Minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha, who on Friday garlanded eight cow vigilante hoodlums, “go-rakshaks” convicted by a Jharkhand fast-track court for murdering a Muslim man, breaks a stereotype that elites love to flaunt. The typical belief is that terrible things are done by relatively poor people who lack education. Mr Sinha is the exact opposite. He is a child of privilege and has had the best education India and America have to offer. And yet he showed no compunction in stepping into the role of a “mob rakshak”, or mob protector.
After garlanding gangsters at his home in Hazaribagh, from where he was elected to the Lok Sabha, the junior minister glibly spoke of higher things. This is typical of the cleverness of the privileged. Mr Sinha assured us he was committed to “honouring the due process of law”.
This is doublespeak at its lowest, but we may be quite sure Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not drop the junior minister for cocking a snook at the judiciary. We may also be just as sure that BJP president Amit Shah will convey no words of censure to this minister.
Perhaps the reason is that the powers-that-be hope to cash in on the votes of precisely the kind of people the junior minister just honoured. Mr Sinha clearly sees the need to humour this type, considering that the government he serves seems to be on a slippery slope and a show of highly-charged communal politics may be needed for electoral purposes. It is important to start the signalling now.
If we shift the context, we get a corroboration of the signalling aspect. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj was viciously and violently trolled by the carefully-nurtured (and anonymous) Hindutva troll army in a way that reduces her dignity. This was done as her ministry transferred a passport officer in UP for being communally meddlesome with an inter-faith couple applying for a passport. But the PM has not said a word so far to defend his senior minister.
Evidently he has no wish to chastise the communal elements. He might need them in the coming polls. Nevertheless, his silence demands answers, not least because our foreign minister, so disgracefully treated, will have little face to show when she travels overseas on India’s behalf as she has been degraded within her own system. Like the PM, the BJP president too has kept mum on the entire Sushma Swaraj episode.
To appreciate what we are up against, we should bear in mind that the cow vigilantes, the “mob-rakshak” lot and vicious Hindutva trolls who wouldn’t spare a top Modi government minister, to say nothing about senior Opposition leaders, are broadly the same set of people. They sit on the same side of the fence.
