BJP needs to address loss of credibility of top leaders

Julio Ribeiro

MORE than the defeat suffered in the Assembly elections in Delhi, the BJP should mourn the loss of credibility of its two top leaders. This loss of credibility has resulted in a piquant situation where even economic data collectors and health workers moving from door to door to vaccinate children are treated with suspicion and sometimes manhandled.

When did the loss of credibility start? Over a long period of time, some may say, but I would mark the successful operation in J&K as the moment. Paramilitary troops were inducted on the pretext that there was an immediate threat to the Amarnath Yatra pilgrims based on reliable information. Tourists, both Indian and foreign, were bundled out of the state en masse in what one would call a well-conceived police operation planned by a clever policeman.

This may have lulled Kashmiri political leaders to believe the Governor and other functionaries who denied any bigger, sinister intent. The Abdullahs and the Muftis were turned into sitting ducks for subsequent incarceration. It was an operation that would put the policeman who conceived of the plan on a lofty pedestal but severely strained the credibility of his political masters.

The peace of the graveyard has descended on the erstwhile state and that ‘peace’ continues to date! The top politicians involved gained immediate and extensive approval in the rest of the country, fed up of the daily dose of stone throwing and worse reported from the Valley. But the next strategic step of the duo taken in the quest of a Hindu Rashtra met with instant adverse reaction from half or even more than half the country.

This rebellious half, consisting mostly of once-subjugated women of the Muslim community, was supported by Left-leaning intellectuals, disgruntled youth and large sections of the majority community routinely dubbed ‘anti-national’ by BJP spokespersons. Thousands came out instantly on to the streets of cities all over India, surprising the unflappable Narendra Modi. He who thought that he had the country’s people on a leash was taken aback by the vehemence of the reaction!

The real strength of this silent and mostly peaceful revolution was the fact that not many were prepared to believe the two leaders when they declared that the CAA was a very compassionate and much-delayed attempt to right the past wrongs inflicted on Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians, wanting to migrate to a Hindu India from three Muslim majority neighbouring countries. They asserted that no Indian Muslim needed to fear the emerging exercise of the NRC that Amit Shah had threatened!

The problem lay in the fact that every Muslim would have to prove his Indianness and that would be difficult if no documents were available with the unlettered and indigent Indian Muslims living on the razor’s edge. Visions of Assam and the detention camps possibly led them to decide that ‘enough is enough’.

No one objects to Hindus and others from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan obtaining citizenship in India. Why should anyone object? That has been going on ever since the Partition. Tens of thousands have been granted citizenship in the past seven decades. The rub lay in the openly stated intent of directly telling Muslims that they were not welcome in this country by deleting any mention of their community from CAA.

Even that would not have resulted in this sustained and open revolt if Shah had not consistently said that the NRC would follow the CAA in all parts of the country. He even said this in Parliament. The Prime Minister, in an unaccustomed defensive move, proclaimed that NRC had never been on the minds of the party’s leaders! No one believed him! It is this loss of credibility that I feel he needs to address if he wants to restore his place in the hearts of the great majority of the country’s residents.

In the meantime, the decennial census of the population is due in 2021. The government wants to start the process by preparing an NPR — National Population Register — beginning from April 1, 2020. Many states have decided not to cooperate. How this open defiance of the Centre pans out is another unfortunate happening that the BJP has brought upon itself.

It did not meticulously plan the introduction of the CAA after extensive consultation with the states, as it should have. It pushed the legislation through obviously with the initial intent of proving its Hindu credentials to Hindus from Bangladesh languishing in limbo (some even in detention camps) in Assam. It became emboldened, or rather its former president Amit Shah, now the country’s Home Minister, became so emboldened as to declare unilaterally, and without any contradiction from the Prime Minister at that stage, that the Assam experiment of the NRC would be extended to the rest of the country.

The loss of credibility of its top leaders is going to make it hard for the BJP to convince opponents of CAA and NRC and the several Opposition states who have thrown in the gauntlet that they have nothing to fear from the CAA, the threatened NRC and the questions posed in the NPR about places of birth of their parents. The last question, in particular, is very, very loaded!