Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: In new year, BJP needs to be called out for its abdications and silences. Opposition needs to find its voice, an imagined community

In December, a student from Tripura died after a hate attack in Dehradun, and no senior member of the BJP government or party called the crime by its name. Leading up to Christmas, attacks on churches and congregations, across states, by goons alleging conversion, met with a similar silence. In Chhattisgarh, Bajrang Dal members arrested for vandalising Christmas decorations in a Raipur mall were welcomed with garlands after they were granted bail, underlining the climate of impunity. A young woman’s birthday party in a Bareilly cafe was disrupted by vigilantes because two of her guests were Muslim.

In Indore, which wins awards for being India’s cleanest city, contaminated drinking water claimed lives and a senior BJP minister swatted down a reporter’s question on accountability (and later apologised weakly).

Local body elections in Maharashtra, one of India’s most urbanised states, which witnessed the most brazen tod phod (splitting) of parties not long ago, showcase anything-goes alliances. Here, 68 candidates of the ruling BJP-Shinde Sena-led Mahayuti will be elected unopposed. The Narendra Modi government rushed a bill through Parliament that radically tamps down MGNREGA’s assurance to the poorest citizens.

Ahead of Umar Khalid’s bail plea coming up in the Supreme Court, when the Chief Justice of India spoke of the importance of “empathy” in bending the “arc of justice towards the communities that need it most”, it only underlined an absence. Too often, the judiciary gives the benefit of doubt to the executive, or seems to take its cue from it. And so it is that a young scholar spends more than five years in jail, a trial far from beginning, bail denied again.

The vigilante is empowered, governance resists accountability, the law is used to bend the rule of law, democracy is undermined using the tool-kit of democracy.

And yet, take a look at the Congress-led Opposition, and beneath its fighting words, you see bewilderment and helplessness. Bewilderment over why the BJP continues to win elections. Helplessness on how to counter it.

If it does not want to get lost in the nihilistic politics of “vote chori”, the Congress-led Opposition needs to ask itself why, despite the BJP government’s abdications, the Constitution/democracy-in-danger argument is not striking sparks on the ground, except in sections of Dalits and among Muslims — two communities that depend on constitutional protections most crucially.

It needs to ask if its defence of constitutional values comes at a time when they are widely seen as fraying and besieged, not without wider complicities. In India, as elsewhere, settled frameworks of legitimacy are seen to be bent under the weight of their own contradictions. In an era of communicative abundance, they are also coming under pressure from the 24×7 performativeness of politics, and new strategies of continuous mobilisation that are changing political representation as we know it.

In a time like this, the BJP was quick to seize its opening — it portrays itself as the carrier of the “voice of the people”, which needs to be unshackled from the old order’s debris. Amid turmoil, it projects emotive wholes and unities that create selfie points and comfort zones and invite the people in — be it “Hindu rashtra” or “Viksit Bharat” or “Vishwaguru”, or “India de-Macaulayised”.

Of course, the BJP’s wholes are not just about belonging, they rest on the exclusion, fundamental and continuing, of the Muslim minority. They use emotional appeal to evade calls for accountability.

But an Opposition that does not recognise the deeper crisis that underlies the BJP’s rise, is unable to find the language to counter it.

To do that, it would need imagination and patience to repurpose the BJP’s whole — to reframe Hinduism by reinstating its pluralism, instead of being spooked by it. It may need to frame a new imagined community. Prashant Kishor slipped in Bihar, but his pitch to voters, simple and powerful — “vote for your child’s future” — sought to straddle social cleavages, offers something to work with.

For now, as the old year dissolves into new, an Opposition stuck with an older vocabulary can call out neither the BJP government’s abdications, nor the BJP project’s exclusions and silences.

The writer is national opinion editor, The Indian Express. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com