NewsClick

NewsClick
  • हिन्दी
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Covid-19
  • Science
  • Culture
  • India
  • International
  • Sports
  • Articles
  • Videos
search
menu

INTERACTIVE ELECTION MAPS

image/svg+xml
  • All Articles
  • Newsclick Articles
  • All Videos
  • Newsclick Videos
  • हिन्दी
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Science
  • Culture
  • India
  • Sports
  • International
  • Africa
  • Latin America
  • Palestine
  • Nepal
  • Pakistan
  • Sri Lanka
  • US
  • West Asia
About us
Subscribe
Follow us Facebook - Newsclick Twitter - Newsclick RSS - Newsclick
close menu
×
For latest updates on nCOVID-19 around the world visit our INTERACTIVE COVID MAP
Politics
India

Can Kejriwal Emulate Hanuman, Build a Bridge Between Hindus and Muslims?

There is a crying need to explain to the Hindus why Hindutva is destructive of the national interest, or why the BJP’s ideological obsession and its propensity to spark social conflict distracts from and undermines governance.
Ajaz Ashraf
12 Feb 2020
Arvind Kejriwal

The Aam Aadmi Party’s model of governance became the bulwark against the attempts of the Bharatiya Janata Party to communalise the Delhi Assembly elections and turn it into a Hindu-Muslim battle. The benefits accruing from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s emphasis on social welfare measures were just too many for Delhiites to have them succumb to the BJP’s tactics of scaring the Hindus into ditching the AAP.

Delhi’s significance in India’s electoral politics is limited, sending as it does just seven MPs to the Lok Sabha. Yet the city’s salience grew manifold in the backdrop of the Modi government enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was projected as a measure to provide relief to the Hindus who had fled religious persecution from the Islamic countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

Thus was created the Hindu-Muslim binary barely two months before the Delhi Assembly elections.

The BJP sought to exploit this binary as protests against the CAA and the interlinked processes of preparing the National Population Register and then the National Register of Indian Citizens broke out countrywide. The BJP chose to portray the round-the-clock sit-in at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh as an example of Muslim intransigence, which the Hindus must oppose for their own safety by voting out the AAP from power.

The Assembly election results are a telling testimony to the BJP’s failure to scare the Delhiites. The AAP won 62 seats, dropping just five seats, and facing an erosion of less than 1% in its vote-share of 54.3% that it had bagged in 2015. The BJP’s politics of communal polarisation fetched it five more seats, up from three, and augmented by 6% its kitty of a 32.2% vote-share.

These statistics will have pundits assert that good governance and providing tangible benefits to people across the class divide is the only effective counter to the BJP’s Hindutva, which fans hatred between Hindus and Muslims for driving a wedge between them.

This was evident in Kejriwal’s electoral strategy—he insisted on projecting the elections as a referendum on his five years of governance, largely resisting the temptation to enter into an acrimonious debate with the BJP over Shaheen Bagh, although his party had voted against the CAA, in contrast to supporting the reading down of Art 370. Kejriwal did periodically speak against the CAA-NPR-NRIC triad during the election campaign, arguing that the citizenship issue would not enable the country to develop or create jobs. 

At times, though, the AAP slipped in maintaining a carefully-cultivated distance from Shaheen Bagh. For instance, AAP leader Manish Sisodia said he stood with the protestors of Shaheen Bagh. The BJP projected Sisodia’s remark as proof of his pro-Muslim sentiments. 

To counter the BJP’s strategy of inspiring the Hindus to vote on the issue of identity, Kejriwal projected his Hinduness by reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and harped on being a bhakt of Lord Hanuman, who is popularly represented as the deity of plebeians. It is they who have tremendously benefited from the AAP government and constitute Kejriwal’s nucleus of supporters. Kejriwal was dissuading them from believing the BJP’s propaganda that AAP leaders are pro-Muslim, or against the interests of Hindus, and deserting him.

