Less than a hundred days into its tenure, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in a hurry to shed its assumed skin and wear its original emperor’s clothes. The election-time posturing — of equality for all, fear for none — is now an encumbrance it is straining under. The two latest incidents to rock India and the BJP’s ineffective responses to both, reveal the party’s prepossession of an ideological immunity.
The bullying of a Muslim catering employee by a BJP legislator in a state-run canteen in New Delhi, forcing him to eat while the latter pleaded that he was on a fast and the illogical opposition to one of India’s brightest tennis talents, Sania Mirza’s appointment as a brand ambassador to the state of Telangana on grounds of her being a non-native, expose BJP’s intemperate nature. The feeble, and reluctant, apology by the legislator and the deafening silence by the BJP’s top echelons on the force-feeding issue is the paint peeling off the BJP’s promise of delivering fair governance.
As for the noise regarding Mirza’s appointment, the BJP would do well to remember its own mea culpa — the appointment of actor Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador of Gujarat. Bachchan is as non-Gujarati as they come and he does not even live in Gujarat. Of course, it is another matter that both Bachchan and Mirza are Indians and the states in question are also in India. But that is a larger view that calls for a higher political intellect to perceive. BJP, unfortunately, seems to be aspiring to neither.
