CAA fire rages: PM, Shah feel vulnerable

Prime Minister Narendra Modi sounded defensive during his rambling speech at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on Sunday, when he sought to quell the nationwide protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Despite a brutal crackdown in BJP-ruled states like Uttar Pradesh, or in Delhi where the police is directly under home minister Amit Shah’s direction, these protests continue. The protests have shown that this government, invincible as it might have seemed with its brute parliamentary majority and an enfeebled political Opposition, can be taken on. Mr Modi and Mr Shah, despite their presumed support from the “silent majority”, are obviously frightened by the recent show of people power. Mr Modi’s speech betrayed this.

He sought to assure Indian Muslims that they had nothing to fear. However, after five years of a relentless assault — likening Muslims to puppies under the wheels of a car/progress, lynching them on suspicion of cow slaughter, the incessant dog-whistling, the reading down of Article 370 in India’s only Muslim-majority state, and even Mr Modi’s recent identification of protesters “by their clothes” — no Indian Muslim will take the PM’s words at face value. He said since he took over in 2014, his government had not mentioned the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which of course is a bald lie. See his speeches in Assam in 2014 and you will find that it was mentioned — though indirectly.

Mr Modi added that the government’s purpose was to identify inflitrators — whom Mr Shah has previously called “termites” — and not Muslims born in India, or “sons of the soil”. Everyone saw how the Assam NRC turned up fewer “infiltrators” than expected: of the 19 lakh “non-citizens” identified, less than half were Muslim. Yet that NRC was rejected and its administrator transferred. Muslims have cause to worry that any exercise to weed out “outsiders” will be either incompetent or sinister, or both.

Then there’s the parliamentary record. On December 9, during the debate on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha, Mr Shah categorically said the NRC would be implemented across the country. He has specifically mentioned the NRC in numerous rallies around India. Mr Shah has been quiet the past week or so. It’s not because he and Mr Modi are playing “good cop bad cop”, or that they have different agendas. More likely the protests have scared them witless. Truly, a bully is a bully until the first pushback.

Clearly, Mr Modi doesn’t really care about weeding out termites, etc, but about continuously winning the “next” election. The setback Sharad Pawar dealt him during Maharashtra’s government formation and now the protests — by people holding up the “tiranga” — have shown him he is vulnerable; that he can’t take allies for granted; and that though his parliamentary majority is unassailable, it is not eternal. Hence his defensiveness. His polemic of blaming the Congress and “Urban Naxals” (whoever they are) of spreading lies tells us one thing: that the single-point majoritarian agenda has its limits for an economically-hurting majority, and he knows it.