Delhi riots: A setback for India
In a way, the Delhi riots in which both the communities suffered were a culmination of the BJP’s longstanding perceived animus against the Muslims. So far as the BJP was concerned, the outbreak was a reaction to the twomonth-long sit-in by Muslim women in
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) response to the Delhi riots is slowly becoming clear. It is in line with the trademark nonchalance which marks its attitude even when things go wrong, as in the case of demonetisation.
Now, when the Narendra Modi government and the party are facing widespread criticism in the media at home and abroad on the communal violence, the BJP has apparently decided to blame the opposition for instigating the riots, as Home Minister Amit Shah’s speech at a rally in Odisha showed.
A right-wing scribe has even squarely put the responsibility for the outbreak on the Muslims, who are accused of taking the opportunity of the presence in Delhi of foreign journalists accompanying US President Donald Trump to light the communal fires. Another scribe, of the same saffron hue, has taken not only the international media to task, but also their “brown coolies” in the Indian press for blaming the government.
While castigating the opposition and the Muslims, the BJP has steered clear of the incendiary speeches that were made during the campaign for the Delhi elections by stalwarts of the party like Minister of State for Finance Anurag Thakur, BJP MP Parvesh Verma, local BJP leader Kapil Mishra and others.
What this pugnacious tactic shows is that the BJP is not going to be apologetic about the perceived failures of Delhi Police and, consequently, of the Union home minister, who is in overall charge of the police in the national capital. Instead, the party’s apparent game plan is to turn the focus on the Opposition and the Muslims.
This bellicosity also explains why provocative slogans like “goli maaro, saalon ko” (shoot the bastards), which was Anurag Thakur’s contribution to the Delhi campaign, continue to be raised as during a “peace march” organized by the BJP in Delhi and during Amit Shah’s Kolkata rally. It is a safe bet that this threat of recourse to the gun against perceived “traitors” will be heard more and more in the run-up to the Bihar elections later this year.
The reason for the BJP’s confrontational stance is an adherence to the “aggression is the best form of defence” policy since the party has been caught on the wrong foot by the riots. However, given the opprobrium which the Modi government is receiving with each passing day, on issues ranging from Kashmir to the citizenship laws with the UN Human Rights Commission being the latest to join the chorus of criticism, the prime minister stressed the need for peace, unity and harmony at a meeting of the party MPs to bolster development.
But to steer the party back to “vikas” (development) from the “goli maaro” mood will be a herculean task. Moreover, this tack has been tried before with no one in the BJP evincing serious interest in Modi’s “sabka saath, sabka vikas” slogan of development for all to which he subsequently added the phrase, “sabka vishwas” or earning everyone’s trust, with the minorities seemingly in mind.
If all this sage advice fell on deaf ears, it is because the BJP has gone too far down the path of stigmatizing Muslims to change course. As is known, the targeting of the community began soon after Modi’s assumption of office in 2014 with lynching (along with the garlanding of a lynch mob by a Union minister), and the provocative programmes of ‘ghar wapsi’, or reconversion of Muslims to Hinduism, and love jehad, directed against Hindu-Muslim marriages becoming routine events.
In a way, the Delhi riots in which both the communities suffered were a culmination of the BJP’s longstanding perceived animus against the Muslims. So far as the BJP was concerned, the outbreak was a reaction to the two-month-long sitin by Muslim women in a Delhi working-class neighbourhood, Shaheen Bagh. How angry the party is over the demonstration can be gauged from some of the comments of its members like the Union minister, Giriraj Singh, who said that the protest site was a breeding ground of suicide bombers while the chief of the BJP’s West Bengal unit, Dilip Ghosh, wondered aloud why the women, a sizeable number of whom were grandmothers, were not dying in the cold when a hundred-odd people had died standing in queues during demonetization.
Since neither the “goli maaro” solution nor the rampages of masked goons as in Jawaharlal Nehru University were applicable in the case of the women, the BJP has been at a loss to understand just
how to deal with protests of this nature, where the normally reclusive Muslim women are playing a leading part. Since a forcible eviction of the protesters is not feasible, lest the BJP faces further criticism from the international media, the party has found itself in an unfamiliar situation of being helpless.
Its electoral position, too, is similar in view of the crushing defeat which the party has suffered in two successive elections in Delhi. Arguably, the BJP may have thought that the pomp and pageantry associated with Donald Trump’s visit would divert attention from its electoral reverses, not to mention the continuing economic slump.
The party must have also drawn considerable satisfaction from the US president’s extravagant praise for Modi, calling him “exceptional” and “incredible”. These accolades were in line with Trump’s earlier description of Modi as the “father of India” and a “great gentleman”.
However, the effect of all the hyperbole was nullified by the riots which were raging even as Air Force One was still on the tarmac. Although the visits of American presidents have sometimes coincided with violence as when Sikh families were massacred in Kashmir during Bill Clinton’s visit in the year 2000. But those were acts of Islamic terrorists who wanted to show that the Kashmir issue was still alive.
But the Delhi riots were different, with the ground being prepared by the toxic speeches made by the BJP leaders during the campaign which were invariably echoed by the other side. The situation was compounded by the failures of Delhi Police which aroused suspicion that the force had been instructed to go easy on the Hindu mobs, as in Gujarat in 2002. Little wonder that a Kolkata newspaper wrote: ‘Neros dine while the Gujarat model comes to Delhi’.
The mention of the Roman emperor, who was said to have played the fiddle while Rome burned, recalled the Supreme Court’s obiter dicta about a “modern-day Nero” in Gujarat (Modi was the state’s chief minister then) and the dinner referred to the state banquet in Trump’s honour hosted by the President of India, Ramnath Kovind.
As the Delhi situation threatened to go out of hand, the government took the unprecedented step of calling in the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval, to restore order. Doval was last seen having street food in front of downed shop shutters in a deserted Srinagar street to show that “normalcy” had returned to Kashmir. His task in Delhi was also to restore normalcy.
However, the Modi-Shah duo, far from being apologetic about the riots, decided to
brazen it out and have, in fact, blamed the Opposition, particularly the Congress, for preparing the ground for it. In his statement in Parliament, Shah said there was “prima facie evidence that the riots were a pre-planned conspiracy...” “It borders UP from where 300 criminals were brought in as part of a sinister conspiracy to organise violence during the visit of US President Donald Trump,” Shah declared. He alleged that “more than 60 social media accounts were created specifically to create communal violence between February 22 and 26”.
Shah promised that the perpetrators would receive exemplary punishment, saying none of the guilty will be spared “no matter which religion, caste or political party they belong to”. When asked about the community-wise death count in the riots, Shah said. “I don’t believe in HinduMuslim. 52 Indians have been killed in the Delhi riots. Will we divide this Parliament on the basis of religion?”
It is now more than evident that the government has decided to put the riots behind them, though it is implicit in their statement that they see it as a blot on governance. The sharp international reaction has also made the government possibly realise that an ideology-driven majoritarian agenda might ultimately fetch it diminishing returns, though External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar sought to dismiss critical response to its domestic policies as the government now realising who its “real friends” were and who were not. But as an envoy from an Islamic country put it, although recent policy actions and events in India might not impair long-term international ties with the Muslim world, as even Islamic countries did not speak in one voice, “India will never be seen in the same light again”.