Yogi’s blatant Thakurwad during the last five years is also generating a new social mobilisation. Dalits and several backward castes are drifting away from the BJP. Even a section of Brahmins is not too happy with the BJP in UP. There are also reports of Muslims going for strategic voting with even Asaduddin Owasi’s rhetoric apparently failing to sway them.UP seems to be drifting away from Kamandal and moving again towards Mandal in this round of elections.It must be alarming news for the BJP. Old timers in the state have for long believed that if Lucknow slips out of a political party’s grip, Delhi too becomes difficult to retain. With the 2024 Lok Sabha elections not too far now, signs of an insecure Lucknow must be causing serious concern to BJP bosses in Delhi. So, there is a desperate attempt to secure power somehow in Lucknow.Unfortunately for the BJP, it has had to fall back upon religion and hate to win elections, although temple politics seems to have considerably lost its appeal. The call for temples in Ayodhya-Kashi-Mathura, as anticipated, has been given but it is just not selling like the Ram temple did in the 1990s.The problem with the BJP in UP now is that there is no visible Muslim ‘enemy’ like Babri Masjid Action Committee to provoke and incite a Hindu backlash now. There is no Muslim resistance to Kashi or Mathura temples like there was to the Ram temple in Ayodhya.So, how to build up hate for Muslims and paint them as the enemy in Hindu minds? Bring Muslims somehow to the streets, let fanatic Muslims retaliate in kind and hold out threats so that a Hindu backlash builds up. The opposition in Gurugram to the devout offering Friday namaz in designated public places, after mosques were shut down and permission for adding floors to existing mosques was withheld, the call for genocide and the auction of Muslim women online are all designed to provoke a Muslim backlash. Once a fanatic Muslim leadership emerges as the community spokesperson, it would be easier to conjure and sell an Aurangzeb versus Shivaji binary to the Hindus.
Source link
