The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan may pose a serious security threat to India but internally the ruling BJP appears to be happy, hoping the tragic developments could help the party.
The BJP’s rise is centred on majoritarian and Hindutva politics and seeking to project Islam as against the “idea of Bharat”. Party insiders feel the images coming out after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan will help to strengthen its politics among the people.
Though both the government and the party have been guarded in their comments, leaders in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh and the BJP ecosystem appear to have hurled themselves into the effort to exploit the situation in Afghanistan, eyeing electoral gains.
“People who are well-wishers of terrorists in Uttar Pradesh should remember who is their Prime Minister and chief minister,” BJP’s Uttar Pradesh chief Swatantra Dev said on Wednesday.
The comment was aimed at rival Samajwadi Party’s Sambhal MP Shafiqur Rahman Barq, who has been slapped with a sedition case for allegedly equating the struggle of India’s freedom fighters for Independence with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.
The alleged comment from Barq, a Muslim, appears to have given a handle to BJP leaders in Uttar Pradesh to go all out to play the Hindutva card. The Samajwadi MP has said he was misquoted.
On Thursday, chief minister Yogi Adityanath too sought to play the Taliban issue while speaking in the Assembly, apparently eyeing the polls in February-March next year.
“Despite the kind of cruelty being meted out to women and children some people here are shamelessly supporting the Taliban. The faces of all these leaders should be exposed,” Adityanath said, seeking to slam principal rival SP, which draws support mainly from Yadavs and Muslims.
BJP managers feel the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan coinciding with the preparations for the Uttar Pradesh polls could divert attention from the failures of the Adityanath government by sharpening polarisation.
The Adityanath government had faced widespread flak for his mishandling of the second Covid wave and recent surveys have shown a sharp dip in his popularity ratings. But party managers hope the polarisation card could wipe off the failures and sway the majority community.
The top leadership of the BJP has maintained silence on the developments in Afghanistan given the sensitivity of the issue but some other key leaders are slowly seeking to use the Taliban to make political statements.
Two former general secretaries of the BJP, Ram Madhav (now with the RSS) and P Muralidhar Rao, initially flagged the serious security threat to India due to the Taliban takeover but later gave comments seeking to obliquely play politics.
“World over people are keenly watching about the developments happening in #Afghanistan. How women are treated under Taliban rule is the touchstone!” P Muralidhar Rao tweeted on Wednesday.
“Hope, all Indians irrespective of denomination they belong to have consensus on this.” he added.
Speaking at an event in Kozhikode on Thursday, Ram Madhav said the Moplah rebellion of 1921, also called the Mappila riots, was one of the first manifestations of the Talibani mindset in India and accused the Left of trying to whitewash it by celebrating it as a communist revolution.
BJP Rajya Sabha MP Rakesh Sinha, who has been known as an RSS ideologue, has slammed those supporting the Taliban and said: “Taliban is an idea which must be opposed by Indian Muslims without if and but!”
