At the doorsteps of the parliamentary polls, BJP is at a loss to explain a statement made by its Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma to the effect that Shudras were meant to serve Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishya communities. Among others, the CPI-M in its official media page has taken strong objection to this and stressed that the “BJP’s Manuvadi ideology is in full play.” Biswa Sarma was heard saying this at the Gita Mahotsav in Haryana a week ago, quoting Lord Krishna. Eventually, he removed the comment from his social media page. To have invoked this idea at this critical hour, Biswa Sarma might have done a disservice to the BJP, a party he had joined only less than a decade ago but managed to grab the CM’s post. Curiously, Biswa Sarma hardly ever drew national attention for his government’s performances or for his utterances as CM, other than when he repeatedly targeted the Muslim community. A former AASU functionary, he drew media attention also in relation to several corruption allegations in the past, and recently in relation to a questionable 10-crore central subsidy for his wife to run a food-processing unit.
Himanta Biswa Sarma’s associations with the BJP or the Sangh Parivar are a recent phenomenon but he has ably inherited their penchant to divide the society. Democracy is all about uniting the people to govern the nation. The BJP often proved it could divide the people and grab power. It camouflages its emphasis on Hindutva by singularly focusing on Lord Ram, thereby ‘unifying’ the majority Hindu society through the arm of religious devotion. The Sudras form the lowest layer of the Hindu framework, outside of which are the BCs and the Dalits. These three together form the bulk of the wider Hindutva concept though all these segments had been treated shabbily and crudely until the dawn of democracy. Even in recent years, Dalits being subjected to inhuman acts in Gujarat, UP etc., at the hands of other communities had been widely reported in the media. But, using Ram as a symbol, the BJP aims to unite all of them under its saffron flag. This, per se, is an equally crude act. Notably, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown restraint in such matters after he took charge of the nation. He claims to be a BC on grounds that his community had ‘converted’ itself to ‘backward’ some time ago and effectively used this large army of voters to win power for himself and sit at the apex of the nation. Politics today is all about a play of games to fool the people. For the hapless nation, there’s no escape from this ‘divide and rule’ policy.
