Jaipur: Earlier this month, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its manifesto for the Rajasthan assembly elections, one point in the 75-page ‘Sankalp Patra’ stood out.
The saffron party, which is hoping to dislodge the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government in Rajasthan, said in its manifesto, replete with photos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that it will create a special police cell to check on ‘anti-Bharat forces’.
It’s still early to predict the outcome of the electoral battle in Rajasthan, where the BJP has not projected any of its state leaders and is solely relying on the face of Prime Minister Modi against chief minister Gehlot’s election pitch of good governance.
But the party’s declaration about creating a special cell to identify ‘anti-Bharat forces’ sounds like an ominous reminder of what one can expect if the BJP indeed forms the government in Rajasthan, a state with a long, feudal history where the protection of human rights is usually among the most-neglected subjects.
The increasing hardline stance of BJP
During the BJP’s tenure in Rajasthan between 2013 and 2018, the party’s egregious record on human rights was most apparent in cases of cow-related mob lynchings, where most often the state machinery, including investigating agencies systematically worked to scuttle investigations.
At the time, Vasundhara Raje, perceived by some as a ‘moderate’ face within the BJP, was the chief minister of Rajasthan, and bulldozing houses as a means to fight ‘crime’ was yet to become the norm. Nevertheless, the police force in the BJP-ruled state chalked new lows with its handling of each case of lynching.
Travelling across Rajasthan’s districts, such as Alwar and Bharatpur, which are part of the larger Mewat region, I, as a part of the fact-finding teams, witnessed firsthand the far-reaching scars that the lynching cases of Pehlu Khan, Umar Mohammed and Rakbar Khan left on the psyche of Meo Muslims – a community that has been historically persecuted since the time of independence.
It is a common sight to see milch cows and buffaloes in Meo houses, many of whom earn their livelihoods by dairy farming. The border areas of both Rajasthan and Haryana are known for their dairy farmers. In the absence of major industries, private or government jobs, the entire area consists of households whose primary occupation is dairy farming.
Earlier this year, when I visited Haryana’s Kolgaon, the village of lynching victim Rakbar Khan, I found his family still recuperating from the massive trauma resulting from his death. They were struggling to make ends meet after losing the family’s breadwinner. Khan was killed in Lalwandi village of Alwar in Rajasthan.
There was also a sense of fear of the virulent politics which was being played out in their name, singling out and targeting Muslims in the country. Months after the visit, more than 750 homes in Mewat, most of which belonged to Muslims, were demolished by the BJP government in Haryana after communal violence in the region.
Back in April 2017, while the whole world had seen the grainy, viral video of 55-year-old dairy farmer Pehlu Khan being beaten to death in the middle of a crowded highway in Behror while transporting milch cows purchased from a cattle fair in Rajasthan, the police under the BJP did not submit the required certificate of electronic evidence.
While acquitting the six men charged with murdering Khan, the trial court was scathing in its remarks for the Rajasthan police, slamming it for carrying out an investigation that had ‘severe shortcomings’ and ‘gross negligence’.
Earlier, even before the chargesheet filing stage, the police had given a clean chit to the six men who were named by Khan in his dying statement as his assailants. These men were not chargesheeted and never had to face trial, despite being named by Khan.
The sequence of events was not surprising. After Pehlu’s lynching, the then home minister and present Assam governor, Gulab Chand Kataria, made a statement, saying the police would take action against both the parties. A case of cow smuggling was registered against Pehlu Khan’s children who were accompanying him during the time of the crime.
It was after the Congress government came to power that a special investigation team (SIT) was constituted to re-investigate the Pehlu case. It found multiple lapses in the way the Rajasthan police under the BJP conducted the investigation, and the SIT report ultimately led to the Ashok Gehlot government appealing in the Rajasthan high court against the acquittal of the accused.
The high court had also subsequently quashed the cases against Khan’s sons Irshad and Aarif, who are fighting a long battle to get justice for their father.
