South Asia Citizens Web

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.

Last spring, a year ahead of the election now gripping India, Amit Shah was dispatched by Mr Modi to Uttar Pradesh with instructions to build support for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in the nation’s largest and politically most-important state. He set about identifying candidates and meeting local leaders in an effort to deliver Mr Modi the "wave" he will need to become India’s next prime minister. But while Mr Shah has cemented support for Mr Modi, he has also run into problems. Over the weekend, one week into the five-week voting process to elect a new government, the Election Commission (EC) banned Mr Shah from addressing public meetings in the state, and ordered that charges be filed against him after he was accused of stoking communal tensions.

Indian society has prided itself on being essentially secular in character, rejecting communal hatred, embracing tolerance. As Indian citizens who love our motherland, we appeal to you to vote for the secular party, which is most likely to win in your constituency.

All three of you are in the Prime Ministerial race. But why are you not talking about the real issues facing the people? Do you have no concern with pressing problems like poverty, unemployment, backwardness, hunger, malnutrition, exploitation of workers-farmers, poor state of education and health, atrocities on Dalits and women and communalism? Why are you avoiding these real issues and indulging in trivialities and cheap dramatics?