What’s Behind The Communal Tinge To Maharashtra Politics?
By HT
Correspondents
Jun 27,
2023
A
gutted bike in Akola
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Mumbai The
class IX student at a Kolhapur school is a huge fan of Narendra Bhagana, the
subaltern Haryanavi singing sensation with testosterone-heavy lyrics: Bhai Tera
Gunda, Villain Rhn De, Bandook Chalegi... (your brother is a thug, forget
the villain, guns will go off...). You get the drift. Earlier this month, this
16-year-old, along with four other minors, was arrested for disturbing peace in
the city and sent to a juvenile home for 14 days
His
WhatsApp display photograph showed a picture of Tipu Sultan with accompanying
text that read: “The king who fought like a soldier. India never seen (a
warrior) like him, his soul departed from his body but his sword remained in
his hand.” Bhagana’s hit song Baap Toh Baap Rahega played when one
clicked on Tipu’s photo. Four other school boys arrested along with him had
similar WhatsApp status updates-- in some cases, glorifying Mughal emperor
Aurangzeb.
These
images so incensed members of the recently-minted Sakal Hindu Samaj (SHS) that
on June 7, they gheraoed the local police station, demanding stern action
against glorifiers of Tipu and Aurangzeb, and the bandh called by them
escalated to stone pelting and destruction of shops.
As the
controversy snowballed, Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis
blamed “Aurangzeb’s Aulaads (offsprings)” for the rising communal
temperature in the state, and on his 55th birthday on June 14, Raj Thackeray
cut a cake with Aurangzeb’s photo by plunging the knife into the emperor’s
mouth like a stake.
Why has
Maharashtra’s politics acquired such a communal colour all of a sudden?
Communal
eruptions across Akola, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Ahmednagar, Beed, Mumbai,
Amravati and Nashik in the last eight months, and the killings of two cattle
traders by alleged cow vigilantes in a the last three weeks at Nashik, have
raised concern that the state may be headed for a bigger sectarian flashpoint.
These instances of violence have come on the back of over 50 Jan Aakrosh
(public anger) rallies that have ratchet up anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Tracking
Roots To RSS
The
Nagpur-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader is a tall and gnarly man
in his early 70s, the national chief of one of the organisation’s key units .
He speaks off the record, but with a candour that comes from certitude, as he
explains the genesis of SHS. “There are many Hindus and Hindu-oriented
organisations that don’t necessarily attend Shakhas, but they share the
same philosophy and they needed to be brought under one umbrella. That is how
SHS was created.”
SHS shares
its credo with an old RSS campaign, ‘Ek Kuan, Mandir, Aur Shamshan, Hinduon Ki
Yahi Pehchan (Those who share one well, one temple and the crematorium are
all Hindu brethren). Organisations such as the Durga Vahini, Gayatri Parivar,
Sanatan Sanstha, Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali, the Sakal Jain Samaj, and even some
Sikh and Buddhist organisations are all part of SHS, this leader claimed.
It enjoys
the intellectual support of the Sangh and the logistical heft of the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), he added. SHS owes its name to something Savarkar once
wrote,
“Tumhi Amhi
Sakal Hindu, Bandhu Bandhu (You and I are all Hindus, and brothers). However,
the idea to keep the outfit overtly leaderless is borrowed from the 2015
Maratha reservation campaign. This means SHS works as an umbrella grouping of
discrete outfits, with no specific leader.
“We want
laws at the national and state level to stop love jihad, illegal conversions
and cow slaughter,” said Sunil Ghanwat, spokesperson for Hindu Janjagruti
Samiti for Maharashtra, which is one of the units of SHS. ”It’s not about the
BJP or Congress or any other party. We have been demanding action against love-
ihad and religious conversions for many years. It’s just that these issues are
more in focus today because of massive marches taken out by Hindus,” he added.
“It’s a
spontaneous movement in the interest of the Hindu Samaj where every Hindu
organisation is a participant,” said another senior RSS leader, Atul Moghe. RSS
Swayamsevaks participate in SHS rallies and support its initiatives, he added.
BJP
Maharashtra spokesperson Shivaray Kulkarni also said that BJP workers and
leaders participated in SHS rallies, including ministers and lawmakers.
“However, neither rank-and-file nor the leaders initiate such rallies. These
are spontaneous uprisings of the Hindu fraternity.”
Spontaneous
is a word that comes up again and again to stress that the Jan Aakrosh rallies
are natural eruptions, rather than organised events. Yet, facts on the ground
differ.
Last
December, after Shraddha Walkar’s murder in Delhi, SHS launched a massive
campaign against so-called love jihad – a popular right-wing conspiracy theory
about interfaith relationships – claiming there were 100,000 instances of it in
the state. The Shinde-Fadnavis government set up a committee to look into
instances of coercive inter-faith marriages, but it has yet to receive a single
complaint.
On June 3,
while steering clear of the term love jihad, Fadnavis said, “Instances of
innocent girls being lured into inter-religious marriages and (subsequent)
exploitation are coming to light. We are concerned, and will crack the whip.”
When HT
spoke to the police stations in Pune, Kolhapur, Solapur, Akola and Nashik,
officers said they had no data to support these political claims and not a
single FIR of coercive Hindu-Muslim marriage was registered so far in 2023. “We
do not have compilation of such data with regards to any love jihad or
religious conversions,” said Pune joint commissioner of police (law and order)
Sandeep Karnik.
