Pinning guilt for Pune techie murder: Has Sharad Pawar lost it?

There is nothing like defeat, and the prospect of further electoral irrelevance, for politicians to simply lose it. The Congress party and the “secular” tribes decided that communalism was the antidote to Modi’s rise in the recent election and ended up in the dust. Not only that, far from ensuring a Muslim consolidation against the BJP, they ensured the complete marginalisation of the Muslim vote. [caption id=“attachment_1564165” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  NCP chief Sharad Pawar. Reuters[/caption] Post-election, it is the turn of Sharad Pawar, normally the most down-to-earth of politicians, to invent new theories in the hope that it will save his party from defeat in the next Maharashtra assembly elections. Using the recent horrible murder of Pune techie Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh last week at the hands of some thuggish group that professed a Hindu cause, Pawar suggested that such elements had been strengthened by the elevation of Narendra Modi to the prime ministership. The Indian Express quotes him as saying, “The change of government in Delhi appears to have emboldened the communal forces who have started asserting themselves, leading to growing incidents of communal conflict against minorities and Dalits across Maharashtra.” This is a hackneyed theory. It basically links two unrelated events by using public perceptions about one party to imply guilt for the acts of another. It also posits indirectly that Modi ought not to have been elected, for his mere election can have negative consequences. Let’s counter the argument from the opposite end: if, as Pawar says, the mere formation of a BJP government in Delhi has “emboldened” such elements, doesn’t it follow that his police force should be doubly vigilant about these groups? Isn’t Pawar being too clever by half to try and pin blame for what happened with the Pune techie on someone sitting in Delhi. His party is part of the ruling coalition in Maharashtra, and the home ministry is run by his nominee – RR Patil. To attribute guilt to someone unrelated to the events here boggles the mind. Moreover, if Modi’s rise is what explains the techie’s murder, then what explains the series of communal incidents in Uttar Pradesh for two years before the BJP won the last election? After all, the Samajwadi Party came to power riding its “Umeed ki cycle? in 2012. Modi was a di*stant blip on the horizon, and nobody believed he would actually become prime minister almost till the last of the opinion polls was unveiled in March-April 2014. In Maharashtra itself, Hindu groups have been loosely blamed for the murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in August last year , but the Maharashtra police has gotten nowhere with their investigations. Would Pawar blame this on the BJP’s rise? The Dhule riots of January 2013 saw the Maharashtra police playing a trigger-happy role. Instead of preventing the riots when communal tension was rising, they fired indiscriminately at a Muslim group when things got out of hand. (Read here and here) If we use Pawar’s logic on Pawar himself, since the public perception about him on probity is not too flattering, we can link him to any act of corruption by anyone he could remotely have had influence on. We can also attribute many acts of Naxal violence to the sympathies shown by some members of Sonia Gandhi’s now defunct National Advisory Council (NAC). After all, a man who was in jail in Chhattisgarh for alleged seditious activities and Maoist sympathies (Binayak Sen) was immediately hired by the Planning Commission following his release on bail. So why not blame Sonia Gandhi and the Congress party for emboldening Left-wing violence? And if we must blame the BJP, why not look at places where the BJP has actually been in power for more than a decade - Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh. Is communal violence the norm in these places where Hindu groups should have been even more “emboldened”? Pawar is playing with fire, and if such theories of guilt by remote association start becoming par for the course, our politics is going to take a turn for the worse.