Gau-vernance doesn't win polls: Is 2016 BJP's year of Hindutva?

For all politicasters, charlatans, demagogues, throttlebottoms and wannabe megalomaniancs, 2016 is going to be the year of paramount importance, but more so for the saffron party of India - the BJP. Especially after a star-crossed 2015 in which it was not only battered in two crucial polls but also bruised by controversies.

Modi, Amit Shah and company will be more than eager to get back to winning ways. In 2015, the intolerance debate, award wapsi and beef ban hogged all attention, so much so that the BJP invested beaucoup bucks on the "holy cow" in the Bihar battle, only to be bludgeoned by the mahagathbandhan, and targeted by Arun Shourie with an epic jibe: "The BJP government is Congress plus a cow." Considering that Shourie was once part of the BJP and was a Union minister under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his comments would have been particularly embarrassing for the Modi sarkar.

The BJP might have its eureka moment in 2016 as it seems to have found a more subtle and persuasive substitute to its Hindutva stand. This might well be a game changer in the context of the politics of violence, hatred and polarisation, or "pugnacious patriotism". This could easily turn out to be the biggest factor influencing another upheaval in Indian politics.

The party has already started a campaign to justify this pugnacious patriotism by organising rallies against whom they call "anti-nationals" or "Pakistan ke dalle" and many rabble-rousing, pithy comments have already been made.

So what exactly is pugnacious patriotism? To be very succinct, it's a very old-fashioned idea of patriotism which means "I am the biggest patriot and anyone who disagrees with me can not only be abused but also be lynched". Making any mention of megalomaniac MLAs or "goons in black" will just ensure they achieve what they want - some cheap publicity to rise through the rank and file of the party they owe allegiance to.

However, here's an incident which shows the evidence of their Janus-faced patriotism which noted journalist Sujata Anandan mentions in her book Hindu Hriday Samrat:

Once the top cop Julio Ribeiro had to entertain some demands from a bunch of pugnacious patriots and here's what he did:

"Knowing his family was away on vacation, he picked up the phone and dialled his home number. Pretending that he was talking to the army chief, he said into the phone: "I have some brave boys here who want to kill the enemy. I am sending them across to you. Please give them a short, intense training and post them on the border with Pakistan. I am sure they will make us proud."

Right enough, all pugnacious patriots who were minions of a xenophobic party and who had been full of bravado earlier sulked away - one with the excuse that he had a six-month-old daughter to look after and could not afford to die on the border; another had aged parents; the third had just got married; the fourth found it inconvenient to fight at the border at that particular time, and so on." Communist until you get rich, feminist until you get married, atheist until the airplane starts falling and nationalist until you have to take a bullet on your chest.

The nation today seems to be divided between the pugnacious patriots and Pakistan ke dalle - a divide which is far more Machiavellian than the divide between "Hindu Hitchintaks" and "Sickulars". I was born seven years after the communal carnage in 1992-'93 and so was lucky not to witness it.

Modi and company need to learn from the Bihar debacle that negative agenda more often than not backfires and it is "governance" and not "gau-vernance" which wins polls. Also, he can't just rely on the TINA factor (There is no alternative), because Rahul 2.0 post his sabbatical has changed from reclusive to resurgent, laconic to loquacious and from a bumbling, mumbling daydreamer to a go-getter.

But as former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said a few days back, "Two years are long enough to call out the government on its faults. If the Congress seeks to replace the BJP, we now need to give solutions as well." (PS - Just as RTs aren't endorsements quotations aren't too!)

I partially disagree with him. Even in terms of criticising and cornering the government, there have been faux pas. For instance, when former minister in the UPA government, Anand Sharma, demanded that Union human resources development minister Smriti Irani should apologise for her "blasphemous" remark. What was he trying to do? Fight sedition with blasphemy? It was just so preposterous and that's why a Lazarus resurrection for the Congress is still far away.

Today, we, as a nation, need to introspect and ask ourselves a few pertinent questions: if Dadri made us ponder if we were becoming a murderous mobocracy, and if the cold-blooded murders of rationalists made us wonder if we were on our way to become a theocracy, then isn't the rise of pugnacious patriotism raising another grave question: are we becoming a kakistocracy, or a government under the control of the least qualified citizens?

There will be "n" number of answers because we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.