The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had deftly warded off attempts made by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during the assembly elections to identify it as a sympathiser of the Shaheen Bagh protests and thus as 'anti-national' and 'anti-Hindu'. The party dodged the barbs thrown at it by the BJP during the polls and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal recited the Hanuman Chalisa on television for good measure.
The cautious approach continued even during the communal riots in northeast Delhi as Kejriwal and his party undertook a fine balancing act and were criticised for not calling out the perpetrators of the violence. In the backdrop of some Shaheen Bagh protesters joining the BJP and the revelations in a Wall Street Journal article about Facebook's alleged bias towards the ruling dispensation at the Centre when it came to regulating content and acting against hate speech, the AAP has found an opportunity to hit back at the saffron party with the same ammunition that it was attacked with earlier.
Over the last three days, the AAP has been incessantly attacking the BJP over the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens as also the February riots in northeast Delhi. It called the sit-in at Shaheen Bagh a “brainchild of the BJP”.
“The entire election campaign of the BJP was based on Shaheen Bagh. The BJP is the only party which benefited from Shaheen Bagh... many people joined the protest with the hope that this protest is pro-democracy. But they also did not understand that this Shaheen Bagh protest is just a brainchild and script of the BJP,” said AAP spokesperson Saurabh Bharadwaj at a press conference on Tuesday.
A day later, the AAP claimed that BJP leaders had made hate speeches that provoked people from the Hindu and Muslim communities and resulted in the riots in northeast Delhi. “Several senior leaders of the BJP openly delivered provocative speeches that led to a toxic atmosphere and ultimately caused communal violence,” Bharadwaj said, adding that it was because of the fear of getting exposed that the Centre did not allow Delhi government's lawyers argue in the riot cases.
Simultaneously, the Delhi Vidhan Sabha's committee on peace and harmony, headed by AAP MLA Raghav Chadha, has taken cognisance of the Facebook controversy. It has decided to probe the matter to discern if there was any role or complicity of any Facebook official in the orchestration of the February communal riots.
The allegations are intriguing because they aim at projecting the BJP as being insincere in its commitment to pro-Hindutva and pro-nationalistic issues, and at the same time, the AAP continues to not take a stand on communally sensitive topics such as the Shaheen Bagh sit-in or CAA-NRC.
The party, aware of the need to not antagonise the majority Hindu voters, has been treading a cautious line on communally sensitive issues. So its attack on the BJP on the issues on which it was earlier silent could be aimed at reaching out to BJP's constituents who might be dissatisfied with the party and consolidating its position in the national capital.
The messaging, the target audience being BJP's voters, is also apparently designed to indirectly provide them with an idea of where the AAP stands on these issues, which is not opposite to that of the BJP.
