by MIHIR S. SHARMA
More than any other party, the BJP can figure out exactly what is likely to infuriate and mobilise their core voter
At some point, you have to just lose yourself in admiration for the strategists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). More than any other party, and definitely far more easily than the aristocratic, out-of-touch planners for the Congress, they can figure out exactly what is likely to infuriate and mobilise their core voter.
Take, for example, the wonderful words “love jihad”. This is the idea, first developed in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s southern “laboratory” of Mangalore, that young Muslim men gather in packs, wear colourful shirts and pass around the hair gel, and then dash off on snazzy motorbikes, humming Salman Khan songs, to woo young Hindu or Christian women in order to convert them to Islam. Karnataka’s BJP government informed people that “this appears to be a serious issue” – unlike, say, illegal mining – and put a special detachment of the Crime Investigation Department on the case.
Now, of all the forms of jihad the Right would like us to worry about, this might seem the most harmless. Unless, of course, you believe the Honour of a Community is Borne By its Girls and stuff like that. Which, it turns out, the Sangh Parivar imagines large numbers of prospective voters do, and so it has happily tried to replicate its southern experiment elsewhere. More than one person has told me that local ABVP and BJP activists in Delhi monitor the notices of upcoming inter-religious marriages that are required to be accessible under the Special Marriage Act; if the girl’s name sounds Hindu to them, they go and complain to, or otherwise harass, her family.
It turns out, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Jat-dominated Western Uttar Pradesh is the most fertile ground for this. According to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP’s) Ashok Singhal, the khap mahapanchayat that was held in Muzaffarnagar on September 7, after which almost 40 people have been killed in religious violence, was a “Bahu beti bachao mahapanchayat” – a grand assembly to save the girls of the house. (Though many would say, if the girls of the house need saving, it’s from the khap.)
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)