DRESS CODE: Several BJP states and chief ministers have called for a ban on women wearing jeans. Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant even went to the extent of blaming parents for minor girls being raped when out at night.
By Rajan Narayan
Unlike during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been Talibanized by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. As Prashant Kishore has pointed out the BJP wants to take over the physiological mind space of its citizens in the country. What to wear, what to eat, what to post and what to think, are not the mandate of any political party. If that is the perception then the BJP is heading towards becoming another Taliban in India in ideology and there will be breaks in the party as Prashant Kishore observes pertinently (see text of Kishore’s analysis `Taliban is BJP Ideology’ here elsewhere).
WHY has Prashant Kishore, the Kingmaker in Indian politics, turned his back on the BJP? It has taken some time but Kishore has finally realised that there is no difference between the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah and that of Afghanistan’s Taliban. That is why although he supported the BJP to come to power in 2014 he did not support it again in 2019.
In the beginning Prashant Kishore thought that the Congress has ruled enough and may be a right wing party deserved a chance to form the government. He never imagined that the BJP under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, unlike the BJP under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, would turn out to be like Taliban in its mindset.
In a widely circulated interview Prashant Kishore clarifies in detail why he feels the philosophy of the BJP is similar to that of the Taliban. In a normal democracy you may have multiple parties. In the elections that are held one or other party will come to power while others without any luck may lose or serve as Opposition.
As a master political strategist Prashant Kishore is happy to do strategies for a change in government. Prashant is happy to help political leaders whom he considers honest and who will improve the status of the aam aadmi in India as opposed to khaas aadmi.
When Prashant realised that the BJP’s politics is as good as Talibanizing India, he decided to part company with it. In his video interview he explains what he means when he equates the ideology of the BJP to that of the Taliban. What the BJP is doing is trying to occupy the mind space of the Indian population. It is just not offering an electoral choice. It wants complete control over the country like did or in the case of Goa, Portugal’s Salazar did. It is not content with votes, it also wants to control the mind of every Indian. What does this occupation of the mind or brainwashing mean?
TALIBAN SIMILARITIES
THE similarity between the BJP and the Taliban is that they want to dictate to you how you should live in matters like what you should eat and what you should wear and how you should think. The BJP in India is opposed to anyone eating beef. Even going to the extent of its followers mindlessly lynching those who have anything to do with beef, even on mere suspicion ordinary people are targeted.re suspicion that they eat beef.
The larger implication is that the Muslim and Christian communities which are large consumers of beef will have to change their eating habits by not eating their favourite food because of the perception that the majority community doesn’t approve of it!
Again, in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan women’s primary freedoms of education and much else are suppressed ruthlessly. Women are treated no better than cattle, as possessions of men. Even if a woman exposes a very tiny bit of naked flesh some lunatic Taliban warrior may target her for flogging.
IS THIS SHARIAT?
TRUE, the BJP in India does not go to the extremes which the Taliban practises in Afghanistan in the name of Shariat law. But there are several states in India where women are now being targeted for wearing jeans. In Uttar Pradesh of course the ultimate depravity for a woman is to wear these seemingly stylish ripped jeans which draw attention to the naked flesh beneath.
A fortnight ago when two young women, minors both, were targeted for gang rape on Benaulim beach in the presence of their companions, Chief Minister of Goa Pramod Sawant instead of pulling up his police force, told parents not to permit their girls to stay out late nights.
In Taliban-occupied Afghanistan women are not permitted to study beyond the fourth standards. They may not go out to work or even come out of their homes. If they come out of the house they have to be covered from head to toe and must be accompanied by a male member of the family. If the Taliban discovers that the male is not a relative but her boyfriend the girl and boy run the risk of being stoned to death. Being stoned to death must be the most barbaric way to die and it happens only in the fanatic Muslim countries.
