It has become a sure-fire way for some people in the BJP to express their deep anger—or their worst insecurities.
It’s that time of the year again when elections are on your mind as well as on the doorstep, which means that a certain bashing of a certain neighbour becomes par for the course. Put it down to insecurity—will the electorate vote me in again or not—or too much time on your hands, or simply, code for beating up your own Muslims at home.
Whatever the reason, the presence of the ‘P’ word, Pakistan, quite dramatically shoots up as the poll season nears. Here’s a compilation of some statements only over the last month:
1. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson GVL Narasimha’s tirade on December 16 attacks the Congress party for ‘conspiring with Pakistan’ to take revenge for its 2014 electoral loss.
According to GVL, Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s targeting of the Rafale fighter jet contract is direct proof that his party is not concerned about the country’s self-respect.
How does GVL leap over and jump to Pakistan? The mind boggles.
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2. On December 31, 2018, Gujarat BJP chief Jitu Vaghani lashed out at senior Congress leader and MP from Gujrat Madhusudan Mistry and told him to go live in Pakistan. Why? Because Mistry had dared suggest that the India-Pakistan border in Banaskantha district’s Suigam village be opened up so that farmers could sell their produce more easily across the border.
At a rally only a few days before, Mistry had said that farmers had complained about their produce taking two-three days to reach the faraway Wagah border in Punjab, and so could he please tell the Centre, which is where foreign policy is usually made, that it would be far more convenient to open a crossing in nearby Suigam?
Most people would put this down to a commonsensical idea—after all, everyone wants their farmers to earn more. Moreover, the border between Gujarat and Sindh was created only 71 years ago, while farmers in both provinces had been trading with each other for centuries before.
But Vaghani was having none of this bhai-chaara business, cloaked in simple economics. “Madhusudanbhai should go to Pakistan and live there,” he said.
Now there is simply no way that PM Modi would have heard what Vaghani said in the end of December, chewed upon it and said something similar on January 13, on the 350th anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh (more on that later), when he pointed out that Partition was a mistake because it left Kartarpur Sahib inside Pakistani territory.
It is also important to note here that Madhusudan Mistry, the honourable Congress MP from Gujarat, is hardly one to take things lying down. Furious at being taunted with the ‘P’ word, the Congress leader lashed back at Vaghani. “You first explain why the BJP government at the Centre is going soft on Pakistan?” he asked angrily.
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3. On January 6, Assam finance minister and BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma said in Guwahati that it was imperative to pass the Citizenship Bill (which gives Indian citizenship to all non-Muslims who have taken refuge in India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh), otherwise ‘Assam will go to the Jinnahs.’
Sarma, who quit the Congress and joined the BJP on the eve of the Assam elections in 2016, which gave the BJP a thumping majority, added with alacrity, “Without that Bill, we are surrendering ourselves to the philosophy of Jinnah… This is a fight between Jinnah’s legacy and India’s legacy.”
Odd thing is, Sarma, a former member of the Asom Gana Parishad (the inheritor political party of the Assam accord which agreed that all foreigners, irrespective of religion, would not be allowed to come into Assam if they were born after 1971) knows that the fight was not about the religion of the immigrant, whether Hindu Bengali or Bangladeshi Muslim, but about Assamese or Ahom identity.
4. Shockingly – or not so shockingly – Sarma followed up his diatribe, saying the PM had ensured with the passage of the Citizenship Bill, that 17 seats in Assam would not go to Muslims, or Jinnah, alias, AIUDF leader Badruddin Jamal.
5. Barely a week later, on January 13 at the BJP National Council meeting in Delhi, the irrepressible Sarma was at it again. He called Rahul Gandhi, his former leader, Gabbar Singh (the villain in the 1970s Hindi film Sholay), in retaliation for Gandhi calling Goods and Services Tax the ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ and accused him of standing with Pakistan and against India.
“But they stand with Pakistan. They know if Rafale comes to India then it (Pakistan) cannot defeat India in air warfare. Therefore they are saying that India does not need Rafale,” Sarma said.
6. Meanwhile, also on January 13, the prime minister accused the Congress (really, Jawaharlal Nehru) of cutting a bad deal with the British Raj—Cyril Radcliffe, Mountbatten, Clement Attlee, Wavell, Churchill and others—and allowing Pakistan to keep the Kartarpur Sahib gurudwara, when it could have easily come to India, if only the border had been shifted a few kilometres to the east.
Perhaps one should send the PM a history book or two on the Partition? On how and why Radcliffe drew his terrible line on the basis of two principles, the religion of the majority in that district as well as contiguity? For example, Lahore was majority Hindu/Sikh, but was surrounded by Muslim-majority rural Punjab, so that ancient city was given to Pakistan, not India. As was the case with Kartarpur Sahib, the gurudwara holy to Sikhs because Guru Nanak lived there for the last 17 years of his life.
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7. On January 15, former BJP deputy chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir Kavinder Gupta said that Shah Faesal, the 2010 IAS topper who quit the service last week to join politics, ‘may have got money from Pakistan.’ Faesal had announced that he was quitting in protest against the ‘unabated killings’ in J&K and the ‘marginalisation of Muslims by Hindutva forces at the hands of Hindutva forces.’
Clearly, ‘Go to Pakistan’ has become a sure-fire way for some people in the BJP to express their deep anger—or their worst insecurities. From the unsubtle Kavinder Gupta to the much more suave Sarma, this catch-all word or phrase reveals the depth of the BJP foot soldier’s anathema for India’s own Muslims, otherwise spectacularly expressed in cow vigilantism and beef lynch mobs.
What’s the point, otherwise, of having a neighbour you simply love to hate, especially on TV?
All eyes now on the answers blowing in the wind in the summer of 2019.