Kejriwal’s strategy testifies to the right-wing shift of Indian politics. This in itself is not novel—Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, for instance, went on a temple spree to emphasise his Hindu identity. The Congress’ manifestos for Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, released before their Assembly elections in 2018, promised several palliative measures relating to the cow.  The Congress won narrowly in both States and formed governments there, but received a drubbing in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections five months later.

Likewise, the AAP has overcome its comprehensive defeat in the Lok Sabha to win the Delhi Assembly; its scale of victory enormous in comparison to that of the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. This comparison raises several questions: How do Opposition parties wrest states from the BJP where, unlike the AAP in Delhi, they are not in power and do not have a model of governance to showcase? Do they need to wait for anti-incumbency to emerge before hoping to sweep into power?

More significantly, in the absence of strong sentiments against BJP governments, will their attempts to play on a softer, benign, inclusive version of the Hindu identity enable them to grab power? It would have been impossible for AAP to return to power without good governance. The party’s projection of its Hinduness was merely designed to neutralise the pull of Hindutva.

Yet, it is debatable whether the Opposition parties can aggregate good governance in a chain of states to dislodge the BJP from the Centre. It should be palpable from the electoral trends of the last six years that people vote differently in state and national elections. Parties in power do enjoy an inherent advantage in setting an agenda for an election. This advantage in the next national election lies with the BJP, even though its record on this score, as of now, is dismal, evident from the slowing economy and the social unrest countrywide.

Opposition parties will find it hard to convince the people that they can govern better than the BJP at the Centre. They are neither united nor have a personality whom they can project as an alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

An alternative to Modi would ordinarily come from the Congress party, which still has a national footprint. The brand of Rahul Gandhi, however, seems to have been irreversibly devalued. It is unlikely that voters will credit the performance of Congress governments in, say, Rajasthan or Chhattisgarh to Gandhi.

Governance, therefore, does not seem an adequate weapon to fell the BJP or Modi. It has to be supplemented by articulating and deepening the idea of belonging to India.

Indeed, the Delhi Assembly elections brought into conflict two ideas of citizenship. The BJP represents citizenship based on descent, privileging the Hindus over all other religious groups. The CAA is one big leap towards turning India into a homeland of Hindus. 

AAP, on the other hand, represents what political scientists call the “service-delivery citizenship”, where the state offers civic amenities and delivers public goods—electricity, power, education and healthcare—to all citizens regardless of their religion, caste, class and language. 

There is a certain universalism to the AAP’s conception of citizenship. This is evident from its manifesto, which has as its opening line: “Aam Aadmi Party makes a commitment to the people of Delhi to serve and uphold, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity enshrined in the preamble to the Constitution of India as fundamental to our governance model.”

The manifesto also reflects the civic idea of citizenship—for instance, it provides a greater participatory role to Delhiites in governance, reminding them that it had approved the formation of 2,972 mohalla sabhas in the city for devolving power to the grass-roots. This could not be implemented because the central government sat on the Delhi Nagar Swaraj Bill, through which mohalla sabhas were to be empowered. The manifesto promises to pressure the Centre to clear this bill.

Delhiites seem to consign the two ideas of citizenship to two separate realms, as I and other journalists found in our conversations with them. They think it is the responsibility of the State or Union Territory governments to execute the idea of service-delivery citizenship. For them, the state is the site where the public goods are to be delivered.

By contrast, the central government’s duty is to weld together a larger national community through symbols such as the national flag, the armed forces and projection of India’s power globally. They did think, rather worryingly, that the nation and the Hindu are, to a large extent, synonymous.

The inclination of Delhiites to simultaneously live with the two ideas of citizenship underscores the possible limits of using development for challenging the BJP at the national level. This limit can only be breached through an ideological battle against the BJP, which certainly also involves denying the party sole monopoly over the religious and cultural realms. 

There is a crying need to explain to the Hindus why Hindutva is destructive of the national interest, or why the BJP’s ideological obsession and its propensity to spark social conflict distracts from and undermines governance. More pertinently, they have to be explained why the CAA-NPR-NRIC adversely affects their interests, not just of the Muslims. 

