Opinion The bigot within

The alleged conversion of 57 Muslim families in Agra on December 8, mostly slumdwellers lured by promises of BPL cards by organisations affiliated to the Sangh Parivar, is the latest incident in a grim pattern. The Bajrang Dal is calling it “ghar wapsi” or homecoming, but that is thin cover for what appears to be an organised and aggressive “dharm jagran” or religious awakening project to shore up the “Hindu count”. By promoting a sense of siege in the majority community, and rousing it to aggressive proselytisation, Sangh Parivar organisations are crudely stoking minority anxieties. These, of course, have already been sharpened by the alternately triumphalist and threatening postures and statements by these organisations in the six months since the BJP came to power. At this moment, it is not enough for the BJP to offer the technical argument that the Agra controversy is for UP’s SP government to address. Nor can it credibly distance itself from Bajrang Dal-RSS plans at a time when its own MP, Yogi Adityanath, has unabashedly reiterated his intention to lead a similar “homecoming” in Aligarh later this month.

The dissonance only grows more glaring — between the daily professions of reform and claims of change at the top echelons of the Modi government on one side and the palpable simmer and regular eruption of a regressive, minority-hating agenda at lower levels of the ruling party and parivar. There has also been a noticeable upward creep of the irresponsibility and chauvinism — Union External Affairs Minister and BJP’s leading light Sushma Swaraj has urged that the Gita be accorded the status of national book and another Union minister sought to divide the people between “Ramzaadon” and “haramzaadon”. At the end of six months, the Modi government needs to acknowledge the contradiction that has built up on its watch. Given the great expectations that shored up its surge to power, it can tolerate or encourage it at its own peril.

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This Parliament session, the government was supposed to seize the opportunity to push through some of the crucial reforms on its agenda. This is the moment when the Modi government should be strenuously and strategically persuading and dividing its opposition to get the important bills through the Rajya Sabha, where it lacks the required numbers. Instead, in the session so far, the government has had to defend itself against a belligerent opposition attack on Minister Niranjan Jyoti’s hate speech on one day, and on the “reconversion” controversy on Thursday. At the very least, a government that wants to be seen as hardworking and purposeful must ask itself if it is spending too much time and energy on firefighting or covering up for the bigot within.