Mumbai The class IX student at a Kolhapur school is a huge fan of Narendra Bhagana, the subaltern Haryanavi singing sensation with testosterone-heavy lyrics: Bhai tera gunda, villain rhn de, bandook chalegi… (your brother is a thug, forget the villain, guns will go off…). You get the drift. Earlier this month, this 16-year-old, along with four other minors, was arrested for disturbing peace in the city and sent to a juvenile home for 14 days
His WhatsApp display photograph showed a picture of Tipu Sultan with accompanying text that read: “The king who fought like a soldier. India never seen (a warrior) like him, his soul departed from his body but his sword remained in his hand.” Bhagana’s hit song Baap toh baap rahega played when one clicked on Tipu’s photo. Four other school boys arrested along with him had similar WhatsApp status updates– in some cases, glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.
These images so incensed members of the recently-minted Sakal Hindu Samaj (SHS) that on June 7, they gheraoed the local police station, demanding stern action against glorifiers of Tipu and Aurangzeb, and the bandh called by them escalated to stone pelting and destruction of shops.
As the controversy snowballed, Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis blamed “Aurangzeb’s aulaads (offsprings)” for the rising communal temperature in the state, and on his 55th birthday on June 14, Raj Thackeray cut a cake with Aurangzeb’s photo by plunging the knife into the emperor’s mouth like a stake.
Why has Maharashtra’s politics acquired such a communal colour all of a sudden?
Communal eruptions across Akola, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Ahmednagar, Beed, Mumbai, Amravati and Nashik in the last eight months, and the killings of two cattle traders by alleged cow vigilantes in a the last three weeks at Nashik, have raised concern that the state may be headed for a bigger sectarian flashpoint. These instances of violence have come on the back of over 50 Jan Aakrosh (public anger) rallies that have ratchet up anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Tracking roots to RSS
The Nagpur-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader is a tall and gnarly man in his early 70s, the national chief of one of the organisation’s key units . He speaks off the record, but with a candour that comes from certitude, as he explains the genesis of SHS. “There are many Hindus and Hindu-oriented organisations that don’t necessarily attend shakhas, but they share the same philosophy and they needed to be brought under one umbrella. That is how SHS was created.”
SHS shares its credo with an old RSS campaign, ‘Ek kuan, mandir, aur shamshan, Hinduon ki yahi pehchan (Those who share one well, one temple and the crematorium are all Hindu brethren). Organisations such as the Durga Vahini, Gayatri Parivar, Sanatan Sanstha, Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali, the Sakal Jain Samaj, and even some Sikh and Buddhist organisations are all part of SHS, this leader claimed.
It enjoys the intellectual support of the Sangh and the logistical heft of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he added. SHS owes its name to something Savarkar once wrote,
“Tumhi amhi sakal Hindu, Bandhu bandhu (You and I are all Hindus, and brothers). However, the idea to keep the outfit overtly leaderless is borrowed from the 2015 Maratha reservation campaign. This means SHS works as an umbrella grouping of discrete outfits, with no specific leader.
“We want laws at the national and state level to stop love jihad, illegal conversions and cow slaughter,” said Sunil Ghanwat, spokesperson for Hindu Janjagruti Samiti for Maharashtra, which is one of the units of SHS. ”It’s not about the BJP or Congress or any other party. We have been demanding action against love- ihad and religious conversions for many years. It’s just that these issues are more in focus today because of massive marches taken out by Hindus,” he added.
“It’s a spontaneous movement in the interest of the Hindu Samaj where every Hindu organisation is a participant,” said another senior RSS leader, Atul Moghe. RSS swayamsevaks participate in SHS rallies and support its initiatives, he added.
BJP Maharashtra spokesperson Shivaray Kulkarni also said that BJP workers and leaders participated in SHS rallies, including ministers and lawmakers. “However, neither rank-and-file nor the leaders initiate such rallies. These are spontaneous uprisings of the Hindu fraternity.”
Spontaneous is a word that comes up again and again to stress that the Jan Aakrosh rallies are natural eruptions, rather than organised events. Yet, facts on the ground differ.
Last December, after Shraddha Walkar’s murder in Delhi, SHS launched a massive campaign against so-called love jihad – a popular right-wing conspiracy theory about interfaith relationships – claiming there were 100,000 instances of it in the state. The Shinde-Fadnavis government set up a committee to look into instances of coercive inter-faith marriages, but it has yet to receive a single complaint.
On June 3, while steering clear of the term love jihad, Fadnavis said, “Instances of innocent girls being lured into inter-religious marriages and (subsequent) exploitation are coming to light. We are concerned, and will crack the whip.”
When HT spoke to the police stations in Pune, Kolhapur, Solapur, Akola and Nashik, officers said they had no data to support these political claims and not a single FIR of coercive Hindu-Muslim marriage was registered so far in 2023. “We do not have compilation of such data with regards to any love jihad or religious conversions,” said Pune joint commissioner of police (law and order) Sandeep Karnik.