In India the BJP is also extremely hostile to women and educated women. It is not in favour of promoting their education. In several BJP states there is a love jihad law banning inter-community marriages. The favourite conspiracy theory of the BJP is that Muslim boys are pataoing Hindu girls with a view to converting them. This is what they called love jihad. It’s the way in which the Muslim community wants to convert more and more Hindu girls into the Muslim fold.
ABSURD FEARS
THERE is this completely absurd fear that the Muslims will one day outnumber the Hindus as majority community and Islam will be back in force for all. There is this fear despite the fact that the percentage of Muslims in India is only 14% and it is fact falling courtesy access to education and jobs and educated couples having fewer children as is the case with the other communities too. Who have realized that quality of life for their children is more important than perhaps quantity of children to fall back on in their senior years.
Prashant Kishore may be a political strategist but he strongly believes in the fundamental principles of the Indian Constitution. Prashant believes that the Constitution guarantees Freedom of Worship and Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Movement which should not only be respected but safe-guarded. Prashant Kishore, who has lived in the United States for a long time, is against any kind of dictatorship.
He has experienced the diversity of the United States which is a country of migrants in history. It is a melting pot in which your geographical or racial or gender or caste or community is not a hindrance to even becoming Vice-President Kamala Harris as was dramatized recently in the last change of political power. Some of the biggest heads of companies are of Indian origin and they are respected citizens in the US.
When Prashant Kishore decided to help the BJP in 2014 he was unaware of the Taliban like agenda of the BJP. While the BJP was in power earlier under the prime ministership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, it was not at all like a Taliban party. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a moderate who fully believed in democratic secularism. He had gone to the extent of suggesting that present Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not following “Raj Dharma.” Which means all communities have rights to equal treatment.
POST-GODHRA
THIS was in the context of the post-Godhra riots when the allegation was that as chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi had turned a blind eye to the mass killing of Muslims in Ahmedabad in retaliation for the train burning incident of Hindu karsevaks returning home after the storming of the Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh.
It was only when the BJP under Narendra Modi started getting more and more fascist that Prashant Kishore decided to break away from the party. He responded to an invitation from Nitish Kumar and helped him win the elections to the Bihar Assembly.
Similarly, Prashant responded to the call of Mamta-didi who was fighting a fierce battle to retain control of West Bengal. The BJP, so obsessed by winning the West Bengal elections, had allegedly bribed Trinamol Congress (TC) MLAs to defect to the BJP. When it should have been concerned about the second wave of covid-19 sweeping in and taken steps to combat and prevent its spread so fewer people died. Instead, Narendra Modi and his senior cabinet colleague were busy campaigning in West Bengal.
It is thanks to the strategy designed by Prashant Kishore that the BJP was routed in West Bengal and Mamata-didi returned to power with an even bigger margin. To add insult to injury, Mukul Roy, one of the founder of the Trinamol Congress (TC) who had defected to the BJP, came to his senses and returned to Mamata-didi, all forgiven or so to speak.
It was because of the help of Prashant Kishore that DMK president, Stalin, won the Tamil Nadu elections, defeating the AIDMK with whom the BJP had entered into an alliance.
TALIBAN FUNDAMENTALISM
THE Taliban has converted Afghanistan into a fundamentalist Islamic republic, an Islamic republic like Saudi Arabia and Iran. It claims it will follow the Muslim Sharia laws strictly. But nowhere in the Quran is it said that women are second class citizens and possessions of men to do whatever they wish with them. Nowhere in the Quran does it say that women should not work but be prisoners in their own homes.
Nowhere in the Quran is adultery punished by stoning to death. Even Saudi Arabia, which was among the few states adhering to an extremist fanatical version of the Sharia laws, has reformed and now allow women more freedoms including the freedom to drive a vehicle. Even Iran which is a Shia Muslim country does not interpret the Shariat laws in such harsh interpretation as the Taliban has been doing for the last so many years.
