An overwhelming narrative about women and children in protest at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh has hardly unnerved the BJP. Instead, as the date of election to the Delhi Assembly nears, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and other BJP leaders are more combative on the issue of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
In fact, Shah’s public assertions on the CAA have gone sharper as he leads campaign through streets of the Capital against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) that looks pretty confident of winning a second term.
The BJP’s calculation is that its core voters, which still swears by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will see the Shaheen Bagh protest as an attempt in a pre-dominantly Muslim locality to force an elected government to blink on the issue. This could open the Pandora’s Box for the government in the future.
Therefore, as the Shaheen Bagh is romanticised by Modi’s critics as the new symbol of a mass uprising in its making, the BJP is on a hard drive to sell the legislation.
Why should the Muslims be so upset with a law that grants citizenship to stranded Hindu and other non-Muslim refugees fleeing from persecution in neighbouring Islamic states? Nobody is taking away their status or rights.
According to BJP leaders, the exclusion of Muslims from this legislation’s scope is by no means an attempt to rob the Indian Muslims of their citizenship. Any outrage on this account —contrived or otherwise— is a bogus attempt to spread disaffection against the BJP government at the Centre, timed with the student unrest in certain campuses.
Even if the CAA may have stoked fears of a larger proportion among the minority community, the BJP would want the ire directed at the legislation to run its course, rather than appear squirming on what it thinks is for a right cause.
Consequently, attempts by some interlocutors to organise an appeal from either Modi or Shah to the Shaheen Bagh protesters have run into a cold wall. There were also suggestions that a delegation of protesters be allowed to meet them. All such attempts have been met with a rebuff, drawing a mix of anger and disappointment though the mainstream media accounts have sought to give the Shaheen Bagh a colour of Tahrir Square of the Arab Spring fame.
Shah and his strategists are firm that the bluff of the organisers must eventually be called off — even if it means the PM getting a very negative press in the West and US business leaders like George Soros showing the thumbs down.
The BJP counts on the utter chaos caused by the lockdown of an arterial road that links South Delhi and Noida due to Shaheen Bagh protest to result in a silent counter-narrative. Reports of children suffering on their way to school because their buses take a detour and even loss of one life due to an ambulance stuck in the traffic nightmare have added new dimensions to an agitation that is still perceived as totally Muslim in character.
This is notwithstanding public readings of the Constitution’s Preamble or illusory poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz that attempt to give an intellectual hue to a street protest.
Allegations of women protesters taking turns and being paid and fed by local politicians are juxtaposed against extreme distress faced by residents commuting from other parts of Delhi.
However, the BJP knows that this counter-narrative alone cannot easily upset Kejriwal whose trump card remains his government’s decision to dole out freebies in the name of development.
In the battle for Muslim votes, the Congress —AAP’s other opponent in the Delhi Assembly elections — has been openly supporting the Shaheen Bagh protests to corner Kejriwal who has been rather mild in his criticism of the CAA and even urging the Shaheen Bagh protesters to exercise their rights without disrupting the traffic.
Both AAP and Congress have always had to fight for the same vote base —the Muslims.
Ironically, many BJP leaders privately hold that a rise in the Congress vote in the 2020 polls will bring down the AAP’s share and help the BJP gain.
The Congress sprung a surprise by coming second in the Lok Sabha polls of 2019, securing 22.5% of votes as against 15% in 2014. The AAP got only 18.1%. The BJP won all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi, bagging 56.6 %. This time, Kejriwal hopes that the Congress will underperform as it did in 2015, hurting the BJP’s chances of winning even a decent number of seats.
Shekhar Iyer
The writer is a senior journalist.
This column will appear every fortnight