On the heels of the Budget session of the Karnataka Legislature ending on a raucous note, an IED blast at the Rameshwaram Cafe in Bengaluru’s IT hub has set off a predictable narrative ahead of Lok Sabha elections.
During the Budget session, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alleged that supporters of the Congress’s Rajya Sabha winner Syed Naseer Hussain raised “Pakistan Zindabad” slogans in the corridors of the State Secretariat. On Monday three people were arrested in connection with the case. BJP State party president B.Y. Vijayendra described the blast in the cafe as an “extension” of the incident involving the alleged slogans and blamed the “my brother” policy of the Congress government for both. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister and BJP contestant from Thiruvananthapuram, also said that both were a result of the “appeasement politics” of the Congress. Even as the investigating agencies are yet to make a significant breakthrough in either of the cases — with the forensic science laboratory report on the audio clip awaited in the first and no arrests made yet in the second — there has been political cacophony.
The Opposition has also been talking about the “failure” of the Congress government’s guarantee schemes and mounting allegations of corruption. But the two recent episodes and the manner in which the BJP has seized these opportunities to target the ruling party is an indication of the tenor of its Lok Sabha campaign. Its leaders’ statements are in the party’s comfort zone of Hindutva politics, which is in tune with what is perceived to be the national mood after the inauguration of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. The two incidents have succeeded in putting the Congress on the defensive, yet again compelling it to bend backwards to “prove” that it is not “anti-Hindu.” Effectively countering this narrative and bringing the discussion back to what it was hoping for in the run up to the elections is a challenge for the Congress.