What is
happening instead is that crimes of rape, molestation or sexual assault under
Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, where the accused may be a
Muslim and the victim a Hindu, are being tarred with the brush of love jihad.
Sample this
– on May 20, BJP member of legislative council Gopichand Padalkar told a press
conference that a Hindu girl from Manchar in Pune district was tortured by a
Muslim young man as part of forcible conversion under love jihad. Pune Police
arrested the man under various sections of the Indian Penal Code but maintained
there was no overt sectarian angle.
Campaign
Pivots To History
With love
jihad conspiracy theories finding little grassroots traction in the state, the
campaign to polarise pivoted to historical figures such as Aurangzeb — an easy
enough enemy, given Chhatrapati Shivaji’s stirring resistance — and Tipu
Sultan, who was similarly vilified in Karnataka.
Between
June 1 and 10, police across the state registered at least 20 first information
reports (FIRs) over social media updates and display photos that featured
Aurangzeb or Tipu Sultan. This crackdown was made easier by the fact that in
February this year, social media company Meta – which runs WhatsApp, Instagram
and Facebook – rolled out a new feature update syncing WhatsApp updates on
other Meta platforms for wider reach and visibility. This, explained cyber
experts, also increased the chances of incendiary content reaching a wider
audience. “Previously, we could only check the status of a person if their
number was saved in our contact list but now due to integration of platforms,
anybody from anywhere can check status updates and these things go viral within
minutes,” said Sanjay Shintre, in-charge of Maharashtra cyber cell.
Senior
Congress leader Husain Dalwai said the trend of valorising the two kings is a
direct outcome of aggressive communal politics. “Muslims should stop reacting
to communal politics. I too oppose using Aurangzeb’s picture as WhatsApp
status, but what is wrong with Tipu Sultan who fought against the British until
his last breath?”
Advocate
Salman Maldar, who secured bail for the young Narendra Bhagana fan and three
other juveniles in Kolhapur, said section 295A of IPC, usually applied for
deliberate and malicious acts intended to hurt religious feelings and disturb
peace, should not have been used against his minor clients. “They did not
insult any god or goddess. Also, both Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan were rulers at
different times and are not banned in this country by any law.”
Aurangabad
member of Parliament (MP) Imtiyaz Jaleel said Tipu Sultan’s picture is part of
the original copy of the Constitution drafted by BR Ambedkar and is preserved
in the Parliament House library while Aurangzeb’s grave is an Archaeological
Survey of India-protected monument. “I have challenged Devendra Fadnavis to
present any one case in which a person was booked for showing a picture of
Aurangzeb in the last 75 years,” he added, questioning the lack of police
action against Telangana lawmaker T Raja Singh who openly called for violence
against Muslims at a Jan Aakrosh rally in Mumbai earlier this year. Last year,
Singh was pulled up by the Telangana high court for exhorting people to boycott
all Muslim shops and businesses.
Political
Designs
“History
has shown that the BJP benefited from the Ram Mandir movement but various Hindu
organisations began working for it from 1985 onward,” said a former BJP leader
who was a core strategist for the party in Maharashtra until his recent
defection. “It is trying to replicate the same strategy across the country to
ensure a big win in 2024. The tension in Maharashtra is just part of that
design, especially since the party dropped seats in the 2019 assembly
elections, and lost power.”
“Maharashtra
Mission 45” is a key part of the BJP’s strategy to win in 2024; 17 of the 45
Lok Sabha constituencies on their radar are with other parties at present.
These are Baramati, Satara, Aurangabad, Chandrapur, Buldhana, Kalyan, Palghar,
Shirur, Raigad, South Mumbai, South Central Mumbai, North West Mumbai, Shirdi,
Kolhapur, Hatkanangale, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Madhe and Osmanabad.
Except for
Chandrapur, SHS has held one or multiple Jan Aakrosh rallies in each of these
constituencies; in some cases, instances of communal violence and retaliation
have ensued.
SHS held 12
rallies in western Maharashtra in the last six months, each of them with
attendance upwards of 100,000. This sugar belt from Sangli to Kolhapur has a
strong network of cooperative bodies that forms the backbone of the region’s
rural economy. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have dominated
the cooperative sector for decades. Polarisation on religious lines could
significantly alter the politics in western Maharashtra’s 11 Lok Sabha and 75
assembly seats.
But the
region that may worry the BJP the most is Vidarbha, where it suffered its
biggest electoral setback in 2019, losing 15 assembly seats it held earlier.
Once again, SHS has campaigned extensively here, particularly in Akola,
Amravati, Yavatmal and Fadnavis’s bastion Nagpur, where the party lost a
crucial legislative council election this year.
In
Marathwada, which sends eight MPs to Lok Sabha, SHS has focused on the
already-polarised district of Aurangabad, now represented by All India
Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The violence during Ram Navmi here was the worst
reported this year. Likewise, Parbhani, where the campaign against love jihad
was launched after Walkar’s death, is a Shiv Sena (UBT) stronghold. The
oft-heard phrase during elections here is, ‘Khan Payije Ka Baan’ (Would
you prefer a Khan or the bow and arrow?). With the Shiv Sena splintered in two,
crucial seats in the region appear up for grabs.
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Source: What’s Behind The Communal Tinge To Maharashtra
Politics?
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/communal-tinge-maharashtra-politics/d/130087
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