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Anuja Chauhan
Anuja Chauhan

POLITICS

Low of the jungle

PTI3_10_2015_000037A

Cutting across party lines, the agenda is to win the battle of the soundbite, to trend on Twitter, to slander, to pander, to clinch the votes

  • Narendra Modi (in pic) claimed that Aiyar called him nichli jaat, ie, low caste, a leap so imaginative that it makes one wonder if he’d been a little ooncha (high) when he made it.

  • It’s a theatre of the absurd, the obnoxious and the ignorant. Everything is posturing and grandstanding, everything is gimmicky smoke and mirrors.

Hmm. Seems it’s not just Melania Trump who has been plagiarising from Michelle Obama’s speeches. This week, in a sentence that sounded dangerously close to the former US first lady’s extremely popular ‘When they go low, we go high’ statement, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pounced on former Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar’s mostly innocuous statement ‘neech kisam ka aadmi’ (low type of human being) to declare to voters in Gujarat that even though Aiyar had called him neech (low), he would keep doing ooncha (high) work. He also claimed that Aiyar called him nichli jaat, ie, low caste, a leap so imaginative that it makes one wonder if he’d been a little ooncha when he made it.

The Congress, instead of calling the PM out on this gross and blatant misrepresentation, reacted by summarily suspending the senior Congressman from the party. Which was very unfair of course, but perhaps, given the one-tone, dead-to-nuance days we live in, also rather savvy. Remember, it was the same Mani Shankar Aiyar who, during the last election, sneered at Narendra Modi for being a chaiwalla, thus handing him a oh-look-poor-underdog-me-against-the-might-of-the-privileged platform that captured the hearts of the Indian voter and propelled Modi to the prime ministership. Rahul Gandhi must’ve had a vision of Modi carrying the day simply because he was mocked at for being a low caste, and decided to nip the blunder in the bud. Today’s news-bitey, click-baity environment isn’t very strong on unsexy, laborious clarifications and Hillary Clinton style ‘fact-checking’. Smarter perhaps to impale Aiyar’s head on a spike, in a fashion so crude that even the most-dumbed down of television channels get the message, and move on. There’s an election happening after all.

Seems to me it’s neech tactics all round, cutting across party lines.

In the same speech, the PM also said that the use of the phrase ‘nichli jaat’ revealed the Congress’s ‘Mughal mindset’. Which is super-confusing because the Mughals, being Muslim, didn’t believe in caste or jaat. So, how can making a casteist comment reveal a Mughal mindset? If anything at all, it reveals the mindset of a Brahmin, which is also what Mani Shankar Aiyar happens to be. But this doesn’t suit the BJP’s agenda at all. Oh no. And so the poor Mughals, so long buried in their beautifully designed tombs, are dragged in to do service yet again.

Besides, what is a Mughal mindset, anyway? If it means a desire to build ostentatious monuments funded by the sweat of the common man, or an urge to hobnob with sleazy, white corporates who are out to steal your empire from under your nose, then the PM could be guilty of having a Mughal mindset himself.

To be honest, I’m struggling to keep up with all the weird new phrases the right-wing hate machinery keeps hurling at us. Like ‘Lutyens mentality’, for example, which means nothing at all, because all the BJP top brass now reside in Lutyens Delhi. It’s nonsensical for them to rail against the Lutyens elite, because they themselves have been exactly that for almost four years now.

Then there’s the phrase I get hit with frequently—‘rice bag convert’, which (I think) means starving people who agreed to change their religion when they were bribed with a bag of rice. And also ‘salvation’, of course. But ‘salvation convert’ doesn’t sound as demeaning a rice bag convert, so the hate-machinery doesn’t use it.

Of course, the phrase the right-wingers are really hot to trot on is ‘love jihad’. This means ‘Muslim men marrying Hindu women’. The diabolical Muslim boys lure the innocent Hindu girls by being good-looking, and cunningly having religion-neutral nicknames like Bittu and Sonu (never mind that these are all common nicknames in India, across religions!). Also by ‘being polite’ to the girls’ parents, taking them shopping, and ‘buying them chow mein’. (Which frankly, sounds pretty amazing to me. I mean, what’s not to like?) Once the girls have been hooked, their goose is cooked.

Never mind that it’s totally legal, under the Indian Constitution, to marry a partner of any faith whatsoever, and change your religion whenever you feel the urge to do so. Never mind that the Constitution was drawn up by a man all right-wingers claim to revere, and who came from a ‘nichli jaat’ himself. Never mind that when they insult the Constitution, they insult this man.

All that matters is unleashing crude, sweeping, divisive and wildly inaccurate labels into public discourse. The more divisive the better. (If Divide and Rule was a colonial policy, then surely the BJP and friends can justly be accused of having an East India Company mentality?)

PTI12_8_2017_000065A Neech speech: BJP workers in Patna protest Aiyar’s statements against Modi | PTI

Basically, keeping people apart is key. Because if Hindus and Muslims, high castes and low, start mingling, sharing, marrying and (horrors) talking to each other freely and frankly, then they’ll figure out that the big lie—that Muslims/dalits/Bihar migrants/northeast kids are snatching all the jobs, cars, women, half-acre plots and blueberry cheesecake from the majority—for what it is, a big lie. And from there, it’s just one little leap (no need to be ooncha to make it!) to figuring out the big truth—that there are no jobs and no blueberry cheesecake on offer, except for the political and religious looters and their corporate cronies.

And so the weird terms, the hateful catchphrases, the labelling and the doublespeak continues. It’s a theatre of the absurd, the obnoxious and the ignorant. Everything is posturing and grandstanding, everything is gimmicky smoke and mirrors.

Cutting across party lines, the agenda is the same—to win the battle of the soundbite, to trend on Twitter, to slander, to pander, to clinch the votes.

In a new episode of this drama, the BJP continued its obsession with mirroring all things American by trying to hurl an ‘in cahoots with Pakistan’ accusation at the Congress, similar to the ‘in cahoots with the Russians’ accusations levelled at Trump in the US. But these charges have been rebutted swiftly, and with unusual vehemence by ex-PM Manmohan Singh, and as they seem to be no meat, all masala, they’re unlikely to stick.

And finally, our PM, who likes to say ‘cool’ things like ‘May the Force be with You’ when he goes abroad, proved again how ‘with-it’ he is by throwing in a trendy new western term he has clearly recently learnt into the hot, roiling mess that is the Gujarat campaign. Laughing off the Congress’s allegation that the electronic voting machines in Gujarat had been tampered with using Bluetooth technology, he said—“Congress is blaming Bluetooth for EVM tampering but the fact is that the party has reached the last task of the Blue Whale game. On December 18, the game will be over.”

Yes, he actually said that. Last task of the Blue Whale game.

It doesn’t get neecher than that, frankly.

Not the smartest of analogies, Mr Prime Minister. Taking a dig at desperately unhappy children driven to suicide by sadistic, online bullies doesn’t make you trendy, or cool, or in touch with the youth. It just proves that you are insensitive, uncaring, and ill-advised.

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