There is absolutely no doubt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) bigwigs have now come to realise that there is widespread despondency and hopelessness among the average voters across the length and breadth of India.
With little or no support from the mainstream media, the opposition parties are busy highlighting this ugly reality of the country. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his trusted lieutenants fell back on the past and time-tested strategy of holding a particular community responsible for the sorry plight of the overwhelming majority of country-men and -women. They started playing the same old psychological game that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had often played in the past.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Therefore, the competition is now between the two rival political combinations – National Democratic Alliance and Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) – over how to exploit this anger and frustration among the common folk in its own favour.
Imaginary enemy
As it is somewhat easy to create an imaginary enemy and blame it for all the problems of poverty, hunger and unemployment, the BJP star campaigners have been targeting Muslims in a more aggressive way after the first phase of the polls than before the start of electioneering. The more they are campaigning the more they are realising the problems of the masses, thus the more they are going vitriolic in their attack on Muslims.
Before the middle of March, when the election dates were not announced, they had little idea of the rampant distress at the lower level. As there is a sort of censorship and the high command was in no mood to pay heed to the feedback from the lower functionaries of the BJP, they were largely in the dark about the ground situation, where not to speak about unskilled labourer even the unemployed engineering graduate driving his own Ola or Uber cab is not able to earn Rs 20,000-25,000 per month after toiling 12 hours a day/night.
As the Sangh Parivar has mastered the art of giving a new twist to mass anger, Modi is now increasingly resorting to this old practice to earn votes.
The present situation can be examined in light of what happened in India in the 1960s and 1970s. That was the time when several industrial-cum-commercial hubs of India, which apparently had no history of communal violence witnessed large-scale riots. They were Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), Rourkela (Odisha), Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Hazaribagh (Bihar but now in Jharkhand) to name a few, not to speak of the prolonged Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) in 1969.
Barring Ahmedabad and to some extent Jabalpur, the other above-named cities owe their birth or growth to industrialisation in the plateau region in the early part of the 20th century. Curiously, none of them saw large-scale communal killing on the eve of partition of the sub-continent.
As the mineral-rich region of Chotanagpur Plateau which is spread to undivided Bihar and to some extent, Odisha, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh saw large-scale displacement of Scheduled Tribes and other weaker sections of the society at the time of industrialisation, it was natural for the original population to feel cheated. As in most of the cases they could not be immediately rehabilitated and given due compensation either by the government or the corporate bosses anger and frustration grew among the homeless lot.
In contrast, a new flourishing class emerged in the upcoming townships and industrial centres. They have their roots in Bihar, east Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal. Though a majority of the new migrants were Hindus some Muslim colonies and localities also cropped up in the entire industrial and mineral belt of east-central India.
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Emergence of tribal outfits
The RSS which had started its works in the region, apparently to counter the influence of Christian missionaries, exploited this economic distress and despair of the aboriginal population. They often used the occasion of Ram Navami to range tribals and other downtrodden lot against Muslims. They were very well aware that unless they do so the tribals would go all out against the outsiders, whom they consider as exploiters. After all Jharkhand Mukti Morcha had emerged in the early 1970s to fight against the dikkus (outsiders), especially mahajans (money-lenders), liquor and coal mafia, contractors as well as big merchants and industrialists. Prior to JMM, other outfits like Adivasi Mahasabha used to champion their cause.
Communal tension during Ram Navami, which became a sort of annual phenomenon in South Bihar (which became Jharkhand on November 15, 2000) came to an end only after Lalu Prasad Yadav became chief minister on March 10, 1990. He dealt with the menace of communalism firmly though by that time India was in the grip of the Ram Janambhoomi Movement.
Incidentally, during the post-2014 years, Ram Navami is being used to foment tension in the rest of the country. This time it is poor and Unemployed youths are being used to achieve the same objective. Not only that, in the 1980s and 1990s, especially during the high-time of the Ram Janambhoomi Movement industrial and commercial centres outside the mineral-rich pockets, such as Bhiwandi (near Mumbai),
Bhagalpur, Surat, Kanpur, Aligarh, Meerut, Moradabad, Mumbai, Gujarat as such etc were rocked by communal earthquake.
It needs to be reminded that Banswara in Rajasthan where Modi on April 21 (ironically jut four days after Ram Navami) spoke about ‘mangal-sutra’ is a tribal dominated parliamentary constituency where the BJP is locked in a very tough battle with the Bharat Adivasi Party candidate. Muslims form a very small number of population.
It may be that in desperation Modi tried to warn Bhil tribesmen that they are poor just because of Muslims. Only time will tell whether his strategy of converting the anger of downtrodden lot towards Muslims works or not.
However, the sheer despair and despondency of a huge section of countrymen had got exposed during the election campaign. Now one seldom comes across the tall claim of India being the fifth largest economy and Vishwa Guru.
Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.
