Saffron Strategy: Set the place on fire, use Amarnath and Ram Sethu

#1.

The Telegraph
August 12 , 2008

Ringtones of discord: Bam-Bam Bhole vs LoC chalo

SANKARSHAN THAKUR
Protesters beat an effigy of Mehbooba Mufti in Jammu. (AP)

Jammu, Aug. 11: As reaction and counter-reaction stretches the state to violent polarity between Jammu and the Valley, the BJP is smacking its lips at the sweet political fruit this crisis has lobbed into its lap. With such relish that it doesn’t fear being superseded by today’s belligerent eruption in Srinagar and areas around the LoC in the Valley; that flare-up, party leaders believe, will only feed their political coffers.

The growing sense in the BJP is that the emotional surcharge over Amarnath will not only power it to recapturing its lost citadel of Jammu, it has also handed them a slogan to encash countrywide. “Jai Shri Ram” may have lost electoral potency, but the BJP has a new war cry in the works here: “Bam-Bam Bhole.”

For all their protestations about this upsurge not being communal, Bam-Bam Bhole has been the signature tune of this movement.

From public greeting to mobile ringtones, from emblazoned banner to the chorus rising off cantankerous barricades, its Bam-Bam Bhole all the way in Jammu. And the BJP is guaranteeing it will take that cry across the country.

“What’s wrong?” asks senior leader Nirmal Singh, “Amarnath is dear to people all over India and if they are going to be obstructed, people all over the country should rise and protest. This is not a communal issue, this is a national issue. It is about whether Indians have the freedom to practise their faith in any part of the country.”

Asked why a religious cry has come to spearhead a movement they call broad-based and regional, he snaps angrily in retort. “But don’t we have the freedom to say Bam-Bam Bhole in this country? Islamic cries are raised in political rallies in Kashmir 24 hours a day, nobody seems to object to that. Why question this?”

The BJP has so far been careful not to foreground itself for calculated and strategic reasons. It doesn’t want to reduce the cross-sectional nature of this upsurge to a partisan issue. That larger veneer serves its purposes better. With its eye on a constituency way beyond Jammu, the BJP would rather play this on “national” as opposed to partisan sentiment.

Not for nothing is the Tricolour the mascot of these protests and the BJP flag conspicuously absent. The conscious use of the national flag has afforded the party huge tactical propaganda advantage — the idea has been to project the Jammu protests as “nationalist” and the Valley demonstrations as “anti-national”.

BJP leaders are quite unabashed about the strategy they have employed. “Let the country see for itself, here we are carrying the Tiranga and there in Kashmir you see the Pakistani flag, let people judge where national interest lies.”

But this espousal of “national interest” barely masks the robust pursuit of political objectives. The slogan being chanted under the Tricolour is still Bam-Bam Bhole. It’s only too apparent the BJP is keen not to lose out on the collateral benefits that could come to it.

They wouldn’t state it openly but the radicalisation of sentiment in the Valley is pleasing them no end. The more protests Srinagar witnesses, the more it helps them consolidate ground in Jammu. The greater the push for a march across the LoC to Muzaffarabad, the more they are able to project the Valley as “anti-national”.

As reports poured in of an agitated and violent “Muzaffarabad chalo” build-up in the Valley’s border towns, a senior BJP leader here remarked: “That is the true face of the people of Kashmir, they will block Indians but open roads to Pakistan.”

Party leaders are loath to admit this is a “Hindu” rights movement, but they are equally loath to deny it will fetch them political rewards. “Of course we will gain from this,” Nirmal Singh says. “When the government of the day is ready to let national sentiment be held to ransom by a minority, people will be angry and they will react. I invite the Congress, too, to benefit from the anger, what is stopping them? Our leaders are taking this issue to the whole country, the Congress is free to do so, too.”

It’s an invitation that’s at once tempting and tormenting. Jammu Congressmen have succumbed to it; under mounting pressure from their constituency, they have been desperately pledging support and wanting to get on-stage with the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti (SASS).

Congressmen elsewhere are panicked by the prospect of lending their voice to the Bam-Bam Bhole cry. Nowhere more so than in the Kashmir Valley where party leaders, under pressure from a contrary constituency, are marking quite an opposite line. The discord emerging between the statements of Madan Lal Sharma, Congress MP from Jammu, and Saifuddin Soz, the state Congress chief, tells its own story of a fracture whose face is turning communal by the hour.

