The 2024 Lok Sabha election was on a Better Call Saul kind of slow burn. Then on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought out the dragons and turned it into Game of Thrones. He suddenly dropped the niceties and tore into the Congress manifesto and Rahul Gandhi’s ‘wealth redistribution’ plank.
“When they were in power, they [former PM Manmohan Singh] had said Muslims had the first right on the nation’s resources. The Maoist Congress manifesto promises to survey gold and ornaments of our mothers and sisters, seize those, and redistribute it among infiltrators and those who make a lot of babies,” he said with vintage ferocity, transforming the entire election into an overheated, polarised gladiatorial arena. “They will not even spare your mangalsutra (sacred necklace for married women).”
The Opposition immediately called him communal and asked the Election Commission to take action. But did Modi breach the election rules?
Let us examine Section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (RP Act). It says that appeals by a candidate, or any other person with the consent of a candidate, to vote or refrain from voting on the grounds of his religion, race, caste, community or language is a corrupt electoral practice.
Did Modi ask for votes based on religion or caste or ask a community to refrain from voting along those lines? No.
He merely analysed the Congress manifesto and pointed to brazen appeasement. He did not ask anybody to vote against Muslims as a community or for Muslim candidates.
Section 123(3A) denounces any attempt by a candidate to promote feelings of enmity or hatred among citizens on these grounds during elections.
Did Modi fan hatred against a community? Again, no.
He merely called out his rival Congress party’s communal appeal. He accused it of trying to steal reservation from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes and transfer it to Muslims. He has kept attacking the Congress manifesto.
By his sudden and audacious attack, Modi has blunted the Congress campaign around ‘wealth redistribution’. Every time the Congress now thinks of advertising its main election plank, it will think twice. Modi has made sure Hindu voters now subliminally connect it to appeasement and galvanise.
Rahul Gandhi has openly and repeatedly sought a caste census. He also promised a survey of wealth and promised to ‘redistribute’ it Robin Hood-style, with Muslims getting their ‘fair share’ based on their numbers in an echo of Manmohan Singh’s ‘first claim’ credo.
Now, that is a purely communal appeal.
Rahul Gandhi’s brazen caste pitch in the promised OBC census, or his mocking of Lord Krishna’s undersea city of Dwarka, or the Congress boycotting Ayodhya Ram Mandir Pran Pratishtha fall neatly into the bigotry basket.
Take for instance Mamata Banerjee calling Ram Navami devotees ‘rioters’. Or her tirade dog-whistling Muslims to fight ‘kafirs’ who are all cowards. Or her old but abiding assertion that ‘one must endure kicks from the cow which gives milk’, referring to Muslim appeasement.
DMK’s Udhayanidhi Stalin publicly called for the extermination of the Sanatan Dharma, triggering a fresh round of vicious verbal attacks against Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular.
Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah stirred the communal nest in December 2023 at a convention of Muslim religious leaders in Hubballi by announcing increased grants for the Muslim community.
Why should jailed Delhi CM and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal fall behind?
An RTI response in 2022 revealed that Kejriwal’s AAP government in Delhi had given over Rs 101 crore of public funds to the Delhi Waqf Board since coming to power in 2015. Of that, Rs 62.57 crore alone was given in 2021.
Such largesse to Waqf is not new. The outgoing Congress government in 2014 left a parting gift of 123 prime properties in Lutyens’ Delhi for Waqf.
Then there are parties whose raison d’etre is communal or caste-based. The Bahujan Samaj Party’s politics revolves around the Dalit cause. AIMIM, Congress’s Kerala ally All India Muslim League, Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front, PDP and National Conference in Kashmir will collapse if they are barred from speaking for Muslims. RJP and SP are known as Yadav-Muslim forces. Jagan Reddy’s YSR Congress has been accused of anti-Hindu and pro-Christian politics.
India’s so-called ‘secular’ ecosystem can continue to ignore such a mountain of evidence of communal and casteist politics and blame the man who is calling it out, but it will not be able to convince ordinary Indians. Contrary to the belief popular among the small and increasingly irrelevant club of the political elite, voters are not fools.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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