With its version of Hindutva, Kejriwal is challenging the BJP’s monopoly over Hindutva
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s suggestion a few days ago about printing the pictures of Lord Ganesha and Goddess Lakshmi on fresh currency notes doesn’t appear to be a one-off remark. It looks like the Aam Aadmi Party chief is consciously working on an agenda—the agenda of Hindutva. The Bharatiya Janata Party has promised in poll-bound Gujarat that it would constitute a committee, under a retired high court judge, on the implementation of the uniform civil code (UCC). Kejriwal has lambasted and lampooned the promise, saying that the saffron party is bluffing. The BJP had pledged the same thing before the Assembly election in Uttarakhand, he said. But, he added, after winning the election, “the committee went back home.” Now, just before the Gujarat poll, it talks about another committee. This committee will also go back home after the election, he quipped. He is entering a territory, that of Hindutva, over which the BJP claims to have proprietorship. For decades, the BJP had three ‘core issues’—building the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, abrogation of Article 370, and UCC. No other party showed much interest in these issues, for these were regarded as ‘communal.’ Of course, there is the Shiv Sena but it has never been focused on the core Hindutva issues; besides, it has always been a regional outfit. AAP, on the other hand, is on an expansion drive—how successful it becomes is another matter.
Further, AAP was born as a ‘secular’ party, comprising a lot of Left-leaning progressive intellectuals and progressives; most of them are out of the party though; like all other parties, AAP is also heavily centralized, Kejriwal being the centre. This is the reason that public intellectuals and liberals were shocked by his view on the pictures of gods and goddesses on currency notes; but Kejriwal doesn’t care two hoots about their fulminations; now he is a politician, not an activist; realpolitik rather than radicalism guides his path. Angrier than the liberals are BJP leaders, for they have been the sole votaries of Hindutva so far. In Kejriwal and AAP, they may see not just a political rival but also an ideological adversary. They faced the quandary when responding to his gods-goddesses-on-notes gimmick; and now this guy is trying to score brownie points even on the core issue of UCC. It has become clear that he is not like other non-BJP leaders who shy away from UCC. So, what would the BJP do with the problem called Kejriwal? The saffron party may find some comfort from the fact, as we mentioned in earlier edits, that non-BJP parties playing the Hindutva card have not fared well. But then many things that have happened in the last few years never happened before; never before, for instance, did a ragtag rainbow coalition of activists and idealists coalesce into a successful political party running two state governments. But AAP did that—and now it’s getting saffronised. The BJP is rightly worried.
