Opinion Us versus us

The furore over the citizenship law, the PM said, implicitly, explicitly, was a conspiracy to unseat him from power.

All speeches are made of what is said and what is not. On the day after, therefore, listen closely to both Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s words, and his silences, at Ramlila Maidan in the national capital on Sunday. The seething backdrop, still unfolding, is the spiralling agitation and anger, expressed in university campuses and outside, by mostly young people, against the law fast-tracking citizenship for non-Muslim persecuted minorities from three Muslim-dominated neighbouring countries and the BJP government’s oft-stated threat to extend nationwide the National Citizenship Register process in Assam. While PM Modi apparently distanced himself from his own home minister, and his party’s manifesto, among others, when he denied that the NRC was being talked about by the ruling regime — a sign, perhaps, of retreat in the face of the protests — what he didn’t say was even more significant and controversial: He did not say there would be no NRC. In other words, having passed a law that makes religion, for the very first time, the basis for giving citizenship to foreigners, the BJP government reserves the right to bring an NRC which would unsettle large swathes of the country’s own minorities and poor at a moment of its choosing. It keeps with itself the power to pick out the “ghuspaithiya (infiltrator)” from the “sharanarthi (refugee)”.

This central message was amplified by several other things that the PM said, and didn’t say. From the podium on Sunday, he addressed “yeh log”, “inki raajneeti”, “inke iraade” (these people, their politics and motives), naming the Congress and its allies, and “Didi” or West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. He did not speak to the agitators, denying them agency and suggesting they are mere puppets pulled by strings “parde ke peeche (in the dark)”, or at the mercy of a “remote control”. He exhorted his audience to demonstrate their respect for the policemen battling protesters on the street, and for elected MPs in Parliament who passed the CAB. He did not urge or express respect, or empathy, for the young people who are opposing the law by taking on the might of the state, and its brutality, mostly peacefully, and sometimes by holding aloft the Constitution and the Tricolour. In fact, PM Modi did make a mention of those who are waving the Tricolour as they oppose a discriminatory law — “yehi hai kasauti (this is the test)”, he said, adding a new nationalism test to the old. If earlier, “They”, those whom he had in an earlier speech identified on the basis of their clothes, and also “urban Naxals”, were challenged to prove their patriotism by holding up the flag and, quite literally, by singing the national anthem, now they would also be asked, as the PM did on Sunday: Have you criticised terror, raised your voice against Pakistan, while holding the flag?

Advertisement

Finally, the PM employed a tactic he has used several times before. He personalised the issue, put himself at the centre. The furore over the citizenship law, he said, implicitly, explicitly, was a conspiracy to unseat him from power. The PM has said his piece. With more and more CMs standing up and saying no to the Centre on NRC, the pushback grows.