Barely forty eight hours ahead of the first phase of polling for the Bihar assembly, the BJP leadership has brought out significant strategic shift in its campaigning.
The party which had earlier announced to face the election under the leadership of Nitish Kumar, has started projecting the prime minister, Narendra Modi as the only public face of the party and also trying to terrorise the upper caste electorates by digging up the criminal past of the RJD and the followers of Lalu Yadav.
What is most visible is the hoardings which carried the photos of Nitish along with Modi are being new hoardings and posters simply carrying the pictures of Modi. The pictures of Nitish have been dumped.
The leadership is trying to maintain distance from Nitish and the most simple logic that is being played is Nitish has lost his cool and has even turned abusive. This is indeed a fact that this election has been witnessing appearance of an intolerant and aggressive Nitish. His friends are shocked and confess that they had never seen this face of Nitish. At every public meeting he uses personal jibes against Lalu and his family members. The jibes are not of abusive nature but they are crude. This is being viewed as his admission of losing ground.
Obviously in this backdrop the BJP is not at all inclined to identify itself with him as he has become the symbol of anti-incumbency. It is really irony that it is he, not even the state BJP leaders, is being blamed for all the problems that the state was facing. Even the inability of Narendra Modi to provide transport to the fleeing labourers in the initial stage of the corona epidemic is being attributed to him.
What a paradox the man who barely a couple of years back was being projected as the prime ministerial candidate is not even considered by the BJP as the next chief minister. Some senior BJP leaders have already started blaming him for administrative failure of the government.
In a tactical move the BJP has started playing up fifteen years of Lalu Yadav’s misrule. The idea was initially floated by the deputy chief minister and BJP leaders Sushil Modi, who is identified as the protégé of Nitish in the state politics. He is now hospitalised with corona. His idea has been hijacked by his detractors in the BJP.
These BJP leaders have suddenly started projecting the CPI(ML) an affiliate to the grand alliance and an ally of RJD, as the party of the criminals and enemy of the upper caste people. This has unnerved the upper caste Rajputs and Bhumihars. An impression is being created that the emergence of the CPI(ML), a major prominent Naxalite outfit, would create law and order problem in the state. This tactics is the part of the RSS design to identify the anti-BJP forces as the enemy of the country.
Nevertheless the CPI(ML) leadership has taken serious note of this tactics of the BJP. The general secretary of the CPI(ML) Dipankar Bhattacharya outright rejected the saffron design and in an article alleged that the BJP was trying to spread fear about CPI(ML) but it would not work. He said; “BJP hopes it can invoke the CPI(ML) as a bogey to cover up the fear the BJP has spread throughout the country through its disastrous policies, hate-filled politics and cruel and repressive governance.”
He wrote “The BJP, which hijacked power in Bihar in 2017 by colluding with Nitish Kumar against the emphatic anti-BJP 2015 mandate of the people of Bihar, had thought it could steal the Bihar elections again by using COVID-19 and the lockdown as shields for the NDA. But the anger and determination of the people on the ground against the arrogant misrule and betrayal of the Nitish Kumar government have clearly rattled the BJP and the party is trying to scare the people against the RJD-Left-INC Mahagathbandhan and, especially, the presence of the CPI(ML) in the alliance.”
“What makes the BJP so desperate? The party clearly has no answer to the questions that are uppermost in people’s minds in these elections. It needs bogeys to divert the attention of the people and it hopes it can invoke the CPI(ML) as a bogey to cover up the fear the BJP has spread throughout the country through its disastrous policies, hate-filled politics and cruel and repressive governance.”
The people of Bihar have reasons to fear the BJP for all that it is doing in neighbouring UP, where Yogi Adityanath Raj is marked by a complete collapse of the rule of law.
Dipankar mentions “What has been the track record of the CPI(ML) in the electoral arena? The CPI(ML) made its mark in Bihar in the late 1980s as the party which resisted booth-capturing and inspired and empowered the landless poor and disenfranchised Dalits to exercise their right to vote. Dalits had to face a massacre in Bhojpur after their first vote, but they succeeded in sending Rameshwar Prasad to Parliament as the first CPI(ML) MP in 1989. The other CPI(ML) leader to have been elected to the Lok Sabha in four consecutive elections was Jayanta Rongpi from the Autonomous District constituency in Assam.”
He said “Who have been the CPI(ML) MLAs in Bihar and Jharkhand? Ram Naresh Ram, the iconic communist leader of Bhojpur who won three successive elections from Sahar; Yogeshwar Gope, legendary leader of state government employees’ movement in Bihar; Mahendra Singh, the boldest voice of the people in Jharkhand who was assassinated during the 2005 elections just after nomination; peasant leaders such as Chandradeep Singh, Amarnath Yadav, Rajaram Singh, Arun Singh and Sudama Prasad; agricultural labour leader Satyadev Ram; popular communist leader of Seemanchal, Mahboob Alam; popular Jharkhand leaders like Vinod Singh and Rajkumar Yadav — such has been the team of CPI(ML) members in Bihar and Jharkhand assemblies.”
There is little doubt that many BJP leaders would mark an ignominious contrast to this illustrious list. He writes “Rape accused and convicted MLAs of the likes of Kuldeep Sengar, the likes of terror accused Pragya Thakur who glorifies Gandhi’s assassin Godse, or ministers like Giriraj Singh celebrating notorious massacre mastermind Brahmeshwar Singh as Bihar’s Gandhi, and chief minister Yogi Adityanath misusing his position to drop all criminal charges against himself — the BJP can boast of such shameful examples that will go down in history as a disgrace to India’s democracy.”
The fact of the matter is the BJP is afraid of the poor and the oppressed finding a voice. The BJP just cannot stomach the fact that the poor have managed to emerge as a fighting force energising Bihar’s ongoing battle for change. The Mahagathbandhan or the grand alliance in Bihar marks the coming together of communist, socialist, and Congress streams of India’s glorious movement for freedom. The ideological and organisational predecessors of BJP betrayed the freedom movement then by collaborating with the British rulers.
He writes “Today they are trying to rule India like the bhure angrez (brown sahibs) Bhagat Singh had warned us against — imposing a new company raj and silencing the voices of dissent and democracy with cruel draconian laws and repressive governance exactly as the colonial rulers did. We have the inheritance of the freedom movement and democracy. We are the heirs of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar, who blazed the trail for social equality and people’s emancipation. The RSS, which was inspired by Mussolini and Hitler, remains fiercely opposed to India’s secular, democratic inheritance and the quest for justice, freedom, equality and fraternity cherished in the Preamble to the Constitution.”
Let the BJP dread the assertion of the poor and the oppressed people for their rights, and the coming together of forces in defence of democracy and the Constitution. Bihar is determined to punish the betrayers of the 2015 mandate, the destroyers of India’s economy and the cruel and sadist architects of the lockdown that caused limitless pain and humiliation to the people of Bihar. The decisive hour for change has arrived and Bihar is ready to fight and win this battle. (IPA Service)