The Gujarat model of electioneering

With elections in Gujarat slated for later this year, short-term gains at the hustings have guided the recent vilifying of individuals

Poll time politics is a spectator sport played with popular perception for a predictable outcome.

And it is this perception which is sought to be stitched together into a facile fabric to clothe electoral ambitions before the state Assembly polls in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh later this year.

As the pendulum oscillates from fact-checker Mohammed Zubair through former vice-president Hamid Ansari to Congress leader late Ahmed Patel, bringing them into the crosshairs of controversy and conspiracy, the sequence of events corroborates an emerging narrative that weaves to cleave. Every election held in Gujarat after Narendra Modi took charge as chief minister of the state in 2001 has seen permutations and combinations of this electoral arithmetic implemented to secure primacy in numbers at the hustings. The results have been favourable for the BJP, which is reason enough for a continuing encore.

Mohammed Zubair has a Gujarat connection. He is the co-founder of Alt News, an Ahmedabad-based Indian non-profit, fact-checking website founded in February 2017 and run by software engineer Pratik Sinha. Alt News rose rapidly in popular esteem to acquire international respectability, as it burst many a misinformation bubble that understandably spooked the political establishment of the day.

Read | 2022 Gujarat poll likely to be 'toughest' election for Congress

Pratik Sinha is the son of Mukul Sinha, a human rights activist and a lawyer who incessantly battled the Modi establishment but fell to the viles of cancer in 2014. A physicist from IIT Kanpur, he founded the Jan Sangharsh Manch, which legally represented the victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat and even secured the conviction of politicians and police officers. Sinha also represented the victims before the Nanavati-Mehta judicial inquiry commission set up by the Modi government to probe the Godhra train carnage and the communal violence thereafter in which over a thousand people perished, largely from the minority community.

The CDR (call data records) secured by an IPS officer and its citing as corroboratory evidence by Sinha played a crucial role in some high-profile convictions in the Naroda Patiya massacre case of Ahmedabad. The Commission gave a clean chit to the Gujarat government led by then chief minister Modi. Its report was tabled in the Gujarat Assembly in December 2019, five years after it was submitted to the Anandiben Patel government.

Apparently, fact-checker Mohammed Zubair was a soft target. He was arrested by the Delhi Police, now headed by a Gujarat cadre IPS officer, Rakesh Asthana, for a four-year-old tweet allegedly hurting Hindu sentiments. A Delhi court which granted him conditional bail on July 15 made some telling comments in its order.

Read | Gujarat Congress ramps up social media team ahead of Assembly polls

"A voice of dissent is necessary for a healthy democracy. The Delhi Police has failed to identify the Twitter user who had been offended by the tweet in 2018. No statement of any offended person has been recorded either. Merely for the criticism of any political party, it is not justified to invoke Section 153A and 295A, IPC," additional sessions judge Devender Kumar Jangala said. Section 153A pertains to promoting enmity between different groups of religion, race, place of birth, and residence, while 295A is about deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.

Retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur is on record stating that "ït is difficult for our criminal justice system to sink lower than this", while another former Supreme Court judge, Deepak Gupta, was similarly quoted as terming the arrest by the Delhi Police, a prejudiced one. There is egg on the face of the police, and the yolk is still dripping.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Wednesday granted Zubair interim bail in all the FIRs lodged in Uttar Pradesh against him and any future ones concerning his 2018 tweet, saying it finds no reason or justification for the deprivation of his liberty to persist any further. The top court refused to restrain Zubair from tweeting in the future as sought by the UP government, stating can a lawyer be restrained from arguing.

There seems to be little discrimination in tear and smear as things go. If Zubair faces an establishment out to tear him, a distinguished former vice-president of the Indian Union is at the receiving end of a smear campaign, where the BJP has thrown all propriety to the winds. A foreign service officer of 38 years standing who was the country's ambassador to numerous countries and topped it with a ten-year vice-presidential stint from 2007 to 2017, Hamid Ansari faces the ludicrous charge of being in touch with an agent of Pakistan's spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence(ISI). Two press conferences and a newspaper write-up later, the line is still being peddled despite the Pakistani journalist(on whom this was based) clarifying that he has never met the then VP. This raises the question, why? The only answer is to influence public discourse.

