Gloves Are Off, BJP Has Exposed Gameplan of Dividing Society: Yashwant Sinha

NEW DELHI: All the gloves are off and the Bharatiya Janata Party is not even making a pretence of adhering to the secular tenets of the Constitution, said former Minister Yashwant Sinha. Visibly aghast at the use of communal phraseology by BJP leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma during the campaign for the Delhi elections Sinha told The Citizen, “not a single top leader of the BJP has condemned these men and their statements, instead Verma was fielded to open the debate on the Presidents Address in Parliament in a clear statement of what the party now supports.”

Sinha who concluded his Bharat jodo (Unite India) yatra against the Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Citizens and National Population Register at Raghat here on January 30 said that the effort to polarise India had gained new impetus. He said that the situation was much worse today than it was when he started his yatra on January 9, as the BJP is unabashedly committed to polarising and dividing society. He said that the Delhi elections had exposed this gameplan to seek a communal division, and if they are not able to sufficiently make the Hindu afraid of the Muslim then they bring in Pakistan. “So it is Hindu-Muslim-Pakistan” all the way now, and the BJP is not going to stop short of anything now, that is clear,” the veteran political leader said.

Yashwant Sinha said it was clear to him after travelling through several cities in Maharashtra --he started the yatra from the Gateway of Mumbai--, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and finally Delhi that the national media had blacked out his entire yatra. It was reported by the local media but not by the big channels. And secondly, the BJP ruled states had taken a decision not to interfere with the yatra lest he make the news. So even when they violated Section 144 in Ahmedabad that is in force most of the time, Sinha said, there was no action by the police and the administration. Similarly in UP where he travelled to Agra, Lucknow, Kanpur, Ferozebad were officially seven persons had been killed in the police attack recently, he was allowed free movement and free access.

“Uttar Pradesh is a horrendous story. In Firozabad for instance where officially seven persons were killed the police has still not given the postmortem report and details of the FIRs lodged with the relatives of those killed,” he said. In Delhi now the BJP “has clearly exposed its gameplan. It is seeking to divide society on a communal basis, if they cannot make the Hindu afraid of the Muslim then they bring in Pakistan,” Sinha added.

He was confident however, that the BJP was looking at defeat in these elections. “If a channel not known for independent views is predicting a win for AAP, then we can be almost certain of this,” he laughed. Sinha said he remained confident that the voters would reject the politics of communalism in Delhi, after all “they did it in Jharkhand.”

Meanwhile AAP leader and chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in an interview to NDTV expressed similar sentiments saying that the BJP wanted to contest the elections on Shaheen Bagh. “"The BJP will not talk about anything else because they have nothing else to talk about. Just Shaheen Bagh, Shaheen Bagh, Shaheen Bagh, Hindu-Muslim , Hindu-Muslim, Hindu-Muslim and Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan...That is all they do,” Kejriwal said.

The BJP has adopted an aggressive posture In Parliament during the discussion on the Presidents address with senior party MPs taking the cue to attack Shaheen Bagh protestors, along with all those who were opposing CAA-NPR-NRC. BJP MPs in the two houses insisted that the effort was to break the nation, and asked what ‘azadi’ slogans being raised all around stood for, what they meant in the context today. Amidst strong defence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the MPs wondered at an opposition that was encouraging such polity.