Sharma is clinging to the SASS coattails, Soz has been hammering it for “imposing an economic blockade” on the Muslim-majority Valley.

The more the SASS asserts, the more cornered people like Soz will feel. The louder the Valley protests, the more vociferous the counterblast from Jammu. That’s aptly symptomatic of the kind of polarisation this crisis is accelerating across Jammu and Kashmir — fringe feeding on fringe and toppling moderate opinion, such as it is, off-stage.

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#2.

ibnlive.com
Aug 10, 2008

With eye on polls, BJP looks for divine assistance

Divyamanu Chaudhry / CNN-IBN


New Delhi: It’s back to Hindutva for the Bharatiya Janta Party, which is raking up all the issues it hopes to get maximum political mileage from ahead of the polls.

The saffron party, perhaps, has realised that just like the rath yatra of the 90s, it needs emotive issues if it is to make a major impact in the upcoming elections. So, from the Amarnath land transfer row in Kashmir to the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal project (SSCP) controversy in Rashwaram, nothing is being left out.

“I want to assure everyone that as long as BJP exists in Indian politics, no one can even touch Ram Setu,” BJP president Rajnath Singh said at public address in Chennai on Thursday.

With Lord Ram in the limelight, Lord Shiva could not be left behind. The BJP probably realises that the two together have a massive bearing on the Hindu heart.

Party leader L K Advani not only reiterated the need for a Ram temple in Ayodhya but also worshipped a replica of the Amarnath lingam.

“This is not just Jammu's battle. It's an issue that affects the whole country. And the whole country will fight for it,” Advani said.

Experts say it's a carefully calibrated strategy. The BJP had hesitated from bringing back the temple issue and instead had been focussing on price rise and terror. But Amarnath violence and the Sethu dispute have handed the party two new issues on a platter.

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#3.

The Telegraph
August 12 , 2008

If it’s Advani, it must be another yatra
SANJAY K. JHA
Advani in New Delhi on Monday. (PTI)

New Delhi, Aug. 11: Ram’s charioteer is contemplating another yatra — this time to Amarnath.

Sources in the BJP said L.K. Advani, who rode a chariot in the early nineties to mobilise support for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, was planning to hit the road from the Ram setu site in Rameswaram to the Kashmir cave shrine.

The sources revealed that Advani had last week broached the idea through an important aide before top RSS leaders, but the Sangh didn’t show much enthusiasm and left the decision to a later date.

Senior BJP leaders expressed ignorance about any plans for a yatra, saying the issue had not been formally or informally discussed at any forum. But some insiders admitted they had “heard of Advani’s keenness to undertake another yatra to highlight the anti-Hindu mindset of this government”.

Sources close to the RSS confirmed the Sangh had been sounded on such a plan but said they doubted whether it would materialise.

Sangh leaders and even some in the BJP said they were surprised at the sudden “turnaround” in Advani’s approach as he had been desperately trying to change his image over the past few months.

Sources said the leaders had taken note of the language Advani spoke at a rally last Saturday and that glimpses of the charioteer of Ayodhya fame were visible after a long time as he declared the BJP was ready to make any sacrifice for Amarnath.

Advani, who had in the recent past been harping on “good governance”, restricted his speech to Hindu sentiments and terrorism even if it was a rally to focus on problems faced by the country’s youth.

“The Congress and some other parties have begun to think they can benefit politically by promoting an anti-Hindu mindset,” he said. “This is clearly evident in the recent developments in Kashmir. A similar anti-Hindu mindset was also evident in the Congress-led UPA government’s approach towards the Ram setu issue.”

This “anti-Hindu mindset and the politics based on this mindset”, he added, “must be defeated. Which is why we wholeheartedly support the courageous struggle of the people of Jammu under the banner of the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti”.

At the last national executive in June, Advani had talked of the challenges before the nation and focused on the “powerless Prime Minister” and the state of the economy. He asked party workers to reach out to every section of society, said the BJP wanted the minorities to take part in the country’s overall development, and appealed to the party to change from “frontrunner” to “clear winner” through a “superior agenda of governance”.

Clearly, Amarnath and the Ram setu were not given pride of place in this “superior agenda”.