DNA Edit: A feeble challenger - PM Narendra Modi highlights the Opposition’s vulnerabilities

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent observations about the conduct of his political adversaries are a damning indictment of the quality of Opposition politics.

In an interview with a news agency, he has underscored the way crimes like rape and lynching have been exploited as political weapons. The PM emphasised a cardinal principle that has been consistently given short shrift in contemporary discourse: Playing politics with crime and reducing cases of rapes and lynching to mere statistics go against the ethos of democracy.

It’s sad but true that the Opposition has cherry-picked incidents of crime to create a climate of fear and hatred in the country. While the target of lynchings has mostly been Muslims, the violence and criminality motivating such crime must not be milked for political gains.

It is not the perpetrator’s or the victim’s religion that should be taken into account while condemning an act of murder. When rape cases are given communal colours, when legislators come out in support of the accused, when the religious identities of the victim and the accused dictate the intensity of outrage, one realises that the fault lines in society have compromised the foundation of human rights.

In the eyes of the justice system, a criminal is only a criminal, convicted for transgressing the established boundaries of law. However, that doesn’t mean that the governments of the nine states where 45 cases of mob lynching took place between 2014 and March 2018 can be condoned for their failure to uphold the primacy of the law. It’s worth recalling how an exasperated Supreme Court was forced to draw up guidelines for dealing with cases of lynching and prod the Centre and the states to take immediate measures.

Throughout the PM’s interview, the underlying strain was the need to rise above petty politics to ensure unity in society. But the Opposition seems bent on widening the existing fissures. It has been trying to milk Assam’s National Register of Citizens for political gains. While all parties seem to agree that illegal immigrants must be sent back to where they came from, BJP’s bête noire, the TMC, among others, has conjured up the bogeys of a ‘civil war’, a ‘bloodbath’ and ‘Desh Ke Tukde Tukde’ to undermine the country’s integrity and institutions.

It is one thing to criticise government policies and quite another to unleash chaos and paranoia through misleading information. The government, including the PM, has been at pains to highlight that “no citizen of India would have to leave the country and that all possible opportunities would be given to those [excluded from the NRC] to get their concerns addressed”.

It’s worth noting that in the recent past, the focus has shifted from job creation, economic opportunities, poverty alleviation, healthcare and education to identity politics. The Opposition, instead of taking the ruling alliance to task for its failures in matters of governance, has yielded to the temptation for rabble-rousing and disruption.

The PM appeared confident of taking on a ‘united’ opposition because of the chinks in the latter’s armour: lack of coherence among its constituent partners and the absence of a long-term strategy. Like the government, the Opposition, too, is in dire need of a course correction.