Bihar Politics: Modi’s Weakening Grip and the Strategy of Outrage
History ought to record the circumstance that when Sonia Gandhi was dubbed “widow of the Congress party” and a “Jersey cow” to boot, her nobility of mind held her back from taking the egregious insults to the people for any political transaction.
Nor did the superlative intellectual, Shashi Tharoor, also of the Congress party, allow the equally vulgar insult heaped on his late wife (a girl friend of Rs 50 crore standing she was called, again by the same personality) allow that below-the-belt obscenity to influence his approval of whatever good the hurler of that abuse may have done in his view.
But we are now led by our own Coriolanus who thinks nothing of displaying his wounds to the meekest and the most impressionable in the hope of dividends, even when there is no evidence yet that the wound has been inflicted by anyone connected to his permanent bug-bear, the grand old party.
A researcher might find much additional material were she/he to seek out the appellations bestowed on Rahul Gandhi, his great-grand father Nehru and his grandmother Indira through the years by the motor mouths of the right-wing.
Not to speak of abuse articulated by ruling party scions at opponents within the hallowed precincts of parliament house – sample how Shri Ramesh Bidhuri profiled Shri Danish Ali in one such session.
What is different in our day is of course a media world, with one or two honourable exceptions, that is more than willing to splash the abuse voiced from the Patna stage long after Rahul and Tejashwi had left the venue as an offence not against one man but, you guessed it, the whole nation comprising 140 crore people.
You may have noticed that the most telling polemical trick of the ruling establishment is always in any matter to invoke ‘sara desh’ (the entire nation) to endorse or deride whatever suits the ruling intent – as if referendums were held on the instant on every such issue within hours of the next broadcast.
All this is of course understandable.
Just two months or so before the elections are due in Bihar, the Voter Adhikar Yatra (march in support of the right to vote) of the INDIA bloc of opposition parties has been a massive success.
Not only has the Supreme Court held up for the most part the validity of the charges voiced by the political opposition against the modus operandi of the Election Commission, but the force of the exposures pertaining to the Mahadevapura constituency in Karnataka made by Rahul Gandhi with fact and figure has gone down to the last man during the Yatra, especially among the less fortunate and most discriminated sections of the Bihar electorate.
Day after day, the ruling combine of the BJP and the Janata Dal (United) has been at sixes and sevens, unable to counter the enormities underscored by the said exposure and by the gauche rejoinders from the commission.
As at the time of the last Lok Sabha elections when the threat to constitutional rights was made an issue by the opposition, the seemingly valid criticism that voters once eliminated from the list would stand to lose their rights and endowments as citizens has been successfully messaged during the course of the yatra.
The fright within the ruling camp is thus more than understandable.
As is now the fact that the lumpen imprecation hurled at the Patna event has provided a tool to the ruling party to go to town with, hoping that the petulant plaint draws all the tears it can.
Indeed, it was said that tears could already be seen in the pupils of women in the audience as that grouse was being shared with astute epithets of hurt.
Nor is this a small eventuality for the INDIA bloc.
Everything will depend on how the opposition is able or not able to consolidate at the grass-roots level, and day after day, the strong messaging that the Yatra has powerfully disseminated.
These are days when, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “The best lack all conviction/And the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
In Independent India no one, but on one, has been as adept at plying that “passionate intensity” as Narendra Modi; and in Bharat, appeals to maternal instincts can be a great counter to fact and reason, never mind how mothers and women in general are treated by patriarchs, within and outside families in public spaces.
Elections here now have turned at the last moment on precisely such split-second eventualities; recall the Pulwama episode, and the “surgical strike” – evidence that a moment’s “happening” can cancel years of hard labour on behalf of sanity and truth.
It might be a good idea for the opposition to seek to determine, without loss of time, who this lout is who has spoken ill of the prime minister’s mother, no matter where the facts of his profile lead.
It has not gone without notice that Shri Modi as a leader is today rather a diminished one, certainly from a global standpoint.
Electoral victories at home will then be one recourse to refurbish his uncontested status as the chief protector of Bharat Mata rubbishing every criticism that may be thrown at him, however justly.
Fraught times may be here to stay awhile.
Tailpiece
News comes that the bandh call given by the ruling BJP in Bihar for September 4 fell conspicuously flat, inducing BJP workers to turn on ordinary passersby, including, ironically, women, for not joining in.
This is indeed a revelatory happening, suggestive of the failure of the BJP to find a popular counter to the clout of the opposition-organised march for protecting the right to vote.
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