Opinion In the fold
ABVP campaign brings a vicious politics home to roost. BJP leadership’s silence is deafening.
In Delhi University this week, the ABVP flagged off a campaign to fight the “menace of live-in relationships”. On the pretext of restoring “respect for women”, it also proposes to raise awareness on “forced conversions” and the alleged phenomenon of women being trapped into marriage by “men with fake identities”. It was careful not to say “love jihad”, but the term has cropped up earlier — on ABVP posters across the university campus, and on the agenda of the student body’s national meet in Lucknow, alongside the usual targets of its vitriol, be it “pub culture” or “Valentine’s Day”. The ABVP is evidently impervious to the fact that a relationship between two consenting adults lies outside the remit of political agitation.
But the ABVP’s campaign in Delhi is no isolated incident. It is part of an illiberal clamour that is seen to be emboldened ever since the BJP came to power at the Centre. It also points to a growing dissonance between this regressive politics and the insistently development-centric claims made by the top central BJP leadership. Till now, the official BJP has carefully skirted issues like “love jihad”. It did not figure in the articulated agenda for the UP bypolls and the party’s central leadership has even feigned ignorance of the issue. When saffron groups in UP sought to work up a ground-level crusade around the issue, the BJP held up the fig leaf of organisational separateness. When the party’s own star campaigner, Yogi Adityanath, brandished it, that fig leaf slipped. With the ABVP’s zealous championing of the issue, it has slipped some more.
The student wing is an essential part of the body politic of the parent party. The ABVP takes its cue from the BJP on key issues and serves as the training ground for future party leaders. This year, when the ABVP swept the Delhi University student elections, it attributed its success to the “Modi effect”. Given the ties that bind them, the BJP leadership’s silence on its youth wing’s irresponsible and inflammatory campaign is deafening.
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