In a tough message to Pakistan during an election speech in Rajasthan on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India will never forget 26/11 and that the country was “looking for an opportunity to bring its perpetrators to justice. Incidentally, the message has come days after the PM in Punjab had invoked the fall of the Berlin Wall to highlight the potential game-changing nature of the move to open a pilgrim corridor to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur. The new hostile position towards Islamabad is thus a rejection of the message of reconciliation the PM had chosen to deliver days earlier in Punjab. What changed within a span of a few days? Or to put it differently, between Punjab and Rajasthan, where the contradictory messages were delivered. The answer is the ongoing state elections.
Unlike 2014, when the PM Modi kept the campaign firmly focussed on a development agenda modelled on the then glorified Gujarat model, this time the party seems determined to put its ideology upfront, with Kashmir and Pakistan as the staples of the electoral discourse. And there’s a reason for it. If the BJP’s electoral performance over the past four years is anything to go by, the party has grown from strength to strength on the back of an endemic resonance of its ideological agenda. Some reverses aside, the party now rules two-thirds of the states – and up until June even the Muslim majority J&K. But the party voluntarily gave up the power in J&K in the presumed belief that the state would become a liability in its bid for retaining power in the upcoming general elections.
There’s talk of the campaign thus acquiring strident Hindutva overtones. And if this talk comes true, Kashmir and Pakistan could very well become the handy tools in the BJP’s bid for power. Kashmir holds a central place in the BIP’s ideological conception of India. It seeks the complete integration and assimilation of Kashmir into the country, a project it has sought to aggressively accomplish. Over the past few years, this view of the place of Kashmir in Indian union has acquired an unprecedented popular approval across the country – much of it manufactured through adversarial television discussions. What shape the party’s apprehended use of Pakistan and Kashmir for the electoral purpose would take is still unclear. But the increasing currency of this discourse and its unabashed use for electoral considerations are likely to distort the country’s policy towards both the places. More so in Kashmir where an exclusive recourse to a security-centric approach is wreaking havoc with the situation on the ground. One hopes such a realization dawns sooner than later.
Follow this link to join our WhatsApp group: Join Now
Be Part of Quality Journalism |
Quality journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce and despite all the hardships we still do it. Our reporters and editors are working overtime in Kashmir and beyond to cover what you care about, break big stories, and expose injustices that can change lives. Today more people are reading Kashmir Observer than ever, but only a handful are paying while advertising revenues are falling fast. |
| ACT NOW |
| MONTHLY | Rs 100 |  |
| YEARLY | Rs 1000 | |
| LIFETIME | Rs 10000 | |
