Haryana victory has emboldened Modi to gaslight Congress

The BJP’s overall aim is to somehow make the Congress give up its core and longstanding principles of secularism in politics.

Buoyed by a second wind, the results of the Haryana Assembly elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost no time in launching a fusillade against the Congress. He found an opportunity to do so at the virtual launch of developmental projects of over Rs 76,000 crore for election-going Maharashtra.

The charges were completely absurd. He accused the Congress of being “the largest factory of hate”, indulging in hate politics every day, fully engaged in communal and caste politics, using “divide and rule” to gain power, instigating farmers, misleading youth and women, doing away with Dalit reservation to give it to “their own vote bank”, and being supported by an ecosystem of “Urban Naxalites” (an amorphous term for those in the cities who support use of violence for political change). He suggests that the Congress is virtually the party of Muslims as its strategy is to “keep Muslims in fear, convert them into a vote bank, and strengthen that vote bank”.

Modi seemed to be appropriating accusations normally aimed at his party and directing them towards his main adversary, the Congress.

In reality, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Hindutva flotilla of organisations that guards the political mothership are by far the largest factories of hate. Modi himself has regularly spun-out campaign rhetoric which sails daringly close to hate speech targeting the Muslim community in every election. The party’s rise to power has been entirely based on the core plank of dividing Indian voters along communal lines.

The BJP is also not above caste politics. It overruled claimants for the chief minister’s post in Madhya Pradesh and Haryana in favour of OBC candidates because it wanted to appeal to caste sentiments. By constantly championing the leadership role of Kumari Selja, a Congress leader in Haryana, and claiming that the Congress was anti-Dalit and ignored Dalit interests, the BJP appealed to caste sentiments to consolidate the non-Jat castes in its favour.

It was the BJP which instigated the farmers’ protests by bringing in the three farm laws without consultation with the stakeholders. It further angered the farmers by blocking roads to Delhi by putting concrete blocks and spikes on the highway, and claiming that they were following a Khalistani agenda.

Does youth have to be ‘misled’ when the government has failed to create the two crore jobs a year that it had promised, and has now turned jobs in the Indian Armed forces, once a sure path of upward social mobility, into temporary contractual jobs?

By refusing to act against its party leader it was the BJP which misled and angered the women of Haryana molesting young women wrestlers. The BJP instilled fear among the Muslim community by facilitating the growth of Hindu cow protection militias in North India that target Muslims over beef.  

Muslims are attacked for offering prayers in public places but public highways are blocked for Hindu Kanwariyas and the State machinery showers rose petals on them from helicopters.

The BJP has also raised fears among the Hindu community of demographic swamping of India’s Hindu population, by ‘love jihad’ and religious conversion. It has institutionalised the Muslim apprehensions about citizenship laws by bringing in the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and promising a National Register of Citizens (NRC). Its leaders have given a call for repealing the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act 1919 which froze the status of all religious places of worship as they existed in August 1947 ((except the Babri masjid site) and prohibits their conversion to any other faith.

It has used Hindu appeasement by its propaganda about triple-talaq, converting the inauguration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya into a State-facilitated event with Modi participating in the rituals for the consecration of the temple. The party’s government at the Centre is now attempting to put non-Muslims on Waqf boards managing Muslim endowment properties by trying to bring in the Waqf Amendment Bill. All this is to frighten the Muslims and appease the majority Hindu community.

So, Modi reversal of charges against his political adversary is pure gaslighting. By ‘blaming and shaming’ the Congress and its supporters he perhaps hopes to escape responsibility for his own and his party’s divisive rhetoric. Perhaps it helps to project himself as someone inclusive, rational, and secular versus a pathologically communal Congress. In effect, it disguises his deliberately divisive politics which has paved his party’s political ascendency — from Gujarat to New Delhi.

The Haryana election victory has encouraged Modi to once again engage in a systematic knocking down of the Congress, deliberately trying to control the public narrative by virtue of the office he holds and the public forums his office allows him to control.

The aim seems to somehow make people believe that there is something wrong in the way the Congress practices politics, and there is a deep flaw in the way the party is. Through such arguments, Modi almost seems to suggest that seeking the votes of the minority community is a politically immoral act, even if it is for a legitimate political party.

Will the vicious gaslighting, amplified by his party’s trolls and the shouting brigade on some mainstream media succeed in making the Congress lose confidence, feel insecure, and experience doubts and shakiness about their secular beliefs? That this is happening to some extent is evident from the fact that there are Congressmen who often blame its pro-Muslim image for its dismal electoral performance. The overall aim is to somehow make the Congress give up its core and longstanding principles of secularism in politics.

The Haryana victory has allowed Modi to strut the public stage once again, deflecting blame from himself to others. This helps him avoid accountability for his communalism and his party’s political behaviour while trying to manipulate the behaviour of his political opponents.

Not only the Congress, but the other secular parties as well, will have to stand strong against such a manipulative narrative and keep the self-esteem of the parties and their supporters intact. They need to expose the perverse logic being used against them.

(Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.