What is happening instead is that crimes of rape, molestation or sexual assault under Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, where the accused may be a Muslim and the victim a Hindu, are being tarred with the brush of love jihad.
Sample this – on May 20, BJP member of legislative council Gopichand Padalkar told a press conference that a Hindu girl from Manchar in Pune district was tortured by a Muslim young man as part of forcible conversion under love jihad. Pune Police arrested the man under various sections of the Indian Penal Code but maintained there was no overt sectarian angle.
Campaign pivots to history
With love jihad conspiracy theories finding little grassroots traction in the state, the campaign to polarise pivoted to historical figures such as Aurangzeb — an easy enough enemy, given Chhatrapati Shivaji’s stirring resistance — and Tipu Sultan, who was similarly vilified in Karnataka.
Between June 1 and 10, police across the state registered at least 20 first information reports (FIRs) over social media updates and display photos that featured Aurangzeb or Tipu Sultan. This crackdown was made easier by the fact that in February this year, social media company Meta – which runs WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – rolled out a new feature update syncing WhatsApp updates on other Meta platforms for wider reach and visibility. This, explained cyber experts, also increased the chances of incendiary content reaching a wider audience. “Previously, we could only check the status of a person if their number was saved in our contact list but now due to integration of platforms, anybody from anywhere can check status updates and these things go viral within minutes,” said Sanjay Shintre, incharge of Maharashtra cyber cell.
Senior Congress leader Husain Dalwai said the trend of valorising the two kings is a direct outcome of aggressive communal politics. “Muslims should stop reacting to communal politics. I too oppose using Aurangzeb’s picture as WhatsApp status, but what is wrong with Tipu Sultan who fought against the British until his last breath?”
Advocate Salman Maldar, who secured bail for the young Narendra Bhagana fan and three other juveniles in Kolhapur, said section 295A of IPC, usually applied for deliberate and malicious acts intended to hurt religious feelings and disturb peace, should not have been used against his minor clients. “They did not insult any god or goddess. Also, both Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan were rulers at different times and are not banned in this country by any law.”
Aurangabad member of Parliament (MP) Imtiyaz Jaleel said Tipu Sultan’s picture is part of the original copy of the Constitution drafted by BR Ambedkar and is preserved in the Parliament House library while Aurangzeb’s grave is an Archaeological Survey of India-protected monument. “I have challenged Devendra Fadnavis to present any one case in which a person was booked for showing a picture of Aurangzeb in the last 75 years,” he added, questioning the lack of police action against Telangana lawmaker T Raja Singh who openly called for violence against Muslims at a Jan Aakrosh rally in Mumbai earlier this year. Last year, Singh was pulled up by the Telangana high court for exhorting people to boycott all Muslim shops and businesses.
Political designs
“History has shown that the BJP benefited from the Ram Mandir movement but various Hindu organisations began working for it from 1985 onward,” said a former BJP leader who was a core strategist for the party in Maharashtra until his recent defection. “It is trying to replicate the same strategy across the country to ensure a big win in 2024. The tension in Maharashtra is just part of that design, especially since the party dropped seats in the 2019 assembly elections, and lost power.”
“Maharashtra Mission 45” is a key part of the BJP’s strategy to win in 2024; 17 of the 45 Lok Sabha constituencies on their radar are with other parties at present. These are Baramati, Satara, Aurangabad, Chandrapur, Buldhana, Kalyan, Palghar, Shirur, Raigad, South Mumbai, South Central Mumbai, North West Mumbai, Shirdi, Kolhapur, Hatkanangale, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Madhe and Osmanabad.
Except for Chandrapur, SHS has held one or multiple Jan Aakrosh rallies in each of these constituencies; in some cases, instances of communal violence and retaliation have ensued.
SHS held 12 rallies in western Maharashtra in the last six months, each of them with attendance upwards of 100,000. This sugar belt from Sangli to Kolhapur has a strong network of cooperative bodies that forms the backbone of the region’s rural economy. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have dominated the cooperative sector for decades. Polarisation on religious lines could significantly alter the politics in western Maharashtra’s 11 Lok Sabha and 75 assembly seats.
But the region that may worry the BJP the most is Vidarbha, where it suffered its biggest electoral setback in 2019, losing 15 assembly seats it held earlier. Once again, SHS has campaigned extensively here, particularly in Akola, Amravati, Yavatmal and Fadnavis’s bastion Nagpur, where the party lost a crucial legislative council election this year.
In Marathwada, which sends eight MPs to Lok Sabha, SHS has focused on the already-polarised district of Aurangabad, now represented by All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The violence during Ram Navmi here was the worst reported this year. Likewise, Parbhani, where the campaign against love jihad was launched after Walkar’s death, is a Shiv Sena (UBT) stronghold. The oft-heard phrase during elections here is, ‘Khan payije ka baan’ (Would you prefer a Khan or the bow and arrow?). With the Shiv Sena splintered in two, crucial seats in the region appear up for grabs.
