• Adv. Rajiv Sharma

When recently, the Bhartiya Janta Party was confronted with the diminishing returns on its decades long hateful and communal campaign in the country, it was forced to adopt a more aggressive and militant approach in its sheer desperation to hold on to the power. The UP Chief Minister coined the slogan “Batenge to katenge”, meaning thereby if you do not remain united, you will be butchered. Initially, it was not clear as to whom the call to remain united was directed at and the identity of their perceived butcher was also kept under the wraps. A lot of people deduced that the slogan probably called upon 140 crore strong Indians to remain united in order to counter the threats from the external enemies. But, unfortunately this was not so. The cat was out of the bag when Dattatreya Hosabale, an RSS General Secretary categorically stated in October 2024 that the slogan exhorted only the Hindus to unite, otherwise they would be butchered.

Therefore, the highly negative and fissiparous slogan “Batenge to katenge” implies that the BJP is attempting to threaten the majority community to instil a false sense of fear among them. Although the top BJP leaders have not directly declared the names of the organisations or communities that according to them may potentially undertake the task of butchering, the statement of Dattatreya Hosabale has left nothing to imagination. Any prudent man will conclude that the BJP is trying to target all non-Hindu minorities in the country namely the Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and other non-Hindu groups as being beneficiary of divisions among the majority community. Hence, the slogan that their target audience must stand united, if they want to save themselves from being butchered, not only attempts to intimidate the majority community but casts a baseless accusation on all the minority communities in the country. Further, the BJP’s slogan has the potential to damage the country’s unity and integrity and the core constitutional values. Such an attempt severely undermines our ethos of “Unity in Diversity” and the spirit of our glorious freedom struggle. Indeed, nothing can be more harmful than pitching the majority community comprising 80% of total population against the minorities.

Unfortunately, now the Prime Minister and other Chief Ministers of the BJP have also begun to follow the same line, which is accentuating an already ominous situation. The Prime Minister and the BJP must understand that the baseless propaganda to spread unfounded fear among the majority community has the potential to subvert freedom and democracy in the country.

It appears that the poisonous slogan with extremely negative connotations has been put forth by the BJP as a desperate and last ditch attempt to counter the powerful social justice plank vigorously espoused by Shri Rahul Gandhi. One of the constitutional obligations of any government in India is to make concerted efforts to ensure social justice by providing equal opportunities to all sections of the society. When Shri Rahul Gandhi realized that a vast majority of castes and groups in India are being deprived of educational and employment opportunities and the major chunk of jobs and businesses are cornered by a privileged few, he vowed to work untiringly to provide justice, dignity and equality of opportunities to the backwards, the Dalits, the tribals, the kisans, the labourers, the poor and other backward classes in the society.

Shri Rahul Gandhi has understood that the affirmative action taken by successive governments in the past to ensure social justice have not achieved the desired goals. Hence much more needs to be done now. The first step in this direction is to undertake caste based census, which will reveal the social and economic woes of an overwhelmingly major chunk of the people placed at a disadvantageous positions. Further, Shri Rahul Gandhi is also fighting to increase the ceiling of 50% in reservations in jobs and educational institutions. In addition to this, he has been relentlessly fighting to ensure an equitable distribution of the country’s wealth and resources among all sections of society.

That the push being given by Shri Rahul Gandhi to the Caste Census and social justice is precisely in line with the provisions of the Fundamental right of equality enunciated in Article 14 of the Constitution, wherein it is explicitly stated that the equals should be treated equally, and the unequals must be treated unequally. The Article 14 of the Constitution of India allows for reasonable classification of the people. The doctrine of reasonable classification is a legal principle that ensures fair and just treatment by allowing for the grouping of people of unequal status based on intelligible differentia. Hence the Constitution gives the right to all those, who are socially backwards and unequal to the privileged sections of the society, to get preferential treatment by way of affirmative action in their favour.

Needless to say, that all this is an anathema to the BJP, which wants to create a small but all the powerful section of ‘the privileged’ on the lines of ‘Manu smriti’ to the exclusion of an overwhelming majority of ordinary, downtrodden and under-privileged people of the country. The saffron party thrives on creating an unequal and elitist society where only a few rich cronies have access to the resources of the country and a vast multitude is forced to survive at the mercy of those in power. This is the seminal philosophy of the BJP and the RSS, which is evident from the direction the BJP governments have taken in last 10 years.

Fortunately, the people are now beginning to understand the egalitarian and anti-elitist ideas of Shri Rahul Gandhi as against the pro-rich and authoritarian approach of the BJP. The Congress Party’s vociferous campaign in support of under-privileged sections of the society has already been catching the imagination of the people. This is giving sleepless nights to the leadership of the BJP. In order to wriggle out of this conundrum, a desperate BJP is forced to adopt a vitriolic communal line, aimed at instilling a false sense of fear among the majority community. The BJP has attempted to create fratricidal divisions in the country in the misplaced hope that if it succeeds in its unholy plan, the majority community may rally behind them. To achieve this wicked objective, the party has come out with an anti-national and anti-constitution slogan like “Batenge to katenge”. It is indeed sad that the BJP is simply not bothered about the irrevocable damage such an approach would cause to the polity.

However, it is heartening to note that every reasonable person in the country is able to see through the dangerous game that the BJP is playing to garner a few votes. The voters also seem to understand that such anti-national slogans promoted by the top leadership of the BJP have the potential to harm the unity and integrity of the country and compromise the country’s status as a thriving democracy, besides causing deep fissures in the delicate social fabric. As a result, the right thinking people, who love and respect the democratic, secular and socialist India and ‘Rule of Law’ are worried about the noxious communal poison, which the BJP is spreading in the country, just for parochial political gains. Therefore, it is imperative and desirable that in all future elections, the prudent voters vote to safeguard the Constitution in order to uphold its ideals of equality, social and economic justice, Rule of Law, democracy and liberty besides its ethos of ‘Unity in Diversity’.

The author is a Chief spokesperson, Chandigarh Pradesh Congress Committee.