest election alone. The new generation of AASU leadership too is against the BJP and had in December 2019 equated the enactment of CAA with the Mughal invasion of Assam in the 17th century. The AASU blames the BJP for not fulfilling the promises made in 2014, 2016 and 2019 elections.
On the other hand, another development had taken place in Assam with the Congress and All India United Democratic Front of Badruddin Ajmal joining hands. In 2016 the two parties could not form an alliance leading to the defeat of Congress under the leadership of the three-time chief minister Tarun Gogoi. He died a couple of months back.
Curiously, the government on the eve of the Republic Day announced Padma Bhushan award to late Gogoi. Political observers are of the view that this is a tactical move just ahead of the Assembly election. By honouring Gogoi, the BJP wants to woo the section of Assamese-speaking Hindus who still root for the Congress.
The problem with the Congress-led six-party alliance is that after the death of Tarun Gogoi on November 23 last there is no such towering leader left to lead the opposition. On the other hand, the BJP chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal has in a way established himself. As he had started his career in AASU and was its president for seven years in the 1990s, he is well aware of those second- generation leaders who are leading the agitation now.
Besides, a section of Congress leadership feels that by taking AIUDF, essentially considered a party of Bengali-speaking Muslims, the alliance may lose some Hindu votes. In the state with 34 per cent Muslim votes the BJP would like in West Bengal to try to polarise the election campaign. In his visit Amit Shah did play this card. Apart from this, the AIUDF has, over the years, grown weak, as many Muslims deem it better to shift to the Congress.
Though the BJP is apparently feeling confident, the problem with the party is that its alliance partner AGP has, over the years, lost much of its relevance and is facing the crisis of credibility.
But the BJP is sure that the CAA card may help it win the votes of Bengali-speaking Hindus of Assam and even West Bengal. This is notwithstanding the fact that in Assam out of the 19 lakh people who could not find their names in NRC more than 65 per cent were Hindus, mostly Bengali-speaking.
If the BJP bigwigs are avoiding to mention the CAA in Assam, it would be doing just the opposite in West Bengal.
Though the rank and file of the party is somewhat confident of coming to power after the extraordinary performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in which it won 18 out of 42 seats – against 22 by the ruling Trinamool Congress – some independent analysts are of the view that non-Bengali speaking leadership of the saffron party is unable to read the popular Bengali sentiment.
The Trinamool Congress leader and state chief minister Mamata Banerjee fully exploited this situation when she strongly protested and refused to speak at the main function organised by the Ministry of Culture to mark the 124th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose in Kolkata on January 23.
She was irked as a section of audience greeted her with Jai Shri Ram, Modi-Modi slogans when her turn came to speak. She quickly reminded that it is not the programme of any political party but an event held to pay respect to a freedom-fighter like Netaji. She concluded with Jai Hind, Jai Bangla slogan.
Jai Hind was the slogan adopted by Netaji’s Indian National Army in 1941. It was recommended by his secretary and interpreter, Major Zainul Abedin Hasan of INA. Major Hasan, originally from Hyderabad, went to Germany to study engineering.
Prime Minister Modi, who rose to speak, realised that Mamata had scored a point. So he started his speech chanting Jai Hind thrice. Three days later the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh said that it does not approve of the raising of slogan Jai Shri Ram at the Victoria Memorial function.