Saugat-e-Modi: Change in BJP’s minority policy

First a well-publicised appearance at Jahan-e-Khusrau, Delhi’s festival of Sufi music. Followed by an even more emphatic outreach during Ramadan culminating in Eid-al-Fitr. Saugat-E-Modi, a campaign to distribute 3.2 million gift kits to underprivileged Muslim families across the country, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s photo on every Eid packet. Have Modi and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) changed their minority policy? This is the question on the minds and lips of many India-watchers.

“Does a leopard change its spots?” asks one of Modi’s many critics? But Modi, as we all know, is no leopard but a political leader and visionary, one of the most astute and powerful that India has known in the last hundred years. And for politicians, the adage might equally well be reversed. Even if a leopard does not change its spots, a politician certainly must. But a successful politician does so not too frequently and certainly not frivolously.