The anti-Muslim speeches in Haridwar in poll-bound Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh’s capital, Raipur, last December are not something new and unexpected. The only difference is that those who have uttered these words have gone a step ahead and openly talked about genocide against Muslims. Besides, those who took part in this venomous campaign include a person whose earlier name was Waseem Rizvi.
Though the Bharatiya Janata Party leaders enjoy total monopoly in such below-the-belt oratory yet it is also a fact that on the eve of every election a competition starts among the Sangh Parivar hotheads over who is a better Muslim-hater. And when they get an inkling that the saffron party is not going to perform well, they sharpen the rhetoric even further. So if this time they are crossing their own limit, one may draw the conclusion that the BJP is not going to do well in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Not to speak of the middle-rung leaders, even the top-brass appear to be panic and their body language suggests that they are not at all confident. So when the election campaign really kicks off, one may witness more such vitriolic attacks on Muslims. As UP has 19.3 per cent and Uttarakhand 13.9 per cent Muslim votes, the last – and of course the first too – weapon on which the BJP relies is nothing but polarisation.
But a close study of the past such actions of the BJP leaders reveals that the hate-speeches alone do not fetch the desired number of votes. They need some other issues as well as different strategy to emerge as victorious. For example, in 2017 Assembly poll in Uttar Pradesh it was not only ‘shamshaan’ (crematorium) and ‘qabristan’ (graveyard) which had worked. In the election speeches then Prime Minister Narendra Modi had referred to the preference given to the maintenance of graveyards in comparison to crematoriums by the then government of the state.
Actually the BJP fully exploited the rift between the then chief minister Akhilesh Singh Yadav and his father Mulayam Singh Yadav. Not only that there was incumbency factor which went against the then ruling Samajwadi Party. The hatemongering further helped the saffron party.
But this formula did not yield result in West Bengal as the BJP had nothing to offer but just polarise the political atmosphere. The party was organisationally weak in the state and there was no figure to match the stature of chief minister Mamata Banerjee. So all the moves backfired and the saffron party had to suffer a humiliating defeat though the state had 27 per cent Muslim population.
In the states where the Muslim population is not too substantial the hate-speeches usually do not work as a magic. As India has shifted from the one-party system – which it was till 1977 – to multi-party one there is already a scope for the growth of an alternative party. In the absence of any other option, the BJP was the best suited to fill this vacuum at the national level. At the state-level, other regional parties emerged equally strong at various places.
But whenever a third party or alliance had emerged at the national level, the people have voted for it. Take the example of 1989 Lok Sabha poll in which the BJP tried its level best to communalise by leading the most vicious campaign against the Muslims, sparking off riots at many places – the most infamous one at Bhagalpur. Yet the voters reposed more faith on V.P. Singh, a relatively new figure in comparison to the BJP strongman Lal Krishna Advani. Within a short span of two years and a half the former made alleged corruption in Bofors purchase an election issue. The BJP, notwithstanding all the wherewithal could win only 88 seats against V.P. Singh’s newly-formed Janata Dal 140-odd seats.
Even at the height of the Mandir-Mandal movement in 1991 and later in 1996 the BJP could not come to power at the Centre. In 1998 it could win 183 seats and with the help of alliance partners form the government simply because the Congress under the then party chief Sitaram Kesari bungled up the whole political scenario. He not only brought down in quick succession of 11 months each the then United Front government under H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, but at the same time failed to make his own party strong enough to come to power. Needless to mention, the Congress was lending the outside support to the then two United Front governments between 1996 and 1998.
So the BJP came to power in 1998 only when it toned down its hardline stand and thus became acceptable to other centrist parties. Instead of Advani it had to put forward a relatively moderate face, Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the Prime Minister.
The party was voted out of power in 2004, that is only two years after the Gujarat riots. But when it bounced back to power in 2014, it was not only on the basis of the anti-Muslim campaign. No doubt the saffron party always used anti-Muslim rhetoric yet the truth is that it came to power simply because of the massive propaganda and campaign against the Manmohan Singh government. The latter failed to counter the charge of corruption levelled against it from all sides. The BJP, with the help of the media, fully exploited this situation. Thus anti-Muslim hate speeches alone would not have brought it to power.
In 2022 Assembly elections in seven states – five in February and March – and in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh in December – it is the BJP which has to face the anti-incumbency heat in all of them except Punjab.
In Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand the ghost of ‘shamshaan’ and ‘qabristan’ is likely to haunt the party this time. This simply because thousands of Hindus had to literally bury the bodies of their loved ones in the second wave of coronavirus in the summer of 2021 as the government not only failed to provide treatment to them, but had failed to make proper arrangement for the last rites. Apart from this, the big rise in price of essential commodities and farmers’ movement are going to have their impact on the election in both these two BJP-ruled states.
As the use of religion and anti-Muslim hate-speeches alone do not work in favour of the BJP, the latter has started realising that it is not too easy for it this time.