Having spent many of my years as a reporter covering communal violence, I learned long ago to detect fear in a community and this time I saw no sign of it among the Muslims who said they would not vote for Modi. What I saw was something much more worrying and this was a sense of power. It was almost as if they knew that in the name of secularism they would always be important to a certain kind of political party and that this would be their weapon to remain relevant. There was something deliberate in their resistance to Modi’s “India first” idea and something sad about the way they seemed to need to make it clear that for them religion was always going to be more important than such things as vikas and parivartan. They admitted that they had been let down by the political parties they had supported but they said they were determined to not let this come in the way of their conviction that the BJP would never be there for them. So, mingled with the silliness and the political nonsense what we saw in the last days of this interminable campaign is the sad reality that an important section of India has not shared in the hope and excitement of this election. For this, every political party is to blame, both secular and communal. - Tavleen Singh
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 13:22:32 +0000
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