The bizarre hounding of former vice-president Hamid Ansari

Bharat Bhushan

The smear campaign against former vice-president Hamid Ansari again demonstrates how Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can cross every propriety to influence public discourse. Two back-to-back press conferences, amplified by social media and an article by the party spokesperson in a national newspaper make the outlandish claim that the former vice-president was in touch with an agent of Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The charges are based on the claims of a Pakistani journalist who enjoys little credibility in his own country. He has now recanted, saying that he neither met the former vice-president privately nor was he invited to India by him. But there is no let up from the BJP in the tirade against the former Vice-President.

Perhaps party functionaries have taken their cue from Prime Minister Modi’s farewell speech in Rajya Sabha when Ansari demitted office. In an innuendo-laced speech, he said, “You were associated with West Asia for a major part of your career as a diplomat. You spent many years of your life in that circle … in that thought … For a major part after your retirement, whether it was in the Minority Commission or Aligarh Muslim University, you remained in that circle.” Notice how “that thought” or “that circle” could be seen as a dog-whistle for the cognoscenti.

The prime minister went on to say to the two-time vice-president, “But for ten years, you had a different responsibility. Every moment, you had to remain confined to the Constitution and you tried your best to fulfil that responsibility… but from today you will not face that crisis … You now have the joy of being liberated, and the opportunity to work, think and speak according to your core beliefs.” The formulation suggested that the Constitution constrained and confined vice-president Ansari’s thought processes as though his “core beliefs” were different from Constitutional ones.

The speech effectively put him in the cross-hairs of the BJP. He became a fair game every time he spoke critically of the party’s attitude to the country’s largest minority or defended the idea of “civic nationalism” against the BJP’s “cultural nationalism”.

Since the present attacks on a former occupant of a high Constitutional office involve accusations of facilitating espionage, it may be time to ask exactly how serious the BJP is about Pakistan’s espionage and terrorist infiltration into India. Should the public not discuss newspaper reports that a terrorist sleeper cell of Lashkar-e-Taiba was found working within the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir? Talib Hussain Shah, a wanted Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist, was appointed the social media incharge of BJP’s Minority Morcha in Jammu. After his arrest, pictures emerged on social media of J&K BJP chief Ravinder Raina handing a bouquet to him and other photographs of Shah attending BJP events.

Public attention should be drawn to revelations that the man who beheaded tailor Kanhaiya Lal with a cleaver, Riyaz Akhtari aka Riyaz Attari, was again a member of the BJP’s minority morcha in Udaipur. He, too, flaunted a picture with BJP’s legislator from Udaipur and former Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria, who later claimed that the photograph had been ‘morphed’. Earlier too, BJP activists were arrested for spying for Pakistan: On February 8, 2017, the Bhopal anti-terrorist squad arrested BJP IT cell coordinator Dhruv Saxena, Bajrang Dal activist Balram Singh and Jitendra Singh, kin of a BJP corporator, along with several others working for the ISI. Saxena was photographed not only with party leader Kailash Vijayvargiya but also with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan.

The usual explanation in such embarrassing moments is that public figures cannot be held responsible for figuring in such photo-ops, but the same courtesy was not extended to Ansari. While both sets of allegations are tenuous, one was pushed as ‘truth’ while the other was dismissed. Even a cursory sampling of those arrested for spying for Pakistan shows how little sense the BJP’s general targeting of Muslims as Pakistani sympathisers makes, let alone including the former vice-president in its accusations.

The majority of arrested Pakistani spies are non-Muslim: Col. Deepak Raina (2006), diplomat Madhuri Gupta (2010), army man Anil Kumar Dubey (2011), Luvdeep Singh, Naik Subedar Patan Kumar Poddar, army man Suneet Kumar and Wing Commander Shashank Shekhar (all arrested in 2014), Ishwar Chandra Behara, Airman Sunil Kumar, Kaiftullah Khan, Mohammad Aijaz, ex-army man Gordhan Singh Rathore, Havildar (Retd.) Munawwar Ahmad Mir and Leading Aircraftsman K Ranjith (2015), Irshad Ansari, Nandlal Maharaj, Bodhraj and Ranbijay Singh (2016), army Clerk Paramjit, Bharat Bawari, Sepoys Harpreet Singh and Gurbhej Singh (2021), among others. If one includes officials accused of spying for other countries like Rattan Sahgal, Rabinder Singh, Ashok Sathe, K V Unnikrishnan, Manmohan Sharma, Ravi Nair, Brigadier Ujjwal Dasgupta and others, one finds no Muslims.

Given the BJP’s slanted discourse, it is no surprise that another Muslim public figure, the late Ahmad Patel, is now being targeted by the party. The BJP has alleged that Patel, a long-time advisor to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, conspired with human rights activist Teesta Setalvad to bring down the Gujarat government led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi and falsely implicate him in the communal riots of 2002. The allegations have been further ratcheted up with statements that Sonia Gandhi herself was the “architect of the conspiracy”.

The campaign of the BJP also underlines the incompetence of the main Opposition party to counter it. The Congress party kept strategically quiet on the arrest of Teesta Setalvad. After its initial reaction, it seems the party now does not want to get too involved in defending Ansari either. Now the party will find it harder to put up a principled opposition to attacks on minority public figures with the dragging of Ahmad Patel and Sonia Gandhi into public controversy. The Congress’ incipient defence of secularism and justice has so far tended to peter out quickly and indecisively even before its sluggish party machinery has made a significant outreach.