The mute Opposition

Why is it so silent on lynchings?

The President of India has spoken out. So has Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has condemned it. But what about the leaders of the Opposition? Only Brinda Karat, the Rajya Sabha MP from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), took the trouble to visit the family of Junaid Khan, a recent victim of such attacks against Muslims and Dalits, and robustly denounced the incident. Apart from her, leaders from Rahul Gandhi to Nitish Kumar to Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee — all vocal defenders of Indian secularism when it suits them — are yet to be heard. Instead, it has been the people who chose to respond to a Facebook post and gather to protest the growing culture of lynchings. Those headline-grabbing protests may have encouraged Mr Modi to issue his statement from Sabarmati Ashram, where, invoking Mahatma Gandhi and his creed of non-violence, he declared that violence was unacceptable and killing in the name of cow vigilantism was wrong. In choosing to speak out, Mr Modi has displayed mettle. Which is more than can be said of the Opposition, which has registered its protest only against the inadequacy of Mr Modi’s statement.

Why is the Opposition so reluctant to champion a cause that concerns a foundational value of the Indian republic? Part of the problem lies in the hugely polarised climate. The “whataboutery” that passes for public discourse has reduced the issue to a childish trading of charges as to which political party has been responsible for banning beef, presiding over past lynchings, and so on and so forth. It is possible that the Opposition’s hesitation has to do with narrow electoral concerns: The over 280 seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party commands in the Lok Sabha and 312 seats it won in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly have been possible without giving due representation to Muslims among the candidates it fielded in these polls. From these numbers, it is easy to conclude that Hindutva as an ideology is widely popular, and a “soft Hindutva” stance ahead of 2019 may pay dividends for Opposition parties.

Apart from the practical fact that “soft Hindutva” will never be able to compete with the Parivar’s proven ability to generate a competing and escalating hard line, such a cynical calculation ignores the weaknesses of the first-past-the-post electoral system and a fractured polity that often delivers results that do not reflect majority opinion. In neither the 2014 Lok Sabha elections nor in UP in 2017 did the BJP win a majority of the total vote share. At 31 per cent, the lowest vote share for a single majority party in the Lok Sabha since 1967, and 40 per cent in UP, respectively, it is clear that a large number of Indian people do not subscribe to Hindutva. Ergo the Opposition leaders can safely jettison their indecisiveness and come forward to robustly defend India’s secular values. At the very least, it will make them more relevant than they are at present.