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Copycats’ purr

There are great acts of magic realism happening in our political landscape as we head towards the General Election 2019. The Congress is trying to appear like the BJP and the BJP is trying to pretend that it could be the Congress on a bad day (A Congress led by Sardar Patel and not Jawaharlal Nehru).

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Saba Naqvi

There are great acts of magic realism happening in our political landscape as we head towards the General Election 2019. The Congress is trying to appear like the BJP and the BJP is trying to pretend that it could be the Congress on a bad day (A Congress led by Sardar Patel and not Jawaharlal Nehru). The phenomena I have in mind is mirroring, which means mimicking or copying the other. The Congress, in particular, is struggling to hit the right note that they imagine will connect with the Indian voter while the BJP’s impulse is to position itself in a manner so that allies could come around in a post-election scenario.

 Rahul Gandhi, a janeudhari Brahmin, is on a trek to Kailash Mansarovar. There’s obviously internet connectivity in the remote parts because he has been tweeting during what I had imagined as a solitary journey with moments of self-reflection. What we have is tweets of amazing vistas  with remarks such as “It is so humbling to be walking in the shadow of this giant” and “Shiva is the Universe”. 

 While Rahul has been harnessing the powers of Shiv bhakti, Kamal Nath, veteran Congress MP and one of the likely candidates for the Madhya Pradesh CM should the eventuality arises, has discovered the wisdom of cow bhakti. He has promised to build a gaushala in each panchayat in the state whose people should be reassured that come the Congress or BJP, cows will have a roof over their heads. 

 Kamal Nath, too, has posted his intentions on Twitter, so there is a strategy here and not idiocy as some have suggested. The Congress is going to some lengths to say that it is not a Muslim-loving party, but a Hindu-loving party and that too with some blue-blooded Brahmins ruling the roost (party’s chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala put up a little side-show when he declared at a gathering of Brahmins that the Congress had a Brahmin DNA). Obviously, the terms of the debate have been set by the BJP and the Congress is being forced to act accordingly. Still it’s not as if the “Hindu-ness” was missing in the past. 

In fact Kamal Nath better watch it; his own party colleague could give him stiff competition in the “I-love-cows-more-than-you” department.  Let me share a revealing anecdote from 16 years’ ago: In 2002 just before he was defeated by the Uma Bharti-led BJP in Madhya Pradesh, two-term Congress CM Digvijay Singh declared that he drank a litre of gaumutra (cow urine) every day and said it would be available in Bhopal for Rs 6 a litre. Then too, he was responding to the idiom and grammar of a contest determined by the BJP.

But returning to 2018, the Congress exertions are taking place at the time when the BJP is finding its construct of Hindus as a monolith being challenged. On the day that metropolitan India was celebrating the striking down of Section 377, the media gave scant attention to a bandh called by the Swaran Sena, allied to organisations that seek to represent Kshatriya and Brahmin rights. The protest was called against the amendment to the SC/ST Act passed by the Modi government.

This was deemed necessary as the SC had earlier struck down the strict provision of mandatory arrest under this Act. This led to Dalit protests and the impression that the BJP-RSS dispensation was somehow behind it. It was to change this perception that the amendment was passed; but the BJP now finds that some of its lawmakers, cadre and voters are unhappy over this push back to the one chance to dilute the SC/ST Act that does defang upper castes from getting away with atrocities.  

There’s another project that’s simultaneously underway in the BJP: the veneration of Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was ignored in the last decade of his life, but has suddenly been resurrected after his death because he stands for coalition building. The idea is to suggest that should the numbers fall short, PM Modi could, if necessary, be reborn into a Vajpayee, the consensus builder. Magic realism, as I said, is all around us. 

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