Nervous BJP targets all, even ads not spared

Shikha Mukerjee

Communist concerns with purity and pollution of ideology as an integral part of its politics can be accepted as part of the dialectical discourse that is an on-going project of interpreting Marxism, which has acquired, over time, many seers and guardians.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s obsession with purity, and pollution of the Hindutva agenda, is also a political project - one which does not make it a defender of the Hindu faith in any way. There are many other ways of being a Hindu than a political party, participating in fiercely competitive elections, can hope to police without hurting the sentiments of some voters in some constituencies, whose practice of the faith has evolved differently from that of the founders of the Sangh Parivar. The choice of recent targets by various oddballs from the BJP and its extended family of faith vigilantes are intriguing. The plaintive comments of Narottam Mishra, home minister in the BJP’s Madhya Pradesh government, that the advertisements for designer Mangalsutra by haute couture label Sabyasachi singles out “Hindu religion” and his advice,

“If they have the courage why do they not use other religions and try to do the same,” is not about defending the purity of the faith from “objectionable and obscene” associations. It is about his ambitions, and his bid to get noticed in the hope that if the BJP high command again does what it has in states like Uttarakhand and tried to do in Uttar Pradesh, which is to replace the incumbent chief minister, he would be in the running as a noisy vigilante of the Hindutva agenda. Targeting advertisements from companies that push the boundaries of cultural interpretations is a cheap and easy way of grabbing attention. The brands are beyond the budgets of the Indian masses, squeezed by the economic downturn in pandemic times. Labels like Sabyasachi are recognised only by privileged people who inhabit a world where they can afford premium products.

The Fab India label is not in the same league as Sabyasachi, but it does cater to an infinitesimally small section of consumers. By targeting its Jashn-e-Riwaaz advertisement as “culturally inappropriate,” Sangh Parivar vigilantes have zeroed in on the language, Urdu, and the style of clothing, as unacceptable in the context of Diwali. Tyres, television serials, beauty products and butter have all figured on the purification hit list. The use of boycotts as a weapon of consumer coercion, as has happened with several product advertisements that have displeased the Sangh vigilantes and Mishra – Tanishq, the high end jewellery label, Manyavar, the apparel line, Surf Excel, a higher-end detergent – is just a way of stirring up sentiment on social media. The objective is to instigate a reactionary interpretation that foregrounds the Hindutva agenda of purification of the realm, polluted by the Islamic mission of religious and cultural colonisation.

The larger question is: why does the BJP find it necessary to deploy cheap and easy ways to poke religious embers by using emotion as a trigger? The undiminished popularity of Narendra Modi, as several public opinion surveys have confirmed, as the choice to lead the nation as prime minister in 2024 ought to be sufficient to give confidence to the party that its government will continue to be in power for the foreseeable future.

If members of the BJP truly believed that Modi was indeed Vikas Purush, and that his leadership and government are indeed the greatest success story that India has ever experienced, then it should not have been necessary to invent ways to recreate over and over again an emotionally loaded appeal. In 2016, Modi said, ““If the Congress had helped the poor in 60 years, the poor wouldn’t still be facing trouble…We can’t ignore 60 years of misgovernance.” Governments change when a sufficient number of voters believe that their expectations of good governance cannot be met by the leader and his party in power. Modi and his party reiterate at every opportunity that “Even though Narendra Modi considers himself as the ‘pradhan sewak … he is the most successful administrator the country ever had after independence.” If Amit Shah’s conviction that Modi is the most successful leader, because he has “a different kind of approach which only a popular leader can have,” is true, then there should be no need to prop up the BJP’s performance through gimmicks that selectively target brands or labels that make a splash on social media, but are consumed only by a few. As the leader most “rooted to the ground,” who knows “the pain of the poor” and has worked tirelessly to deliver the benefits of development to the “poorest of the poor,” and has taken India to a “different level,