Will Jharkhand voters teach Modi a lesson?

This newspaper is disturbed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s nasty, communal, and polemical challenges against his main opponent, the Congress Party, over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Having won a second term, Mr Modi ought to speak like the country’s leader; instead he sounds like he is still a movement’s leader. Only an intellectual lightweight would remain stubbornly tethered to his partisan background.

True, his gauntlets were thrown at election rallies in Jharkhand, where anti-incumbency means his party could lose another state government. True, the PM is a vigorous speaker who gets carried away by his own rhetoric at times. “I dare Congress and all its allies to announce before the nation that they are ready to grant Indian citizenship to all residents of Pakistan,” Mr Modi said at Sahebganj on Tuesday. What a master of spin. His challenge is built upon the lie that the Congress conspires to turn Pakistanis into Indian citizens. “If the Congress has the guts, it should also announce they will reimpose Article 370 in J&K and Ladakh,” he added. Another fake premise. The Congress has not spoken of resurrecting Article 370; in fact, it was the first to erode Article 370 in the 1950s. Indeed, Kashmiris would today laugh at the suggestion of resuscitating Article 370: they have seen India at its ugliest, and they want out.

“Congress and its allies are stoking fire over the Citizenship Act but the people of the Northeast have rejected violence,” Mr Modi said in Dumka, with another lie as his premise. “Actions of the Congress prove that all decisions taken in Parliament are 1,000 per cent correct.” One, any political party’s actions prove nothing beyond that party's political stratagem. Mr Modi insidiously insinuates that his party equals the nation, and others equal the enemy. Two, Parliament makes law, and sheer numbers don't make such laws necessarily correct. Three, a 1,000 per cent exists only in a statistical context; this mathematical illiteracy is further evidence of this government’s inability to arrest India's plunge into an economic abyss — a plunge undertaken deliberately in pursuit of harebrained schemes like demonetisation. “Stop using others as shield to practice guerilla politics,” Mr Modi told the Congress at a rally. “Do not use the youth for your political gains. Do not ruin their future and the dreams of their
parents.” More lies. To call the Congress gurerillas (or its supporters “Urban Naxals”) is a joke because clearly, the Opposition party lacks killer instinct at its highest levels.

Equally clearly, students, even non-Muslims, don’t need any provocation to protest. Their future is already in doubt due to Mr Modi’s dubious economic stewardship. And it is also clear that his appeal is not directed at students but at their parents, to keep the social order intact — through paternalistic rule, on a scaffolding of lies.

Though we urge the PM to cease and desist from nonsensical challenges, we suspect it will be Jharkhand’s voters who will soon teach him a lesson in the limits of nastiness.