(The Political Line newsletter is India’s political landscape explained every week by Varghese K. George, senior editor at The Hindu. You can subscribe here to get the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.)
Rivers run through them
This week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the renovated corridor from the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi to the banks of the Ganga; President Ram Nath Kovind inaugurated the renovated Sri Ramna Kali Mandir in Dhaka in Bangladesh. These two events tell two different stories of the neighbours.
This week, India and Bangladesh celebrated the 50th year of the latter’s birth, which was aided by the former through the 1971 war against Pakistan. If the formation of Pakistan in 1947 was based on the notion that religion formed the basis of nationalism, the separation of East Pakistan from it as the new nation of Bangladesh was the negation of religious nationalism. And a triumph of linguistic and cultural nationalism that was inclusive of all religions. But the battle for the soul of Bangladesh continues -- a very strong strand of Islamist nationalism continues its efforts to transform the country into an Islamist one. They want to overthrow Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her party that stand for religious freedom, and secularism. Violence against Hindus, who comprise 10% of the population, is frequent. Around Durga Puja this year, Hindus faced significant violence. In 1951, when the country was East Pakistan, 22% of its population were Hindus -- their proportion declined to 15% in 1991, 8.5% 2011 but in 2017, rose to 10.7%.
The Sheikh Hasina government supported the renovation of a temple of the religious minority, despite the continuous and strong blowback against her secular principles from Islamists; the Varanasi temple event in which Mr. Modi spoke and conducted as a religious patriarch was a celebration of the complete fusion of the temporal and the spiritual, state and religion -- a pandering to majority politics. The two temple events showed where both countries stand in their respective evolutionary journeys.
Awami League, Bangladesh’s ruling party, has over a dozen Hindu MPs in the 300-strong Parliament; the BJP has no Muslim among its 301 Lok Sabha members. In government jobs, Hindus in Bangladesh are around 5-7%; in police, they are 10%. Nearly 600 were arrested for violence against Hindus during the Durga Puja. Ms. Hasina visits a puja pandal also most years.
The BJP in West Bengal and its allies target the Hasina government for not doing enough to protect the Hindus. In 2017, ahead of her visit to New Delhi, party outfits said she was “appeasing” the majority community in Bangladesh.
Three aspiring challengers to NaMo
Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee is trying to emerge as the primary opponent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 2024 election but she does not get a free pass. There are at least two other contenders for the position – Aam Aadmi Party leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Telangana Rashtra Samithi leader and Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao. Just as Ms. Banerjee raised the stakes in recent weeks, Mr. Kejriwal and Mr. Rao have also become active, as latest events bear out. What is common for these three, besides their competing ambitions to emerge as the challenger of Mr. Modi, is their rivalry with the Congress, albeit in varying degrees. In fact, their first step is to outsmart the Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi to occupy centrestage.
Mr. Rao had a meeting with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin -- they have been friends for long -- this week. The two Chief Ministers are understood to have discussed the political situation at the national level and the manner in which the BJP government was trying to usurp the rights of the States through its policies. Mr. Rao may be travelling to other States to meet with regional leaders. He is also warming up to the Congress, sensing the BJP’s growth in Telangana. He has a good relationship with the Gowdas in Karnataka, Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and even Ms. Banerjee. (A quick aside: Nistula Hebbar who pored over a new biography of H.D. Deve Gowda writes that Mr. Modi had proposed to H.D. Kumaraswamy in 2019 to dump the Congress and form a coalition government with the BJP in Karnataka. The BJP later engineered defections in the Congress-JDS coalition and formed its own government.)
Mr. Kejriwal is pulling out all the stops in Punjab -- he knows this is his last chance to make an imprint outside Delhi, and place himself as a national leader. His campaign is focussed on the Congress, which is in power. If he wins Punjab, he could be in the reckoning to be counted as the key opponent of Mr. Modi. The BJP and the regional outfit launched by former Congress Chief Minister Amarinder Singh have announced an alliance. The Shiromani Akali Dal, led by the Badal family, is sinking fast. In its first foray into Punjab, the AAP scored 23.72% votes in 2017. It won 20 seats, though far behind the Congress’s 77 seats, the party emerged the key Opposition. This time, the contest may not be bipolar -- if both the SAD and the BJP-Amarinder coalition manage to stay in the race, it could even become a four-cornered contest.
Federalism Tract
Punjab in SC against the BSF’s expanding jurisdiction
Punjab has filed a suit in the Supreme Court against the Centre’s move to increase the limits of jurisdiction of the Border Security Force (BSF) from 15 km to 50 km along the Indo-Pak international border.
Nagas push back Indian Army
The dominant Konyak Naga community has virtually made Nagaland’s Mon district out of bounds for the ‘Indian military’ until justice is delivered to the families of 14 civilians killed by security forces on December 4 and 5.
TN YouTuber faces police ire, gets HC protection
The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Tuesday quashed the FIR registered against YouTuber Maridhas by the Madurai Police, following a tweet of his that had questioned whether Tamil Nadu was turning into another Kashmir. The Madurai police had registered an FIR after the YouTuber’s tweet. Mr. Maridhas has other cases also against him. The BJP has defended Mr. Maridhas as a “nationalist voice”.
Counting the threats?
The Chakma Development Foundation of India (CDFI) has approached the PMO against racial profiling of Chakmas and Hajongs in Arunachal Pradesh through an exclusive census of both the communities from December 11-31. The Deputy Commissioner of Arunachal Pradesh’s Changlang district had on November 26 notified the “census of Chakmas and Hajongs 2021”, which the CDFI said was in clear violation of their right to life, including the right to privacy and the right to equality. The Deputy Commissioner has now denied such a notification.
Christians in Karnataka are worried over the survey of the community by State authorities.
The BJP government in Karnataka is also pushing ahead with an anti-conversion Bill. As per the draft of the Bill, forced conversion will be non-bailable and non-cognisable. It has some stringent provisions, including imprisonment for not less than three years and minimum fine of ₹25,000. The burden of proof as to whether conversion was by force lies with the religious converter.
Meanwhile, the High Court of Karnataka said that, at this stage, the government cannot insist on making Kannada a compulsory language for first-year under-graduate courses from this academic year.
States and UTs with border disputes
The Union Home Ministry (MHA) has informed the Lok Sabha that 11 States and one Union Territory have boundary disputes between them and “occasional protests and incidents of violence are reported from some of the disputed border areas”.
Ladakh MP wants Sixth Schedule protection
The BJP’s Ladakh MP, Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, has sought safeguards for land, employment and cultural identity provided for by the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution for people of Ladakh, speaking in the Lok Sabha. For some background on the issue, read this and this.
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