However, in a seemingly desperate bid to buttress the BJP’s position, the party can be said to have crossed all limits. Its leaders in Delhi and elsewhere appear to be competing with each other in being vicious. Perhaps the top slot in this race has been taken by the Union minister of state for finance, Anurag Thakur, with his slogan at a Delhi rally in favour of shooting the “traitors”. His exhortation has been followed by several gun-toting chelas (disciples).

But the BJP M.P., Parvesh Verma, ran him close with his prediction that those behind the Shaheen Bagh sit-in of the Muslim women, viz. the Muslim men, will rape and kill Hindus. There are also others, such as the repeat offender, Dilip Ghosh, the West Bengal BJP chief, who has wanted to know why the women in Shaheen Bagh are not dying although they are sitting in the open in temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius. Ghosh had earlier called for shooting the anti-citizenship law protesters like dogs.

Among the others who have spewed venom against the Muslims is Karnataka chief minister, B.S. Yeddyurappa’s political secretary Renukacharya, who has said that no development work will take place in the Muslim localities if they do not vote for the BJP.

What these diatribes bring to the fore yet again is the party’s central anti-Muslim plank. Notwithstanding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas pledge, the concept of development for all and the need to earn everyone’s trust seems to have no meaning for the BJP’s storm-troopers.

They adhere without fail to the task of demonizing the country’s largest minority community with the avowed purpose of consolidating the BJP’s core group of Hindus and inducing fence-sitters to join the ranks of the party faithful.

Although minority-bashing has been a feature of the Sangh Parivar’s propaganda ever since the formation of the RSS 95 years ago, it is noteworthy that there has been no slackening of the campaign of this nature even after the BJP’s electoral successes of the recent past which have seen it win 300-plus Lok Sabha seats .

Success has not induced moderation. Instead, it has intensified the BJP’s and the parivar’s vitriol, presumably because they are now convinced that their cherished Hindu rashtra is within reach.

Even then, what the BJP’s playing of the communal card in Delhi emphasizes is that the party remains nervous about its prospects even after emerging as supposedly the largest party in the world and having at its head a popular prime minister, who easily comes out on top of all the other contenders in opinion polls, and a Union home minister whose earlier stint as the party president saw him build up an energetic organizational structure which has no parallel among the other parties.

Moreover, one of the reasons for the BJP’s gains is the absence of a credible opposition. Yet, although the BJP seemingly has everything going for it, the party appears to lose its nerve when it confronts what it believes is a strong challenger, as in Delhi.

It is possible that the BJP’s apprehensions have grown after the recent electoral setbacks in Haryana, where it failed to get a majority, in Maharashtra where it was outfoxed by the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress combine, and in Jharkhand where it lost.

Understandably, the BJP is jittery in Delhi, for a loss in the Union territory, or a poor show, will be bad for the party’s morale eight or nine months before the Bihar elections. Four successive setbacks will be politically discomforting at a time when the Modi government is facing several serious problems such as the economy, Kashmir and the citizenship issues.

The BJP is also at a loss as to how to deal with the unique problem posed by hundreds of burqa-clad Muslim women taking to the streets in Delhi and elsewhere to protest against the new citizenship law and its auxillaries such as the national register of citizens and the national population register.

Since it is not possible to unleash any heavy-handed measures against women like letting loose masked assailants as in the Jawaharlal Nehru University or giving the police a free hand as in Jamia Millia university, the BJP has had no option but to call the protests an instance of pan-Islamic Khilafat 2.0 like the one in the 1920s in support of the Ottoman Caliphate.

Little wonder, a BJP leader has likened the Delhi elections to an India-Pakistan match. The hope in the party apparently is that enough anti-Muslim sentiments will be generated for it to move ahead of the AAP, which is banking solely on its reasonably successful record of governance. The answer will be available on February 11. (IPA Service)