Newsmaker: Cultivating image of Hindutva ambassador Narottam Mishra

Narottam Mishra, senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in Madhya Pradesh, was perhaps prescient when on December 26, 2020, he proclaimed what fate awaited Muslim stone-throwers and trouble-makers in his state: “They will be removed from where the stones were thrown.”

Sure enough, that day, Abdul Rafeeq and his family of 19 were out on the streets of Ujjain’s Begum Bagh after their house was demolished because Abdul was identified as a stone-thrower on a Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) procession that wended its way through the minority-dominated areas, reportedly raising provocative slogans. The BJYM is the BJP’s youth wing, with whom Mishra was associated from 1978 to 1980.

By 2020, Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh chief minister, had added to the BJP’s manual of demonstrable penalties against selective “offenders” as examples for potential lawbreakers. The homes and commercial properties, dubbed “illegal” by the police, of criminals-turned-politicians, Mukhtar Ansari and Atiq Ahmed, were razed by bulldozers in August-September that year. Since then, the bulldozer blithely rolled on UP’s roads to punish transgressors and eventually became a symbol of Adityanath’s “exemplary” law and order management that chose its targets fastidiously.

Following the stone-throwing on Ram Navami processions on April 10 in MP’s Khargone, bulldozers were out to bring down homes and commercial properties in Muslim habitations. Mishra bluntly blamed Muslims for the “clashes” that occurred, although Bajrang Dal activists in the columns that went through Khargone sang offending songs outside mosques. He declared his intent thus: “The houses where the stones came from will become a pile of stones.”

As MP’s home minister, Mishra apparently modelled himself after Amit Shah, Union home minister, for whom he hosted a lunch with editors when Shah visited Bhopal in 2017 as BJP president. But his bond with Shah went back further when he hosted his visit to the Peetambara Shakti Peeth at Datia, his assembly constituency. “Mishra treated Shah like royalty,” a Bhopal BJP source remarked.

Mishra’s sedulous efforts to “cultivate” Shah which purportedly met with a degree of reciprocity led Mishra’s traducers in MP to treat him as “Delhi’s pawn” and keep the chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, edgy. A veteran Bhopal journalist said: “When a person becomes CM, by accident or hard work, he is always the first among equals, whether in the BJP or Congress. Chouhan was supposed to be a stop-gap arrangement (after his predecessor Uma Bharti quit) but he has lasted 13 years. In politics, covert dissidence never succeeds. Silent fighters are not warriors. Mishra’s ambitions to replace Chouhan as CM are futile for another reason. He’s a Brahmin and there’s no place for an upper-caste politician at the top in a post-Mandal era.” Chouhan is not a Delhi favourite but he was back as CM in March 2020, after the Kamal Nath government was toppled.

Incidentally, Mishra played a role in the Bhopal edition of “Operation Kamal (after the BJP’s lotus symbol and not Kamal Nath)”. On Delhi’s orders, he stayed put at a Gurugram hotel with the Congress’s rebel legislators, while the operation was on.

Even a home minister in a state has a limited mandate. It seems the wily Chouhan hasn’t allowed Mishra to get in edgeways, and decides IPS postings and home ministry-related policies himself. So, Mishra makes the most as the government’s chief spokesperson.

His day begins at 10 am with a press briefing at his Char Imli residence. After priming the media on government policies and programmes, he gives statements on a range of issues defined as “personal remarks”. More often than not, the “remarks” are assertions of his hardcore positions on Hindutva. “I am taking a stand and giving these statements because it concerns me as I am holding the charge of the home department,” he said as a preface to the innumerable controversies he courted in the process.

In October 2021, when the Bajrang Dal stormed the sets of filmmaker Prakash Jha’s Aashram, a crime drama web series, Mishra announced that new guidelines would be framed to mandate moviemakers from getting their scripts cleared by the district administration before shooting. The minister took exception to the “objectionable scenes” in the series which, he claimed, “hurt our sentiments”. Mishra forced Dabur to pull out an ad depicting a same-sex couple celebrating “Karva Chauth” by exchanging mangalsutras. He also extracted an apology from Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the fashion designer and retailer, who created the neckpiece. On Mishra’s intervention, Netflix officials were booked by MP police for showing a kissing scene in a temple’s precincts in Mira Nair’s web series, A Suitable Boy.  Mishra purged the use of Urdu from police documents.

Born in 1960 in Gwalior, Mishra’s father, Shiv Dutt Mishra, was a doctor and RSS swayamsevak. He got a degree in Commerce from Vrinda Sahay College and did his Master’s and PhD from the city’s Jiwaji University. His thesis was on “Role of an MLA in Indian Democracy”.

Mishra himself has been an MLA six times, first from Dabra and once it became a reserved seat, he moved to his present constituency, Datia. His career in politics began after he won the students’ election as an undergrad and became the youngest president. In 2005, he was inducted as a junior minister in Babulal Gaur’s ministerial council and later became a Cabinet minister.

Notwithstanding his fabled workers’ connect — his number is found on the walls of villages and he is one of the few ministers who answers his phone calls — in the 2018 elections, Mishra failed to swing seats for the BJP from the Chambal region, his home terrain. BJP insiders say had he chalked up a better showing and become “stronger”, it might have made life difficult for Chouhan.