After his party’s stupendous victory, Kejriwal paid obeisance to Lord Hanuman, who in the epic Ramayana built the bridge to Lanka for enabling Lord Ram to wage war against Ravana. To take on the BJP, Kejriwal needs to emulate Lord Hanuman and build bridges between India’s social groups, of whom the Muslims particularly were brutalised by the state in his own city. This is the surest route for Kejriwal and AAP to revive their national ambitions, at which they have got their third shot.

 

The author is a freelance journalist. The views are personal. 

Get the latest reports & analysis with people's perspective on Protests, movements & deep analytical videos, discussions of the current affairs in your Telegram app. Subscribe to NewsClick's Telegram channel & get Real-Time updates on stories, as they get published on our website.
Delhi Election 2020
Muslims in Delhi election
Shaheen Bagh
Aam Aadmi Party
BJP
Modi-Shah
Amit Shah
Narendra Modi
AAP
Arvind Kejriwal
Related Stories
Kamala Harris being sworn in as US Vice-President. At right extreme is President Joe Biden. Washington, DC, January 20, 2021

Biden’s Idea of India and Savarkar’s is Poles Apart

vaccine hesitancy

When an Anti-Science Dispensation Faced Vaccine Hesitancy

gujarat VHP.

Gujarat: Fact-Finding Report Says Riots Have Shifted to Rural Areas

civic staff.

Delhi: Strike for Pending Wages by Civic Staff May Hit COVID Vaccine Campaign

disabilty rights.

Disability Rights Organisations, Activists Write to Amit Shah, Ask that NCRB Maintains ‘Disaggregated Data’ on Violence Against Disabled Women

COVID Forced Consent Vaccine

Forced Consent and No Transparency Can Create a Backlash against Vaccines

Farmers protest at Ghazipur border

‘If Govt Suspends Farm Laws Till 2024 Then We Have No Problem’

modi and trump

Why Hindutva Supporters Find Trump’s Defeat Hard to Accept

parliament.

Opposition Unity Crucial in Budget Session 2021

stop rape

MP: Spine-chilling Crimes Against Women Reported Even as Govt Runs ‘Samman’ Campaign

Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on WhatsAppShare via EmailShare on RedditShare on KindlePrint
Share
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on WhatsAppShare via EmailShare on RedditShare on KindlePrint
Share

Related Stories

Amey Tirodkar

Maharashtra Mahapadav: Farmers’ March Reaches Azad Maidan in Mumbai, Agitation Continues

24 January 2021
Mumbai: On the second day of Mahapadav agitation in Maharashtra, after walking down the Kasara ghat on Sunday early morning, thousands of
Tikender Singh Panwar

50 Years of Statehood of Himachal Pradesh: A Look at Achievements and Challenges

24 January 2021
As Himachal Pradesh observes its 50th anniversary of achieving statehood on January 25, we may want to take a look at the struggle for it
Shinzani Jain

Vicious Cycle of Perpetual Indebtedness Among Madhya Pradesh Farmers

24 January 2021
Sitting in a camp at the Palwal border, Shrikrishna Kushwaha shares an old proverb – “Uttam kheti madhyam baan, neech chakari bheekh nida

Pagination

  • Next page ››

More

  • NetaJi

    ‘Jai Shri Ram’ Slogans Mar Netaji‘s 125 Birth Anniversary Event in Kolkata

  • tractor parade 26.

    Delhi Police Allows Tractor Parade on Jan 26; Route Details to be Decided, Say Farmer Leaders

  • Larry King, Broadcasting Icon for Half-Century, dies at 87

    Larry King, Broadcasting Icon for Half-Century, Dies at 87

  • ‘Refused Police Jobs Despite Domicile Certificate,’ Claim West Pakistan Refugees in J&K, Launch Protest

    ‘Refused Police Jobs Despite Domicile Certificate,’ Claim West Pakistan Refugees in J&K, Launch Protest

  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with
about