Congress Crying Time

 Congress Crying Time

The NDTV commissioned Opinion Poll gives the NDA 259 seats with 53 out of 80 in Uttar Pradesh. This total is without counting seats via the TDP Alliance  just announced today on BJP's Foundation Day. And the B JP/NDA is seen to be getting votes from urban and rural people alike across the length and breadth of the country. In fact the rural vote share is trending upwards!

The Congress must be baffled how all that welfare spend has made no impact on its fortunes with the poor. Every usual stratagem and time-tested device of theirs is failing in a face of an overwhelming rejection by the people, and they have no new ideas to stem the rot.

So their dirty tricks department has gone into overdrive to raise old bogeys, but alas, once again without success.  Alleged Congress sponsored slurs and resurrections are coming thick and fast. It must be terrified of an en masse abandonment by its Muslim vote-bank in particular. So it arranged for Sonia Gandhi to beg the Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid, the largely discredited Ahmed Bukhari, who seems to favour different political parties at different times. He has even been dubbed ‘Bhikari’ in the social media for reasons best known to them beyond the strength of the pun.

In addition, Cobrapost, a spin-off from Tehelka.com, both regarded as well known agents of the Congress Party, came up with an old hat sting, swiftly rejected by the CBI as ‘nothing new’. It alleges current B JP leaders LK Advani, Uma Bharati, and Kalyan Singh who was then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and even the late Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao were in the know about the Babri Masjid demolition and variously aided and abetted it.

This whole matter has of course been very thoroughly investigated by the authorities over more than two decades, and the conclusion was that it was a spontaneous action by some of the lakhs of Kar Sevaks who had gathered there at Ayodhya, nothing less, nothing more.

The Babri Masjid story has been resurrected now because the caterwauling about the Godhra Riots to malign Narendra Modi has been effectively countered both by the Supreme Court supervised SIT, and by the spontaneous resurrection of the Congress engineered Anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984 and the desecration of Operation Bluestar that preceded it. This came from various aggrieved people including the Sikh diaspora, who have not received either justice or closure over the last thirty years.

Congress must be hoping against hope that Bukhari’s bare faced interference in matters political will agitate the Muslims in Uttar Pradesh in its favour, where it is otherwise facing a rout. Incidentally, the media and various commentators talks often of decimation, but that Roman technique only refers to the destruction of every tenth person literally, thereby leaving 90% intact, a fate not likely to favor Congress this time.

The Cobrapost claim on the destruction of the Babri Masjid, based on mere remembered reflections of old Kar Sevaks in the Ayodhya area, accuse the BJP leaders of a planned involvement in 1992. However, this diabolically timed damp squib seems to have done absolutely nothing to help the Congress. The Muslim target audience is both angry and disillusioned by Congress serial betrayal of their aspirations over decades of rule, and refuses to be provoked by such attempts.

The other bit of scurrilous defamation comes from still surviving but dwindling fast British newsmagazine, The Economist, which attempts self-importance by writing an arrogant opinion piece damning Narendra Modi’s character. Many Congress people try it every day to no avail and the out-of-date British magazine should have known better. Besides, the British today enjoy negligible influence in India though we like to be polite about it and readily adopt those amongst their number who demonstrate a special love for this country. But the hard-up Economist   appears to have succumbed to a Congress funded lateral PR effort by damning Narendra Modi with faint praise and facile, convent- school logic. Apart from expressed surprise at the unsolicited poison-pen advice from the magazine, the b road-spectrum intelligentsia has largely ignored the piece, as it does occasional efforts along the same lines by the arch-leftist New York Times and The Guardian of the UK.

Congress, of course, is also trying to deflect attention from its cap-in-hand entreaty to the Shahi Imam by calling it a personal appeal on both sides, though the Election Commission is likely to let Congress get away with it for the small impact it will make.

In fact, Bukhari’s brother was quick to publicly disagree and identified the Congress Party as the most communal of all and renowned for letting down Muslims everywhere in the country. Several other Muslim clerics and leaders have  also been prompt to state that the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid does not speak for them or the Muslims in general.  

The tussle over the Muslim vote between the BJP and the Congress is likely to continue in the remaining days of the campaigning, of course, but there are enough signs that the minorities will vote according to their own convictions. And that they may turn away from bad experiences with the Congress, the SP and the BSP. 

Past attempts of this Shahi Imam Bukhari to back any political party, unlike his father in the 1980s, has not been very effective. But the days of Muslims being ordered to vote via fatwa as it were, may indeed be over. Someone may need to tell the Maulanas and Imams to stick to their religious duties before it backfires on the polity.

(922 words)

6^th April 2014

Gautam Mukherjee