South Asia Citizens Web

he whole BJP campaign has focused on Narendra Modi as the Man Who Knows It All. That’s the gist of what Rahul Gandhi alleged when the BJP’s manifesto was missing in action. The Man was the Manifesto. So what was the point of poring over Murli Manohar Joshi’s fine print. Modi has all the answers. Modi knows all. If Rahul was trying to alert his audience to the dangers of a Modi-who-knows-all, now we have a glimpse of the Modi who does not know. In a rare television interview, Modi was asked by an audience member if he would take steps to ensure no churches are broken down if he becomes prime minister. Modi replied “I have never heard of such incidents taking place.”

All parties have broadly agreed on various aspects of Model code worked out by Election Commission for a certain period before the elections – It has worked quite satisfactorily. Fortunately the Election Commission still remains in command. Recently it denied the central government to make certain changes in some economic and subsidy policies (though the later would adversely affect the poorer sections of society) its neutrality was not challenged.

Like in any third world country, the contradiction between the rich and the poor, across ethnic, provincial and sectarian lines, is sharp as ever. The Pakistani state is doing next to nothing to change that massive imbalance in favour of the rich. There is an inherent bias towards the powerful and the privileged in all institutional arrangements and functioning of the state. The lack of provision of basic facilities and services, health and education, employment and entertainment, to the large majority of Pakistanis is shameful. This was a contradiction the state inherited from colonial rule; while it did not create it itself, it did nothing serious to resolve it either.

It is a pity that the woes of the families returning from Pakistan Administered Kashmir (PAK) under the amnesty policy for surrendered ultras have remained unheeded. The tragic suicide by a wife of one of beneficiaries of this policy last week demonstrates this beyond a shadow of doubt. It turns out that three years after Jammu and Kashmir government gave the nod for rehabilitation and amnesty policy for youth who had crossed the borders for arms training and wish to return to lead normal lives is a major fraud with them. Several men who picked up guns after 1989 but had no cases against them did return, most of them with wives they married there and children who were born out of the wedlock, after crossing the Line of Control or taking the long route via Nepal. However, the policy is both conceptually flawed and ambiguous. Besides, there is as yet no mechanism in place for making the policy effective and allowing beneficiaries to settle back in their original homes to lead normal lives, disconnected from the conflict.

The difficulty with believing the BJP’s new ‘governance’ anthem is that Modi and his right-hand man, Amit Shah, chose during their election campaigns to sing a succession of the sangh parivar’s oldest tunes. As political disc-jockeys they showed a marked preference for the BJP’s bloodiest hits. In Bihar, Modi made speeches where he re-mixed the cow-slaughter theme song under a new title, the ‘Pink Revolution’. The lyrics of his cover version went like this: the Congress government had subsidized cow-slaughter, butchers had grown rich on the back of meat exports, did Yadavs really want to make common cause with people who killed the sacred cow? Amit Shah, hand-picked to deliver Uttar Pradesh to the BJP in 2014, made even more viscerally provocative speeches.