AAP's Allegation Against Shaheen Bagh Protests Insulting To The Muslim Community
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2020-08-17 21:44:34
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Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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What the Aam Aadmi Party spokesman Saurabh Bhardwaj has said about the Shaheen Bagh movement is scandalous. It reduces the value of all people's movements and is insulting to the Muslim community. To say that a movement of the size and nature of the Shaheen Bagh protests, where mostly women and children were at the forefront and the male members just provided the background support was stage-managed by the BJP is to credit the party with a lot more than it is capable of (especially where the Muslim community is involved) on the one hand and paint the Muslim community as stooges of the ruling dispensation who would do its bidding without demur on the other. Neither is true.
Bhardwaj backs his analysis by pointing out that the key players behind the Shaheen Bagh protests have now joined the BJP and it was the only party that benefited from the protests as it made them the central plank of its campaign in the Delhi assembly elections in which it increased its voting percentage from 18 to 38 percent. This, Bhardwaj said, shows that the BJP was in cahoots with the organizers of the protests and it scripted the entire episode with every minute detail. But can any political party instigate and control a people's movement like the Shaheen Bagh protests (which the national media hailed as a unique experiment) with such precision?
Will women in large numbers leave their home and hearth behind day after day and maintain a vigil at a spot if they are not zealously aroused by injustice, real or perceived? Will men look after the home and allow their women to do that? The Muslims were agitated that they were being discriminated against in the CAA and the NRC. The protests were not limited to Shaheen Bagh but happened all over India. Shaheen Bagh captured the imagination of the nation as it was in the capital and held the novelty factor of women being at the forefront. But there was no way the BJP could have instigated or controlled the movement.
Yes, the BJP benefited by the protests. Yes, it polarized the electorate. But is that anything new? In election after election, that is one of the main strategies the party has employed to get the desired results. It used it in Delhi too and the Shaheen Bagh protests gave it an additional handle. Secondly, if the main organizers of the Shaheen Bagh protests have now joined the BJP, it just goes on to show there are no permanent bedfellows in politics. After all, the man whose hate speeches are said to be the main reason behind the Delhi riots, Kapil Mishra, was originally in the AAP before he switched to the BJP. The AAP, which was born out of Anna Hazare's India Against Corruption (IAC) movement (can we then say that IAC was stage-managed by Arvind Kejriwal for his political ambitions?), should know a thing or two about people's protests and must refrain from discrediting the common people who raised their voice against what they thought was a law that discriminated against them. The Muslim community should give a fitting reply to the insulting allegations leveled by AAP by ignoring it in the next elections.
