Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, April 13, 2024

Letter to the readers, Mainstream, April 13, 2024

It is campaign time for the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Most opposition political parties have released their ‘Election Manifestos’, highlighting their proposed policy promises to voters. We had in our last issue provided links to manifestos of the Congress Party and of the three major Left parties [1]. They make interesting proposals on a range of themes that need public debate and attention. The Congress manifesto makes a socially progressive commitment to modify laws to ensure the individual freedoms of women to live the way they want to, eat the way they want to and marry the way they want to. Some of these freedoms have been legally curbed by BJP led state governments. According to the CSDS-Lokniti pre-poll survey unemployment, price rise and development are the three main focus areas for citizens [2]. It is about a week to go before voting in the first phase of the election starts but the ruling BJP, the biggest and richest political party has still not released its manifesto. The BJP’s star campaigner is the Prime Minister who repeatedly raises the Ram Temple in Ayodhya taking credit for it, or tries to tarnish the opposition as corrupt, or denounces the Congress party manifesto saying it uses the language of separatism as if inspired by the Muslim League (The political party of Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah that led the movement for Pakistan). He needs to be publicly reminded in front of citizens that founding figures of his political family of Hindutva organisations called for separate countries for Hindus and Muslims even before the Muslim League demanded partition. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee the founder of ‘Jan Sangh’ — as president of Hindu Mahasabha was part of a coalition government in Bengal with the Muslim League in the early 1940s. [3] The Congress party has complained [4] to the Election commission of India that its campaign manifesto is being misrepresented, but unfortunately the ECI has not taken any action. Mr Modi keeps denouncing Congress and Left politicians for not attending the inauguration ceremony for the Ram Temple at Ayodhya, but he needs to be bluntly confronted during the campaign that as prime minister of a secular country he had no business leading rituals of a private temple and he breached all protocol. The entire opposition alliance must challenge the BJP on its record on issues of unemployment, rising inequality, price rise and not get drawn into responding to a communalist & identitarian tit-for-tat. The Election Commission of India should take firm action against all politicians who are bringing in religious messaging into the election campaign, and it must immediately put a stop to agencies like the income tax department or the enforcement directorate hauling up and interrogating opposition candidates at the time of elections with model code of conduct in place [5], [6].

April 13, 2024 —HK