India 2014 - a hate story: Starring Sonia, Modi and feat. Amit Shah

Showing to full houses and polarising audiences across the country: “India 2014-A Hate Story” starring Narendra Modi and Sonia Gandhi. And featuring fire-eating Amit Shah in a provocative new role.

Over the past few days, the plot of this hate story, aka the 2014 general election campaign, has got uglier with the Congress and the BJP stepping up their race to the bottom in competitive communalism– Sonia Gandhi shamelessly wooing the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid for Muslim votes, Narendra Modi trying to whip up Hindu passions over cow slaughter, and Amit Shah issuing blood-curdling threats of badla against the “killers’’ of Hindu jats in last year’s Muzaffarnagar riots.

“This election is about voting out the government that protects and gives compensation to those who killed Jats. It is about badla (revenge) and protecting izzat (honour),” Shah was reported saying at a meeting with Jat leaders in UP.

And then pointing towards Suresh Rana and Hukum Singh, two BJP MLAs accused of inciting anti-Muslim violence during the riots, the BJP general secretary and Modi’s right-hand man reportedly said: “The leaders standing next to me have also been humiliated. A man can sleep hungry but not humiliated. This is the time to take revenge by voting Modi.’’

His remarks were clearly calculated to further polarise a campaign already deeply polarised along sectarian lines. And he succeeded in doing that, as predictably, the Congress and the Samajwadi Party hit back with their own abusive rhetoric amid fears that Hindu-Muslim tensions in the region were likely to get worse. The Congress has complained to the Election Commission over Shah’s “communal’’ remarks which included calling SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav “Maulana Mulayam’’ for his alleged “appeasement’’ of Muslims.

Yet, barely three days ago the same BJP was up in arms over Sonia Gandhi’s ill-judged meeting with Syed Ahmed Bukhari, Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid, at which she sought his support in consolidating the “secular’’ (read Muslim) vote. It promptly lodged a complaint with the EC demanding “strict’’ action against the Congress president after a characteristically strident Modi accused her and her party of “communalising’’ the election campaign.

“Sensing defeat, they have dropped the slogan of secularism and started rabid communalism. The Congress leader has started speaking the language of rabid communalism," he charged.

As an illustration of manufactured outrage, the BJP’s apoplectic reaction will be hard to beat. I will come to Mrs Gandhi’s foolish move in a bit, but isn’t the BJP over-egging the pudding a bit? Isn’t its own entire campaign about consolidating the Hindu vote? What was Modi doing if not communalising the campaign when apropos of nothing he raked up the cow slaughter issue– a “key Hindutva agenda’’ as The Economic Times pointed out—accusing the UPA government of clandestinely encouraging beef export and subsidising slaughterhouses mostly run by Muslims.

“In many parts of India there are big slaughterhouses. There is no subsidy for farmers or for rearing cattle, but the Congress gives subsidy to those who slaughter cows”, he said in a crude attempt to whip up passions on an issue that has caused communal riots in the past.

No doubt, what Sonia Gandhi did was a travesty of secular politics but at least she was not inciting hate. More than anything else, she was guilty of poor tactics.

She exposed her party and herself to the charge that they are completely out of touch with the Muslim mood. My own first reaction when I heard about the meeting was that the Congress had shot itself in the foot by trying to influence Muslim voters through the Imam —a man nobody takes seriously even in his own neighbourhood let alone Delhi and beyond.

First, Ahmed Bukhari doesn’t have the same stature that his father, Syed Abdullah Bukhari, had though even he was greatly diminished after a series of blundering moves including flirting with the BJP and died a lonely man. But more importantly there has been a profound shift in Muslim mood, and as the Imam’s own brother Yahya Bukhari pointed out, “Today’s Muslims don’t take such appeals and meetings seriously. Gone are the days when Muslims blindly followed what the Imam of Jama Masjid said.”

If anything, the Congress overtures towards the Imam might actually boomerang against it. Muslims have become so wary of being treated like a “commodity’’, according to theatre director Aamir Raza Husain, that even those who may have contemplated voting for the Congress could now dump it in sheer disgust. Knowledgeable Muslim observers such as Shahid Siddiqui, editor of Nai Duniya and a former MP, fear that the Sonia’s move would lead to a consolidation of Hindu votes in favour of the BJP.

Modi is right that the episode underlines the Congress party’s desperation but how does one explain his own palpably sectarian campaign? The truth, to use an overwrought cliché is, that “is hammam mein sab nange hain’’. At the start of the election, we were loftily told, that it would be fought only on development issues.

Remember the headlines about how India had moved on from old ways of doing politics, and henceforth it was going to be all about good governance and accountability?

In the event, absolutely nothing has changed—not even rhetoric—and it is turning into a campaign whose sole purpose appears to be exploiting deep-seated cultural fissures in the name of nationalism on the one hand and secularism on the other.