Modi’s journey to the top has been paralleled by a similar rise in the frequency of communal incidents

G. Sampath 

Narendra Modi’s coronation as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate is a clear message to the world that the Hindutva agenda is back on centre stage.

For many, the answer to the above question would appear so obvious they would deem it stupid to even pose it. But since we as a nation have time and again displayed the collective stupidity necessary to reward communal politicking with votes, it might be a useful exercise—in the light of the recent events in western Uttar Pradesh—to examine this question afresh.

Narendra Modi’s supporters—at least those who claim to believe in religious equality—have always held that the 2002 Gujarat riots are in the past, that Modi has abandoned it for a developmental agenda, and that we too should move on. I have argued elsewhere why this is a self-serving delusion . The recent events in UP’s Muzaffarnagar are significant in that they offer an unambiguous answer, if any was needed, to the question of whether Modi 2.0 is the same as the Modi of 2002.

Modi’s rise within the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) national hierarchy culminated last week with his selection as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. His journey to the top has been paralleled by a similar rise in the frequency of communal incidents, especially in north India. As reported by Mint, between 2009 and March 2013, Uttar Pradesh, the state with the highest number of parliamentary seats (80), witnessed 482 incidents of communal violence, “the highest for any state in the country—resulting in 105 deaths”. According to several reports, there is every indication that the Muzaffarnagar conflagration was a “made-to-order riot” aimed at polarizing the electorate along religious lines. This would engineer the precipitation of the BJP and the Samajwadi Party’s core vote banks around the majority and minority religious identities respectively.

In general, the recent resurgence of communal tensions in UP has been blamed on Sangh affiliates—the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). While this is true enough—the RSS is set to open 40 shakhas in every district and has launched a “Hindutva awareness programme”—the Samajwadi Party also needs to take the blame for encouraging fringe Muslim groups. As political analyst Badri Narayan has pointed out, 10 days before the aborted chausasi kosi parikram in August, senior Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders had a two-hour long closed-door meeting with Mulayam Singh Yadav. “No one knows what exactly transpired, but it can be safely speculated that there was consensus on some enacted rivalry between the two,” Narayan said.

Coming back to Modi, he is the first RSS pracharak to rise so high in Parliamentary politics—to actually become a prime ministerial candidate. Notwithstanding his occasional run-ins with the RSS leadership, Modi’s politics is organically one with that of the RSS in a manner that was never the case with either A.B. “mukhauta” Vajpayee or L.K. “Jinnah-admirer” Advani. In Modi, the RSS found the weapon it needed to depose the Advani-Vajpayee regime, which it never forgave for moving away from the core Hindutva agenda. Modi’s coronation as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate is therefore a clear message to the world that the Hindutva agenda is back on centre stage. This can only mean one thing: the ghastly Muzaffarnagar riots are only a foretaste of what is to come.

It is therefore surprising that the link between Modi and the latest conflagration in UP has received little attention. Who is the head of the BJP’s national poll campaign committee? Modi. Who is in charge of BJP’s election campaign in UP? Amit Shah, Modi’s confidant. And what does Amit Shah do best? Does this question even need answering? For the record, India’s minority affairs minister Rahman Khan has stated that “Amit Shah was sent to UP to flare up communal tension”.

Interestingly, there’s been much heartburn in India over the foreign press branding Modi, India’s PM-in-waiting, so to speak, as a “divisive leader”. Well, if Modi really wants to be taken seriously as a messiah of development who considers all Indians as his brothers and sisters, the least he can do is pay a visit to the riot victims in western Uttar Pradesh, condemn the communal violence (which he has not done still), and express his sympathy for the families who have lost their kith and kin. But it is revealing that Modi, within a week of the communal tragedy, was busy wooing Jat votes in neighbouring Haryana, even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi visited the riot-hit areas and met the affected families.

Before 7 September, 2013, the last large-scale communal riot in western UP had been in Meerut in 1987. It claimed about 350 lives. Television footage from Kawwal and Muzaffarnagar tell us that India is preparing to repeat once again the all too familiar mistakes of the past. Those of us old enough to have been following the news in the eighties would remember how frequent reports of communal violence were. While communal politics built around the Hindutva agenda has remained alive at the state level—most (in)famously in Gujarat—it seemed to have run its course at the national level with the resounding defeat of the BJP in the 2004 election.

The catapulting of Modi onto the national stage thus marks a return to a past that one would have hoped India had outgrown. For now, at least in western UP, it’s yesterday once more. The coming months, and the forthcoming assembly elections in five states, will give us a clearer picture of what direction other parts of India are headed in.