Appeasment Politics

While Modi was fasting, India was busy either in praising governance skills or criticizing his ideological bent. Adding to the buzz were the events like Muslim skull cap controversy or Mehbooba Mufti’s being misquoted. It gave his opponents opportunity to disgust him further. We may be on any side of the divide but it is established that Modi is the most polarizing political figure in current political class. It is also clear that the aim of this event was not to appease Muslim votes,  as Modi understands that they are not his constituency. 

Similarly, it is not going to bring any change in Muslims' position. Thus idea was to develop wider acceptability among the allies of NDA who might oppose his candidature during the next parliamentary election. As the kind politics Modi does may hurt the likes of Nitish, Chandrababu and Biju. These allies are also feeding their constituencies as they understand the risk of aligning with Modi. My take on Sadbhavna Mission has already being published so without digging further into the event, I would like to raise other aspects of these fake fasts and appeasement politics. 

Imitating Modi congress’s Shankar Singh Vaghela also announced a fast. Vaghela himself was BJP’s chief minister and followed the same ideology. When he was dumped by his BJP and adopted by Congress he had an overnite change of heart. We will never know if it was a genuine or compulsion of vote bank politics. Although Vaghela’s fast received nominal response but it gave Congress an opportunity to try and appeasement some more Muslim votes.

These appeasements of the Congress are superficial and most of the times has failed to transform the fate of the minorities. When Digvijay Singh visited Shanjarpur village of Azamgarh, the home to the two victims of Batla House Encounter case. He met their parents and parents of those whose kids are arrested in the case. Families of these students requested Digvijay Singh to initiate an independent inquiry on the encounter and to start a fast track court for the trail of the arrested students. Two years of have passed since he visited, no action has been taken from him or his party. Three key years of these students have passed in jail and they have not yet been charged by agencies.

In the recent Bharatpur communal riots the police are being accused of favouring one community. As soon as this news broke out, Rajasthan Chief Minister announced compensation. Like BJP the congress also does not understands that money can never compensate injustice. Beside these recent cases there are hundreds such cases like forgotten Sri Krishna Commission report on Mumbai riots, Bhagalpur riots, Meerut riots. The list of forgotten but not forgiven cases in Congress's regime is definitely many folds longer than BJP's.

Far from Gujarat, shivers of fast was also observed in Bihar where Nitish Kumar avoided to comment on the Narendra Modi’s fast. But forgot that he very recently missed to apologies on the Kishanganj atrocities by police in Bihar. My intend is not to revisit these unfortunate events but to highlight how these fasts and statements has started to appears more theatrical that real. These tricks have become so predictable that schools kids have also started guessing it right. This is the reason why youth has started hating our politicians across the party line.

Neither I support Narendra Modi nor his style of hard line politics, especially in as diverse country as ours. But at the same time we as Muslims also need to understand that so called secular parties have used our votes but have not delivered what was expected from them. In this time of high drama and audacity, BJP surely gets the credit of using this appeasement politics at the least. They have mobilized their votes through their vast networks and of course through fake propaganda.

Published in Rozmarra.com

Javed Akhtar's Fasad ke Baad