How Modi has used the communal violence bill to his advantage

By writing a strong worded letter to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh against the proposed prevention of communal violence bill, Narendra Modi has kept his campaign momentum going. By broadly revealing the nature of his objections through a series of tweets, he not only succeeded in generating the political uproar he desired, but also put the UPA government on the defensive, forcing it to concede amendments in some key provisions. Modi also timed his letter to the Prime Minister sweetly and made its contents public a day after exit polls predicted a wipe out for the Congress in four key north Indian states. [caption id=“attachment_1271393” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AP[/caption] The exit poll predictions have made Congress leaders sluggish and demoralised. If the predictions of these post-poll surveys are proved correct on Sunday, it will not require a great deal of inside knowledge to predict the mood of Congress MPs in Parliament on Monday. The winter session of Parliament will only further weaken the UPA’s authority and diminish its political will for governance. It is anybody’s guess if the Congress leadership will have the appetite to suddenly push through this contentious piece of legislation in its current form. But as the government has only recently circulated a revised draft of the bill to the states and asked for comments to be sent “immediately,” there is apprehension among the BJP leaders that Modi’s concerns that “it appears that the Government of India is contemplating a hurried introduction of the Bill in the upcoming Winter Session of Parliament", will be proved right. The UPA government had surprised the opposition in the monsoon session by suddenly introducing the food security bill and land acquisition bill towards the end of the session. So the BJP is vigilant this time round. Modi already knows this, but he wants to be one up in the game of political brinkmanship. The BJP leaders feel that the sole intention behind the Congress’s move to bring in the Communal Violence Bill is  to create a so called ‘secular-communal’ divide, and send a message, particularly to the Muslim community, that they care for them so much, that they are even willing to write the provisions in such a way that it is heavily loaded against members of the majority community. This is something that Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley calls “highly discriminatory since it discriminated against the majority and minority on basis of birth marks.” Faced with a barrage of criticism from powerful opposition leaders, the Union Home Ministry has committed not to define victims of riots on the basis of community, and also tone down provisions which deal with the centre’s role in containing and intervening in law and order situations. Modi blasted the UPA government on its “timing” in attempting to bring the bill. “Coming just a couple of months before the expected announcement of the next General Elections, it makes the move look very suspicious. It is almost a giveaway that the move to introduce the Bill is based on political considerations dictated by vote bank politics rather than genuine concern for preventing communal violence", he wrote. Modi’s aggressiveness coupled with very strong objections by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha has put the UPA on the defensive. Parliamentary affairs minister Kamal Nath tried to strike a conciliatory note and make it appear that the BJP was making an issue out of nothing. He said the bill has not been tabled in any of the two houses of Parliament, that such a tabling had not even been proposed, and in addition to the fact that the bill had not gone to the Cabinet, not even a Cabinet note had been prepared in this regard. Basically Nath is saying that there is still a long process to be followed before the bill can be even considered for tabling. Though he didn’t commit either way on whether it would be introduced this session,  two other ministers -Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and minority affairs minister K Rehman Khan indicated that this option was still wide open. The winter session is scheduled to be a very short session with hardly 12 working days,  but since for all practical purposes it is going to be the last working session of this Parliament, all sides will keep up the political posturing. The problem for the government is that even the Samajwadi Party, which supports the UPA government from outside and has strong secularist credentials, is opposed to the bill, albeit on grounds that it encroaches upon the federal structure of Indian polity. The Biju Janata Dal and Trinamool Congress are objecting on the same grounds. The Congress’s new found ally, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (U) is of course, supporting the bill and demanding its immediate passage with a zeal that not even Congress is showing. It’s clearly more about positioning for all parties concerned. But Modi has taken his battle to another level. While he has written to the PM, he has also hit hard at Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s pet National Advisory Committee (NAC). He hit out at Sonia without naming her but the reference is more than clear. “…However, knowing its genesis, I am not surprised by the poor drafting of this bill. You will kindly recall that in the Chief Ministers’ Conference on Internal Security in Delhi in May earlier this year, I had brought to your notice how certain individuals with questionable credentials and condemnable links with anti-national elements have penetrated into our policy making think tanks like the Planning Commission and the National Advisory Council, NAC. It is the same NAC, an extra-constitutional authority and the same set of individuals who seem to have now usurped the law-making powers because of the void created at the political level that are behind this draft.” “A plain reading of the bill suggests that it is not confined to communal violence on religious lines and includes other considerations like linguistic identity. This expansion of scope may lead to serious issues of operationalizing the provisions.…..In view of all of the above observations, I would like to express my government’s strong opposition to this ill-conceived and poorly drafted Bill. I would also like to convey my government’s strong reservation against this attempt to encroach upon the authority of the state governments. I sincerely request you to direct the Home Ministry to have a wider consultation with the State Governments, political parties and the police and security agencies before proceeding further”, Modi added in his letter. Dragging Sonia’s name into this raging public debate makes the Congress uneasy. Also being seen as anti-majority brings the fear of majority community backlash since the party does not have the confidence of the minority community to the extent they would like.