Monkey Baat: BJP's loony toons may backfire and benefit Kejriwal

Here's a little story you may have heard. A monkey entered a village and spread panic among people. The villagers began chasing the monkey out of the village when the monkey climbed a tree. Soon, the entire village surrounded the tree and began throwing stones at the monkey. That's when the Chaudhary of the next village spotted the commotion and came enquiring about it. He asked the villagers about their furious stoning of a tree. The villagers explained that the monkey scared the kids, and they were determined to chase it away.

The Chaudhary said, "Who is on the monkey's side?"

After a momentary pause, a villager volunteered to answer, "nobody."

"Okay! Come on, then, I am on the monkey's side," said the Chaudhary, as he stood in front of the mob.

The Chaudhary represents the Indian's love for the underdog. At a meeting with journalists, just months after the Gujarat riots, Narendra Modi once told a bunch of journalists from the English media, "Go on attacking me. Because the more you attack me, the more will people of Gujarat love me." Bull's eye. The sharp arrows directed towards him helped build a wave that won Gujarat thrice before sweeping the nation.

The story repeated itself in the Lok Sabha elections, when every party opposing the BJP made it a Modi versus The Rest election, instead of the BJP versus The Rest. Allegations, some true and others truly exaggerated, flew thick, and Narendra Modi became the most attacked person in the elections. He won handsomely.

The BJP knows the benefits of the ridicule and venom that were heaped on its leader. Mani Shankar Aiyar's cringe-worthy condescension in the "chaiwala" remark led to a surge in support for Modi. So, even when BJP's enemies did not hit it below the belt, it screamed "below the belt" to extract the benefit of being hit. Priyanka Gandhi used the word "neech" to describe the vile attacks on her family; and the BJP quickly spun it into a casteist remark and linked it to Modi's backward caste background.

It's ironic then, that the BJP is giving the same benefit to its principal challenger. The BJPs cartoons are not about AAP's failures, but about Arvind Kejriwal's personal failures; it does not attack AAP's ideologies as much as it attacks Arvind Kejriwal the person. This is what may backfire for the BJP. Whenever an army rolls outs tanks on the roads, the world stands with the lone man who stands in front of them.

This is why the AAP cries on the usage of the word "gotra" and links it to the entire community. The BJP has long been the party of the baniyas. The AAP wants a share of that vote bank, too. The BJP just gave the opportunity to Kejriwal to announce his caste affiliations on a platter. One may say that the word "gotra" was used as a metaphor, but these are not the days for metaphors. Everybody reads everything literally or interprets everything to suit one's interest.

Rustic wisdom is not one of the many things that you can accuse Yogendra Yadav of not possessing. When he says that the BJP is losing the Assembly elections, you take it with a pinch of salt. But when he says that if BJP continues taking pejorative pot shots at Arvind Kejriwal, AAP doesn't need to do much for publicity, he is not far off the mark. Our political discourse has been exploring the bottom of civility for quite some years, and hitting below the belt no longer shocks us.

Election campaign strategies now focus more on the negative than the positive. For the one who becomes the target of a negative campaign, things tend to turn positive, in case the attack is seen as excessive or getting too personal. That's why the BJP's attacks on Kejriwal should worry BJP leaders more than Kejriwal, who is getting free publicity and probably sympathy, too, right when he needs them the most.