Is the BJP unable or unwilling to take action against Tejasvi Surya?

During the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, RSS ideologue Sadhvi Rithambara was campaigning for the BJP candidate in South Mumbai at a spot very close to the minority settlement of Mohammad Ali Road.

She was not unaware of the proximity of Muslims to the campaign venue and she gave deliberate offence. “They do everything opposite to our norms. We pray facing east , they pray facing west.”

She perhaps did not know that only South Asian Muslims faced west towards Mecca. Those in the West would be facing east like all Hindus there would too.

But she didn’t stop there. “They eat tamsik food, we eat only satvik, no onions, no garlic.” That too was rooted in ignorance because more Hindus than not were always non-vegetarian.

But what she said next was obscene and offensive and caused chaos on the dais. “We eat with our mouths, so where do they eat from?”

I remember Gopinath Munde springing to his feet and ripping off her mike as she began to laugh raucously. The BJP candidate did not seem too happy either and with a Congress government in the state, we were sure FIRs would be lodged against her for vitiatng communal harmony.

However, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by Sri Lankan Tamil terrorists later that night and the whole nation's attention was diverted towards mourning for the former prime minister.

When campaign resumed some days later, Sadhvi Rithambara was history. Leading the charge against her was none other than Munde, an essentially decent man, who had been outraged by her comments. He banned her from campaigning for the BJP in Maharashtra. When the party's election managers protested, he said, “You can send her to other leaders' constituencies. She is coming nowhere near me or mine. I do not want the few Muslims who do vote for us alienated.”

Other BJP candidates followed his lead and Rithambara was never seen on a political stage thereafter. However, that was a BJP led by the likes of Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani who had coined the words “party with a difference" for the BJP and made terms like shuchita (cleanliness), samrasta (unity in diversity) and sabhyata (refined behaviour) bywords for the party’s DNA.

Obviously that culture is a thing of the past. For, last week, social media discovered a tweet from BJP’s Bangalore MP Tejaswi Surya wherein he claimed “over the past 100 years, 95 percent of Arab women have not had an o----m".

His source for that claim was Tarek Fateh, a Pakistani Canadian, who has been routinely targetting Indian Muslims from the safety of his Canadian citizenship. Surya ‘s tweet, however, was noticed by many Arabs, both men and women, and many warned him of consequences if he ever visited their countries. The tweet also put Narendra Modi, no model of samrasta, to embarrasement.

I am told Surya was asked by the PMO to delete the tweet, though screen shots remain and continue to cause him and the BJP a good deal of needling on social media.

Arab intelligentsia, led by Princess Hend al Qassimi of Sharjah, have since been tweeting at India routinely evoking Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela against our Islamophobia and that has got at least two Indian missions in the Gulf warning Indian residents in those countries against endangering not just the safety of other Indian nationals but also of jeopardising India's relations with the Gulf.

In a very belated gesture Modi too tweeted, reminding people that the Coronavirus did not discriminate between castes and religions. But if at all he had been truly capable of stepping into Vajpayee's shoes, Modi would have seen the perils of encouraging Islamophobia sooner.

I recall the time when Vajpayee as prime minister had held out an olive branch to the minorities and Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena had raged against him. “Disenfrahchise the Muslims. Take away their right to vote. Only then they will all stop their vote bank politics, “he had said.

Pramod Mahajan, the then BJP general secretary, who had been the architect of his party ‘s alliance with the Shiv Sena, was a close confidante of Vajpayee at the time.

“Unfortunately, Balasaheb is clueless about these things. He has never been a government functionary and his party will never lead the Centre. Whoever is the prime minister has to consider India's security and energy needs. For all our big talk, we do not produce much oil. Most of our requirements are fulfilled by the Gulf nations. If we finger our Muslims, the OPEC nations will stop our oil supplies. The country's economy will collapse. The Shiv Sena does not have to be responsible for that. We do,” he had told some reporters wryly in a private conversation.

I am amazed that despite his good terms with Arab leaders and being decorated by some of those nations, Modi did not see the perils of pushing Indian Muslims to the wall, sooner. I am equally surprised that the Gulf intelligentsia stayed silent for so long. The prices of oil have fallen in the international market but, as I understand it, this holds true mostly for oil produced by American companies. If the market does not correct itself soon, the US will stop selling outside and stop buying from Gulf nations to contain its own economy. India will then have no option but to look solely to the Gulf nations- what if they stop supplying altogether, as Mahajan had feared?

Meanwhile, I cannot say that there is no poetic justice in this world. As the Sharjah princess warned Indian Islamophobes in the Gulf, they make their bread and butter off the Arab plates and then abuse the official religion of those very countries. She implied they could lose their jobs and some already have been terminated by their employers and face action from the authorities in those countries.

I have been seeing pitiable tweets from these brave armchair warriors who thought they could get away by targeting Muslims from a Muslim country. The Gulf nations are not Pakistan and many have strict laws against religious discrimination. These Islamophobes risk not only endangering other Indians but also shooting themselves in the foot.

For the benefit of the princess, Hindi has a very evocative phrase that suits the situation - jis thali mein khaya, usi thali mein chhed kiya (they drilled a hole in the very plate they were eating out of).

That plate may soon be leaking like a sieve for these Islamophobes and I cannot say they don't deserve it.