Meanwhile, to complete the third angle of this triangular narrative, Congress leader from Gujarat, late Ahmed Patel, has been pulled out of the grave and charged by Gujarat's hurriedly constituted Special Investigation Team(SIT) with a conspiracy to pull down the Modi government in Gujarat, 20 years ago. With the Modi-led BJP government deciding to seize the opening provided by the Supreme Court judgment on the Zakia Jafri case and get even with their opponents, instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, a whole new chapter is sought to be reopened.

With elections in Gujarat slated for later this year, short-term gains at the hustings have guided the move as is witnessed in the familiar route events are taking - constituting of the SIT, the arrest of Teesta Setalvad and former Director General of Police, R B Sreekumar - and the police theory that it was a political conspiracy engineered by the Congress and cash was paid by Ahmed Patel at the behest of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to destabilise Modi's government 20 years ago.

Setalvad has trashed the charges in court during the hearing on her bail plea. The Congress has rubbished the claim, and Patel's daughter, Mumtaz, has asked Modi what he was doing as the chief minister all those years if the government had all the information. The SIT, on its part, is going out of its way to ensure maximum media coverage. The perceived end has now turned into a new beginning.

Is it a mere coincidence that all three personalities in the line of fire happen to belong to the minority community? That all three are sought to be publicly hauled over the coals for something that happened in the distant past. Zubair's tweet reference is four years old from a movie made 40 years ago, and nobody sought fit to complain until late last month. Ansari has been out of office for half a decade now, and the might of the country's intelligence under Modi, functioning for a good seven years, had nothing to say so far. And how efficient a set-up did the same cops run under the present prime minister when he was in Gujarat if they failed to sniff the Ahmed Patel conspiracy while neutralising - through encounters- numerous others by various jihadi groups targetting Modi during his 13 years plus chief ministerial stint?

Come polls in Gujarat, the polarising pile-driver surfaces with 'religious regularity'. Was it not Ahmed Patel whom the Pakistani establishment wanted to be installed as chief minister of Gujarat just before the 2017 Assembly elections in the state? India's PM is on record saying so at an election rally at Palanpur in Banaskantha district, also raising questions about a 'media reported 'meeting at Congress leader Mani Shanker Aiyer's house attended by the Pakistan High Commissioner, a former Pakistan foreign minister, India's former vice-president (Hamid Ansari) and former prime minister Manmohan Singh creating the perception of a 'Pakistan' inspired conspiracy to unseat the BJP government of the time in Gujarat.

The issue was drummed-up by the party's poll propaganda machinery to derive maximum mileage. Lost in the cacophony was the fact that it was the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government which went to war in 1971 and split the neighbouring country. The elections over, finance minister Arun Jaitley was left to turn things around in the Rajya sabha with a statement on December 27, 2017, that there was no intent of Prime Minister Modi to question the commitment of the former PM to the country. The battle of perception had been won, the remainder was trash for the cans.

Another step back in time. The 2007 election campaign reference to 'maut ka saudagar' (dealer of death) by Sonia Gandhi was similarly linked to the Sohrabuddin case by the then chief minister, and by implication, to the continuing conspiracy against the 'Hindu hriday samrat' (Hindu heartthrob) by jihadi terror groups. Whether it worked remains a moot point, but Modi was re-elected with a decisive mandate. In the 2002 state Assembly elections, where the Christian origins of the chief election commissioner were weaponised by the simple expedient of publicly pronouncing his full name with a jibing drawl -James Michael Lyngdoh, links with Sonia Gandhi's religion of birth and therefrom to the Vatican and the Pope. Modi's 'Gujarat Gaurav' yatra around the same time, which covered over 160 of the 182 Vidhan sabha constituencies in Gujarat, primarily focused on 'Miya Musharraf', but it was common knowledge who was being alluded to. A questionable 'fatwa' asking Muslims to vote for the Congress to defeat the BJP -three days before voting - was just the sucker punch needed for the kill. Modi steamrolled to power.

The elections are upon us again, and while history repeats itself, so does the fascination for the familiar. And therefore, the unfolding encore.

(R K Misra is a senior journalist based in Ahmedabad)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.