By Binoy Viswam
Stating that there are nearly 400 days left for the 2024 elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi masked himself by exhorting the BJP cadres to keep aside electoral aims and work for all sections of people. He was addressing the recently concluded national executive meeting of the BJP.
It is one example of how the RSS-BJP and their cadres have been tempered by the fascist ideology. The two-day conclave was devoted totally towards elections and all its deliberations were focused on the electoral victory of the BJP. In fact, the RSS spearheading the BJP has begun the election work since last year itself. Setting up a target of one lakh new shakhas for the RSS, their goal was to activise the BJP work in all the polling booths of the country. While many other political forces were engaged in various other important and unimportant activities, RSS was silently doing their work concentrating only on elections. It shows the political sharpness of the fascist ideology.
Once the National Executive meeting is over, the electoral plank of the BJP is clear before the people. They are going to face the elections based on the same subjects that helped the BJP to reap rich dividends in the past. There is nothing new in the ideological or political storage of the Party, which is committed to represent the class interests of the super-rich and extreme right. They follow the footsteps of fascism in Germany, moulded by Adolf Hitler during second World War. With all fervor, RSS-BJP has put into practice the racial pride which serves as the founding principle of their cultural nationalism.
The national executive convincingly revealed that BJP is going to hide all their failures under the glorious carpet of consorted propaganda. Ram temple is going to be the highlight of their campaign. Lord Ram is again drawn into the realm of power politics. This may be unthinkable for the God-fearing doctrines of real faith. But for the power mongering faith of RSS-BJP, it has become their habit. To give their campaign a political shade, the Presidency of G20 is going to be widely utilized. From the very beginning, BJP was depicting the G20 Presidency as a special honour bestowed on Modi’s India by the rest of the world. But the simple fact is that it is only a routine rotation that made India the President of G20.
The next and the most important point of the campaign would be the welfare of the poor, as the poor constitute the major chunk among the voters. The quintessence of the resolutions and statements discussed by the National Executive was to win over the common people to gain one more innings. It is not without any purpose that the finance minister, during recent times, talked too much about the middle class. RSS-BJP strategists have understood the significance of wooing the middle class as they are the crucial opinion makers in urban and rural areas. The facts of life have proved that the BJP rule since 2014 has only betrayed the large segments of the population right from the lower middle class down to the lower strata that include Dalits, Adivasis and the underprivileged.
As part of their election strategy, the BJP leadership has intensified a political offensive against all its opponents. In fact the BJP is scared about its future. It can not ignore the growing discontent among all sections of the society. Everyone is expressing anger in various forms throughout the country. All the promises given to them are thrown to the wind, even the BMS and Swadeshi Jagran Manch are critical about the economic policies of the government. Ideological framework of cultural nationalism and religious slogans like Ram temple are used and reused to pacify those elements of resentment.
In this background, the inequality report, 2023 published by Oxfam has aggravated their worries for the future. The Oxfam report throws light to the real living conditions of India. “It shows that the impact of inequality is especially stark at the margins of the Indian society, with some communities such as the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Scheduled Caste (SCs) suffering from physical remoteness and systematic exclusion from the means to achieve vertical mobility. It reveals some stark findings proving that the gap between the rich and the poor is indeed widening.
Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than three percent of the total wealth. Its impact has been exceptionally poor diets, increase in debt and deaths. This is in stark contrast to the top 30 per cent who own more than 90 percent of the total wealth. Among them, the top 10 per cent own more than 80 per cent of the concentrated wealth.
The wealthiest 10 per cent own more than 72 per cent of the total wealth, the top 5 per cent own nearly 62 per cent of the total wealth, and the top 1 percent own nearly 40.6 per cent of the total wealth in India. The country still has the world’s highest number of poor at 228.9 million. On the other hand, the total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 billionaires in 2022. The combined wealth of India’s 100 richest has touched INR 54.12 lakh crore. The wealth of the top 10 richest stands at INR 27.52 lakh crore – a 32.8 per cent rise from 2021”.
When these facts and figures stare at India, the leaders of the BJP spend their energy to propagate the greatness of ‘Modinomics’, which is full of hollow rhetoric. While using aggressive language against the opposition, the BJP spokespersons were consciously silent about their taxation policies. The report further mentions, “Before the pandemic, in 2019, the Central Government reduced the corporate tax slabs from 30 per cent to 22 per cent, with newly incorporated companies paying a lower percentage (15 percent). This new taxation policy resulted in a total loss of INR 1.84 lakh crore and had a significant role in the 10 per cent downward revision of tax revenue estimates in 2019-20. To increase revenue, the Union Government adopted a policy of hiking the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and excise duties on diesel and petrol while simultaneously cutting down on exemptions. The indirect nature of both the GST and fuel taxes make them regressive, which invariably burdens the most marginalized”
Even at the national executive the BJP was silent about the proportion of a wealth tax. BJPs economic policy is to transfer the burden of crisis on the poor and marginalized and safeguard the unending greed of the super-rich. In that frenzied move, swadeshi RSS-BJP has become the faithful followers of FDI. They owe an explanation to their own followers, the reasons for the boundless subservience to the foreign and domestic capital. They should explain the reasons for skipping away from the promise of legal guarantee of MSP to the farmers. They should also tell the marginalized the reasons for diminishing layout for projects like MNREGA and other social security measures.
The BJP national executive was desperate in its statement, that it has to win all the nine state elections scheduled to take place in 2023. It is evident that the party of the extreme right led by the fascist ideology would use all the weapons in their armoury to come back to power. Such a situation is dreadful for the secular democratic foundations of India. BJP’S victory was always possible due to the divide among the opposition votes. The same would be their approach in the coming elections- to divide the opposition votes and rule the country once again. It is high time for all those forces in positions who are committed to the constitutional philosophy of secular democracy to understand the gravity of the situation and work out their strategy for the coming elections. This is a life and death moment not only for the BJP but also for the opposition. The Communist Party with all its clarity has tried to tell the nation the urgency of a broad unity of secular, democratic, left forces to fight and defeat the fascist threat looming over the country’s future. The time has come to unite the masses and to wage the battle. (IPA Service)