Also read: How a Botched Investigation Helped Get Six Accused in Pehlu Khan’s Killing off the Hook
Even as cow vigilantes continue to operate in Mewat, two Bills passed by the Congress government in the Rajasthan Assembly in 2019 – the Rajasthan Protection from Lynching Bill, 2019 and the Rajasthan Prohibition of Interference with the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances in the Name of Honour and Tradition Bill, 2019 – continue to gather dust in wait of presidential nod because the Union home ministry is not sending affirmation from its side.
In this year’s elections, the BJP has fielded Alwar MP Balak Nath, a firebrand Hindutva leader from the Meo Muslim-populated Tijara constituency. In his election speeches, Nath has been saying that the electoral battle in Tijara is like that of an India-Pakistan match.
Such was the divisive undertone of the campaign in Tijara that the BJP unwittingly landed itself in a tricky spot after Sandeep Dayma, one of its leaders, spoke about the need to ‘uproot gurdwaras and madarsas’, in the presence of Balak Nath and UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.
After Sikh bodies slammed the BJP, the party had to expel Dayma, who apologised for his remarks on Gurdwaras, but maintained that he originally wanted to say mosques and madarsas in place of gurdwaras.
This episode is testimony to the increasing hardline stance of the BJP in Rajasthan, a state where it earlier had Muslim politicians such as Yunus Khan in powerful positions.
Cut to 2023, Yunus Khan is contesting as an independent after being denied a BJP ticket while Amin Pathan, another influential Muslim leader, too, shifted to the Congress after many years in the BJP.
Also read: Interview | Denied Ticket, BJP’s Muslim Leader in Rajasthan Quits Party to Contest as an Independent
The change in the party’s approach has also led to leaders from the Atal Bihari Vajpayee era to mould themselves after the UP model of bulldozers and demolitions.
Now, as a mark of the changed times, former chief minister Vasundhara Raje has targeted the Congress over its politics of ‘appeasement’, shedding her ‘moderate’ image in favour of a persona more palatable to the party’s Hindutva narrative.
BJP’s actions don’t match words
While one of the main planks of the BJP’s campaign in Rajasthan is atrocities against people belonging to the Dalit community, the party’s actions don’t match its rhetoric.
Earlier this month, the BJP inducted Girraj Singh Malinga, a Rajput MLA from Congress, who is accused of assaulting and severely injuring a Dalit government engineer, who has been lodged in hospital for more than a year.
Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge, who himself belongs to the Dalit community, said that it was decided to not give Malinga a Congress ticket due to his attack on the engineer.
During its five years in power, the previous BJP government could spend only 72.85% of the Tribal Sub Area Plan (TSP area) and 76.63% of the SC-ST area. On the other hand, the present Congress government has spent 90.70% of the TSP area and 89.74% of the SC-ST area in the year 2020-21.
The Congress government in the state had passed the Rajasthan State Scheduled Castes And Scheduled Tribes Development Fund (Planning, Allocation And Utilization Of Financial Resources) Bill, 2022, which makes provisions to earmark a certain amount as outlays for the Scheduled Castes Development Fund (SCDF) and Scheduled Tribes Development Fund (STDF).
A visual from my visit to Rakbar’s village, Kolgaon, has been etched in my mind for many months. Rakbar’s wife, Asmina, is bedridden after an accident following her husband’s death. After losing Rakbar, the family has been running out of resources to make ends meet. That day, Asmina, barely able to rise from her bed, had made a desperate plea.
She had asked for an automated wheelchair so that she could go to the fields to work to earn money.
While the four men have been convicted and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for the murder of Rakbar, Naval Kishore, a leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), was acquitted. However, the family maintains that Kishore was the main accused in the case.
The sight of Asmina and her children’s dilemma was a portrait of the immense injustice meted out to the lynching victims and their families by hate crime and misuse of the state machinery.
At such a juncture, the BJP’s promise of creating a special cell to identify ‘anti-Bharat forces’ gives a glimpse of what to expect if the party indeed comes to power in Rajasthan.
It invariably makes one anticipate more arbitrary arrests, demolition of houses, and sweeping powers to investigative agencies without much accountability. Worse yet, it may lead to the public celebration of extrajudicial methods such as police encounters – all of which are a reality today.
Akhil Chaudhary is a human rights lawyer based in Rajasthan. He tweets @akhilchaudhary