UP elections and BJP dilemma

UP elections and BJP dilemma

The hypocrisy of action against Dayashankar Singh

By

Faraz Ahmad

The alacrity with which the BJP acted against its Uttar Pradesh state vice president Dayashankar Singh for insulting Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief and three times UP chief minister Behen Mayawati and derisively comparing her with sex workers, could be commendable.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh also disclosed to the Parliament that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was saddened by the public flogging of the four Dalits in his home state Gujarat by upper caste Gau Raksha Dal (Cow Protection vigilantes) for skinning a dead cow. But no one has so far heard a word from the Prime Minister. The man who wastes no time reacting to the killings in Nice or the coup attempt in Turkey, has remained stoically silent on the activities of his cow vigilantes.How could he, for after all these gauu rakshaks have been set upon hapless people ever since Modi  had made a public issue of “Pink revolution” in the runup to the 2014 general elections,  elaborating this as the slaughter of cows and its progeny and its export abroad. Coming to think of it we have not heard of public flogging in the post Ziaul Haq Pakistan too. So we are progressing fast. We have left behind Pakistan and are racing to compete with that Wahabi Saudi Arabia.

To make a subtle point, he rushed off to Gorakhpur to patronize the ‘Math” of that venomous communally provocative Thakur BJP MP from Gorakhpur, Yogi Adityanath and pat him on the back ostensibly for his vituperative anti-Muslim, anti-Dalit violent campaign in the name of Gau Raksha. This fellow had gone all the way to Bisada near NOIDA to fish in troubled waters with that Gau Rakshak lynch mob that had pulled out from his home and stoned to death a poor Muslim Akhlaq last Bakrid, mainly because they despised the non-vegetarian eating habits of Muslims. And this “Tamsik” diet the Aryavrats despise even among the Dalits.

The Prime Minister made some astonishing claims on behalf of these saffron clad bullies, making any sane person wonder how can a person commending the likes of Adityanath really disapprove of the daily atrocities on Dalits and Muslims in almost all the BJP ruled states in the name of Gau Raksha.  He said in Gorakhpur that “Hundreds and thousands of ‘Maths’ are busy making India modern and prosperous.”  The irony is that the sadhus never took any credit for modernizing the country. But our prime minister discovered this remarkable trait among the Sadhus babas which no one ever saw in them. Perhaps he got carried away by all the latest gadgetry that all these sadhus love to use and even flaunt, from the latest mobile phones to secret cctv cameras to automatic doors which help them suddenly disappear from public eye to the latest fast cars to expensive planes and yachts they own and like to show off. Mind you that’s what is common between Baba Ramdev, Yogi Adityanath, earlier Asaram Bapu and at one time Chandraswamy and you name any of them.  Just exposes Narendra Modi’s comprehension of what constitutes modernism.

And it’s no fault of Modi. He has learnt all this spending his lifetime in the RSS shakhas and getting fully indoctrinated there. But he and his ilk have also learnt much more than this. He has learnt that Manusmriti is supreme source of all knowledge and thereby the Aryavrat is natural and rightful claimant to rule upon the whole world one day. In that there is not much to choose between these Aryavrats and that Zakir Nayak and his ilk who believe and actually preach that Islam, particularly his brand of Salafist Wahabi Islam, is the only religion which should prevail upon all others and the Musalaman should rightfully aspire to rule upon the whole world.

Deep inside neither the Prime Minister nor any of his esteemed colleagues can really regret, leave alone actually condemn what Dayashankar Singh said or what happened to those four Dalits skinning dead cows in Una district of Gujarat on 11 July. The atrocities against the Dalits are recurring each day. Amidst all the Dalit agitation, there was a report of another cow vigilante group beating up five Dalits in Amreli district of Gujarat for skinning dead cows, handed over to them by the Municipal Corporation of the city.In Karnataka Bajrang Dal men attempted to attack Dalits on the pretext that they were consuming Beef. In next door Maharashtra a Dalit boy was killed for an alleged affair with an upper caste girl. About the same time a Dalit girl was raped in Haryana now notorious only for atrocities on Dalits and Muslims. In Jharkhand Tourism minister Amar Kumar Bauri was prevented from inaugurating the Shravan Mela in his Deoghar constituency because he happened to be a Dalit and we are not listing here the atrocities on Muslims in the name of cow protection.

But the Prime Minister chose to ignore all round condemnation in Parliament and now it transpires even from his admirers like Tavleen Singh and Lord Meghnad Desai. Instead he went off to Gorakhpur to certify  Sadhus and Sants and their Maths as the harbingers of modern India.

With the elections to Uttar Pradesh and Punjab approaching fast the Prime Minister and his party the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appear to be caught in a bit of a cleft. On the one hand BJP president Amit Shah had been working for over a year to repeat Muzaffarnagar (Muzaffarnagar abhi Baqi hai) to raise communal passions and recapture UP in the next assembly elections. For this he needed to draw away Dalits and OBCs so that a Dallt-Muslim vote bank may not benefit Mayawati and simultaneously defeat Mulayam Singh Yadav’s efforts to regroup a Muslim-OBC alliance to win the 2017 elections. Shah’s strategy as in 2014 general elections was to convince all the Hindus of UP that the Musalman was their common enemy who had to be defeated.

For that, he doled out some sops to a handful of Dalit leaders and debunked Mayawati as a highly corrupt person. But that is exactly what poor Dayashankar Singh was doing. So why blame him? Why expel him alone? That’s only for these impending elections. But it so happened that the unbridled Sanghi gau rakshaks couldn’t comprehend the nuances of political expediency and therefore did not know that they should hold back their horses till the conclusion of UP elections. Similarly poor Dayashankar Singh just spewed out the same venom against “the corrupt Mayawati” that he gulped each consecutive day at the feet of his Baudhik in the shakha. The backbone of BJP support is primarily the Aryavrat who considers it his right to rule upon the Dalits, the backwards and the minorities, specially the Muslims with an iron rod. It is for this reason he is celebrating the coming to power of the BJP on its own strength and wants to fulfill his dream of putting the Dalits, the OBCs and the Muslims in their place. And the BJP cannot afford to alienate this Aryavrat.

The Aryavrat’s dilemma common to all Sanghis is that temporarily during the election season they may want to unite all Hindus as victims of hundreds of years of Muslim rule to isolate and make the Muslim vote infructuous. But Manusmriti has taught them how the Dalit is worse than the animal and how Shudra is there only to serve them. And how many of them, Modi included, would disown Manusmriti?

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