Shobha Yatras turn incendiary

NEW DELHI: The past week has been the cruellest period for people living along the path of the Shobha Yatras launched in cities and towns across India to mark Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti festivals. Communal violence has broken out in at least a dozen towns in seven states: Howrah in Bengal, Aurangabad (renamed Sambhajinagar) in Maharashtra, Kishengunj, Sasaram and Biharsharif in Bihar, Khandwa and Khargone in Madhya Pradesh, Vadodara in Gujarat, Balidih and Dhanbad in Jharkhand and Mathura in UP. Minor skirmishes have been reported from dozens of other localities.

The riots in Sasaram and Biharsharif, in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s home district of Nalanda, have been serious enough for Union Home Minister Amit Shah to cancel his political meetings in the former town scheduled for Sunday, but not sufficient for him to cease fishing in troubled waters. Bihar’s citizens are witness to the strange situation of watching people abandon their homes in two districts while the country’s Home Minister and the state’s Chief Minister are presently in Patna with no news of them conferring in the interests of peace. We do have news, however, of Shah calling the state’s governor to ask if he can be of help. The latter has taken it upon himself to set up a 24x7 war room in Raj Bhavan, ostensibly to ‘monitor the situation’ but perhaps also to play up the incompetence of the Chief Minister.

The BJP pleads speciously that these bursts of violence are proof of the failure of governments in Bihar and West Bengal, led by its adversaries, Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee, respectively. This does not square up with the fact that similar episodes have occurred in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, all BJP-ruled states. It does not also account for the fact that the Shobha Yatra violence has become a recurrent motif of the Ram Navami-Hanuman Jayanti period, especially when it coincides, as it has this year, with the Muslim month of Ramzan.

Festival processions are the BJP’s favoured form of mobilising support. In multiple cities, Sangh Parivar-friendly trade bodies organise and fund community festive celebrations in neighbourhoods adjacent to Muslim localities, thereby transforming the spirit of Ganesh Chaturthi, Ram Navami and Shiv Raatri into identity parades. The festival yatra serves multiple purposes for its local stakeholders. For the traders, it is an investment in neighbourhood security and for the party it is a reservoir to recruit from.

However, in the past 30 years, as the BJP became increasingly muscle-bound, it has used processions to achieve many more outcomes. One is to martialise Hindu deities, especially Ram as a battle-ready deity, not as maryada purshottam, the form in which he is conventionally worshipped by Hindus. Another is to normalise the bearing of arms such as Rampuri knives, tridents and guns. In the past decade, the BJP has added on two political objectives to this Hindutva machismo project. One is to legitimise two of its debatable icons Nathuram Godse and VD Savarkar. And the other is to win the vote of the Most Backward Classes that are not served by the OBC parties. These are groups adjacent in poverty to and competitive with Muslims and therefore are likely to be receptive to the BJP’s polarising pitch.

The violence witnessed during the Shobha Yatras in multiple locations might be misconstrued as evidence of the success of this wicked strategy. On the contrary, it is in fact proof of the party’s failure to attract support by other means. After nine years in governance, the BJP finds itself inadequate to go to the people with its economic achievements or welfare offers, if any.