India 2014 elections: Modi tries to cash in on Assam massacre | Jawed Naqvi

Dawn - May 05, 2014

VARANASI: Communal appeal is meat and drink to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and last week’s carnage of Muslims in Assam will be handy for the rightwing Hindutva party in West Bengal where a whopping 23 of its 42 seats are still to go to polls. In the main battlefield of Uttar Pradesh the BJP seeks to corner Rahul Gandhi on May 7 in the Amethi vote.

Nearly everyone opposed to Narendra Modi has a candidate in Varanasi for the May 12 voting, the last leg of the polls.

West Bengal’s ousted Left Front was never too comfortable with the influx of Bangladeshis, a volatile issue in Assam where the massacre happened over more or less those resentments. However, the incumbent Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee gets useful support from all manner of Muslims, including those that are suspected to have arrived from across the border.

On cue, Mr Modi was mopping up potential votes in West Bengal on Sunday from the Assam killings. Not surprisingly, he said Bangladeshi infiltrators who were allowed into the country for vote bank politics would have to go back, while Hindu refugees thrown out of Bangladesh on religious grounds would be greeted with open arms.

“BJP’s position is very clear, vote bank politics has destroyed the country… Those who are Bangladeshi infiltrators, will have to go back,” Mr Modi said in West Bengal’s Bankura district.

“Two types of people have come from Bangladesh — the refugees who have been thrown out in the name of religion and the infiltrators,” he said at an election rally in the district, which goes to polls on Wed­nesday together with five other West Bengal seats.

In an openly communal call in apparent deference to the Assam massacre of 34 Muslims, he said: “Those who are thrown out of Bangladesh, should they come to India or not? … Those who are thrown out of Bangladesh, those who observe (the Hindu ritual of) Durgastami and speak Bengali, they are all our Mother India’s children. They will get the same respect just as any Indian.”

As a potential dark horse in the race for the country’s top job, Ms Banerjee needs to keep her flock together till the results are out on May 16 while the BJP is desperate to breach it.

Uttar Pradesh on the other hand sends 80 MPs to parliament, of which 33 races are still to be decided in the remaining two stages. On May 7, Mr Gandhi will take on a determined challenge from Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the BJP, and his cousin Varun Gandhi, a vitriolic BJP speaker, features in the neighbouring contest in Sultanpur.

The most sensitive constituency is of course Varanasi where the Congress and the AAP are giving a tough fight to Narendra Modi, the BJP’s prime ministerial hopeful. The constituency’s Muslim votes could tilt the balance if they so decide, which seems unlikely at present.

AAP workers in Varanasi are hoping to convert their leader Arvind Kejriwal’s clean and anti-communal appeal to woo votes in this constituency of 1.5 million voters. But, they told me unequivocally on Sunday: “We fear serious trouble after May 7.”

The reference was to the completion of the penultimate round of elections.

“We fear everyone will be rushing to Varanasi, to the main battleground for the BJP, and this may not be good news in the background of what has happened in Assam,” said an AAP spokesman.

According to reports, the main trigger for this round of anti-Muslim violence in Assam was that the community didn’t vote for candidates of their attackers’ choice. “Imagine the plight of the Muslim voters, not only in Varanasi, but in other parts of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal where polls are to be held,” warned the AAP spokesman, adding that his party feared some “untoward thing” happening before the Varanasi election on May 12.

The city is crawling with Hindutva groups who have sought to terrify election campaigners from other parties, having targeted AAP activists most viciously, local reports say. In the meanwhile, Ms Banerjee has contradicted communist leader Mr Prakash Karat, who had claimed that she could join the BJP after the polls. Dismissing the claims that her Trinamool Congress would ally with BJP, Ms Banerjee said: “It will never happen”.