Reports of police excesses against those protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Uttar Pradesh, where at least 19 lives have been lost in alleged police firing, are disturbing as there are indications a particular community is being targeted by the men and women in khaki. Communal rants by policemen and their justification by the top brass, ransacking of Muslim houses, attacks on peaceful protesters and activists are there for everyone to see on widely circulated videos.
The saffron-clad chief minister of UP Yogi Adityanath does not have the best secular credentials and the actions of his state police reflect this unfortunate tendency. Adityanath’s statement that those vandalising public property will be identified by CCTV footage and revenge will be extracted is deeply troubling. When the chief minister of a state gives the rule of law and due judicial process the go-by, serious questions are raised. And while Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quite right to slam those damaging public property, he did not have a word to offer to families of those who died in the course of protests.
This concern for public property and infrastructure was strangely absent when the Jats went on the rampage in Haryana in 2016 and the followers of Gurmeet Ram Raheem went berserk in Panchkula after a court found him guilty of rape in 2017. Unfortunately, a majoritarian agenda is evidently in play despite all the statements to the contrary by spokespersons of the ruling dispensation. The test case for this agenda seems to be Uttar Pradesh where the Yogi government has been targetting minorities with impunity.
The bogey of a Hindu exodus from certain districts in UP, which began a few years ago, got a fresh impetus after the sweeping victory of the BJP in the 2017 state Assembly elections. This was followed by a similar spectacular victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha election in UP when the Congress lost even its Gandhi family bastion Amethi. That the verdict was the result of a deep-rooted policy of polarisation was evident, the state being clearly divided on communal lines rather than on caste considerations as was the case in earlier elections.
The BJP’s strategy brought it success in the 2019 general election, so there is no likelihood that it will give it up, despite protestations to the contrary in the wake of the unprecedented anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests across the country. The othering of a community that has been done so effectively by the administration in UP will hopefully not find resonance in the rest of the country. The spontaneous protests by people, especially students of all communities, against what is viewed as a patently discriminatory law, can be seen as a rebuttal of the majoritarian push by the government in power.