In attack on Rahul Gandhi, BJP falls back on that familiar epithet: Mir Jafar

A commander in the Bengal army under Siraj ud-Daulah, Mir Jafar had betrayed the nawab during the 1757 Battle of Plassey, which eventually paved the way for British rule in India. Patra said Rahul had done “the same thing during his visit to London”. “He invited foreign forces to come to India. Shehzada wants to become a nawab. Shehzada has sought help from the East India Company to become a nawab,” the BJP leader charged.

During his recent interactions in the UK, Rahul spoke about democracy being under threat in India, going on to say that it was an Indian problem and India would tackle it. However, he added that given India’s importance, democracy in the country was “a global good”, which the world could not ignore.

Earlier this year, while criss-crossing Jammu and Kashmir as part of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said he never thought former party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad would turn out to be a “Mir Jafar”, and alleged he had been propped up by the BJP to cut into Congress votes in the Union territory.

A couple of months earlier, while also referring to Azad, Ramesh had said there was a “Mir Jafar” in the Northeast as well, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma. A former Congress leader, Sarma is now a rising BJP star.

Madhya Pradesh Congress leaders used the same description for Jyotiraditya Scindia when he crossed over to the BJP in 2020, taking away more than a dozen MLAs and bringing down the Congress government in the state. Former MPCC chief Arun Yadav even shared a photo of Scindia while posting greetings for Nagpanchami.

During the 2021 Assembly polls, Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee dubbed prominent defectors from her party to the BJP such as Suvendu Adhikari, Dinesh Trivedi and Mukul Roy as “Mir Jafar”.

Mir Jafar’s descendant Syed Reza Ali Meerza or Chhote Nawab took offence to this. Ali, who contests the historical representation of Mir Jafar as a traitor, declared that he and his family had been TMC supporters but would never vote for the party again.

Later, when Roy made his back to the TMC after Mamata Banerjee retained power comprehensively in the Assembly polls, it was the BJP’s turn to call him “Mir Jafar”.

Last year, across the border in Pakistan, “Mir Jafar” had surfaced when then PM Imran Khan was tackling the threat to his government. Accusing the US of having a hand in the crisis, Khan said his political adversaries were part of the “foreign conspiracy”, and branded them “Mir Jafar”.