Speech defects

The Big Two are taking politics to a new low in campaigns

Within the low standards that characterise political campaigning in India, last week marked a new nadir by both the principal national parties and reflected poorly on their respective leaderships. From two former Congress Union ministers came remarks that blew the lid off the party’s claims to a secular and egalitarian platform and from a BJP MP an unprovoked and unsubstantiated claim against a widely respected former bureaucrat whose transformational work would have been the envy of any politician.

First up was C P Joshi, former minister for roads and railways, who upped the ante on the campaign trail in Rajasthan by suggesting that neither Uma Bharti nor Narendra Modi was qualified to talk about Hinduism because they were not Brahmins. “If anyone knows about religion in this country then it’s Pandits, Brahmins," he stated at a rally. It is to Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s credit that he responded swiftly, and tweeted an apology. It is a pity, however, that Mr Gandhi did not see fit to issue an apology when another former Union minister, Vilas Muttemwar, who once held the shipping portfolio, cast grossly objectionable aspersions in Rajasthan on Mr Modi’s family background. In an apparent bid to counter the BJP’s standard “dynast” allegations against the Gandhi family, Mr Muttemwar said: “Everyone knows five generations of Rahul Gandhi. But this Narendra, nobody knows his father’s name.” Apart from the extreme poor taste on Mr Muttemwar’s part, the observation displayed a lack of political nous, because it only served to emphasise Mr Modi’s valid point about India’s dynastic politics and presented him with an opportunity to burnish his “common man” credentials. 

Public disparagement and bad taste were not the monopoly of the Congress. Over the weekend, we have the extraordinary statement from Gujarat BJP leader and former state minister Dileep Sanghani that Verghese Kurien, the late founder-chairman of the National Dairy Development Board and the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, financed religious conversions of tribal communities by Christian missionaries by donating funds from Amul. This unprovoked accusation was aimed at the man who launched Operation Flood and turned a milk-deficient country into the world’s largest dairy producer. Mr Sanghani may have had a point in suggesting that Tribhuvandas Patel, who was the founder of the Amul cooperative, did not get the credit that was his due for his role in Operation Flood. But the slurs on Mr Kurien, whose birth anniversary Amul was celebrating with motorcycle rallies as National Milk Day, were surely gratuitous. First, it is impossible to claim that Kurien’s Syrian Christian religion played a part in his enormous public achievements since he was an atheist. Second, Mr Sanghani offers no evidence to back up his claim, and Mr Modi would do well to have him walk back the statement. As with Messrs Joshi and Muttemwar, Mr Sanghani is cynically mobilising the lowest common populist denominator in Indian politics — religion and caste — to win votes. If these comments proved anything, it is the ideological bankruptcy of both parties and their irresponsible role in polarising Indian society even further.