Twenty years ago when the Taliban first took control of Afghanistan, after the Soviet Union was driven back, a Taliban brand of Shariat has been enforced. The Taliban are actually Afghanistan youth trained by the Inter-Services Wing of Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It is the United States which has created and been the largest sponsor of the Taliban militia fighting to take control of Afghanistan.
Unlike the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which is what the Taliban is calling itself, India is a secular democratic country and not a theocratic Hindutva state. But this is the objective of the present leaders of the BJP. Narendra Modi and Amit Shah want to convert India into a fundamentalist Hindutva country like Nepal which till recently called itself officially a Hindu nation.
INDIAN CONSTITUTION
THE Indian Constitution makes it clear that unlike Pakistan, which declared itself an Islamic state when it separated from India, India remains a secular country where all religious communities were considered equal. India has never discriminated against any citizens of the country on grounds of race, religion, gender or caste. Prashant Kishore has broken his ties with the BJP because it is no longer a political party but a movement like Nazism. Hitler’s Nazi party wanted to control the mind space of the people of Germany.
Which is why in his interview available on YouTube Prashant Kishore explains why he is totally committed to India as a secular democracy. He does not share the fundamentalist views of the BJP’s present leaders. Political parties can tell you how to vote. They may follow left or right wing policy. But they must respect the Constitution. They cannot behave like dictators. They cannot tell you what to wear and what to eat and where to go and what to think and what they should post.
Prashant finds it extremely distasteful that citizens should be arrested and accused of sedition for social media posts critical of senior BJP leaders. As an ustad on social media, he believes social media should be democratic. The very man who used the social media to ensure victory for Narendra Modi and the BJP is now determined that the BJP should be replaced by a national democratic alliance.
Which is why Prashant who got the BJP elected with a huge majority twice, has now become its greatest enemy. Prashant Kishore has now decided to help Sharad Pawar create an alliance of all secular parties to oust the current BJP’s Taliban-styled dictatorship from India.
THE TALIBAN’ IDEOLOGY OFBJP’
As explained by PRASHANT KISHORE in a video making the rounds on social media…
IT IS important for all of us to understand it is not that this is a government with the largest majority we’ve ever seen, we’ve seen governments with bigger majority than this one. We’ve also seen parties ruling India for far longer time than they’ve (BJP) been, they’ve been ruling only for seven years, we’ve seen governments ruling for 10, 15 years.
Why we are saying that this is different is because of the reason that beyond your voting preference, here’s a government, they want to have complete dominance on the psychological mind space of the people, beyond voting. So they don’t want only your vote, they also want to interfere into what you wear, what you eat, what your faith is. That bothers people. As a political party they have a right to seek your vote, but then they are not stopping there. They’re trying to dominate the mind space, have that complete psychological control over your mind space, and want to have a say in everything else beyond the vote as well.
Similarly, as a party, they’re well within their right to say “We want to win India.” But never before in this country a ruling party has given a war cry that “I want to wipe off opposition.” They don’t only want to win India, they want to wipe out the opposition, that’s problematic. So you seek votes, it is acceptable, but to have complete control over the mind space of people about things which are beyond vote is problematic. You want to win it is fine, but you want to wipe out opposition is problematic. You want to propagate your achievements, it’s fine, but then you are saying that nothing in 70s years has happened before we came, so much so that they’re including the 10 years of their own government, that nothing happened in this country.
I can go on giving many such examples. Why people find this government a bit more scary or why they’re fearful, or why we are saying we’re going down in democratic principles and values, it is because of these reasons. You have to make the distinctions, people are not worried because they voted for them and they’re in majority. People are worried when they come and say “You cannot wear jeans,” “You cannot be friends with Muslims,” “You cannot eat this,” “You cannot drink this.”
That is what creates the fear. People are not worried because they’ve have won. Many parties have won in the past and they’ve won bigger than this party. But they (BJP) are saying no, wipe off opposition completely. That is the problem. And hence make no mistake in the context, in this backdrop, if they win Bengal, we would have made a decisive step in the direction of “One Nation, One Party.”