Is this a confrontation the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate can afford?
In an election that has all too often seen lines of propriety and civility being crossed, BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi crossed a new one on Sunday. In rallies in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, he targeted the Election Commission. Modi’s charges — of widespread rigging and violence in Bengal, Bihar and parts of UP — may possibly need to be probed further. But Modi’s style — of straightaway indicting the EC for unfairness, and then taunting it, daring it to take action against him — needs to be censured immediately.
Taken together with Modi’s comment, or threat, also made in a rally in Bengal, of deporting all those Bangladeshis who do not “observe Durgashtami”, and his close aide Amit Shah’s description of Azamgarh as a “base” for terrorists in UP on the same day, Modi’s challenge to the EC would appear to shore up apprehensions that have been stoked by his dizzying political ascent: that minorities would not be safe or respected in a Modi regime, and that his brand of muscular politics would be careless or cavalier with due process and institutions.
Sunday’s statements also directly undercut the image that Modi’s own campaign in this election, for the most part, has energetically sought to project — as a man of development, whose self-proclaimed mission it is to implement the “Gujarat model” in Delhi, and whose only “holy book” is the Constitution of India. In the last few days, when statements of bigotry have been made by those in the parivar, such as BJP candidate in Bihar, Giriraj Singh, or the VHP’s Praveen Togadia, the BJP has attempted to distance itself from them by holding up Modi’s own apparently unwavering focus on governance issues. Modi’s statements on Sunday make it difficult for the party to hold up that fig leaf.
If there is anything that keeps India’s democracy lively and growing, it is a shared respect, despite the aberrations, for the settled rules of the game. Institutions like the EC are vital in undergirding it. Even a campaign that is centred on a personality, as Modi’s is, must acknowledge that. Any ill-considered attempt to rush headlong into the institutional wall will only bruise Modi, not the EC.
