As much can be discerned from railway minister Piyush Goyal’s assertion that the economy is on the path of a “robust” recovery and the clean chit given by the BJP’s national general secretary (organization), B.L. Santhosh, to U.P. chief minister Yogi Adityanath for what the party’s vice-president, Radha Mohan Singh, described as an “unparalleled” handling of the pandemic in the state.

The waning of the pandemic’s second wave has also been hailed by Union home minister Amit Shah as Narendra Modi’s achievement just as the petering out of the first wave saw a declaration of victory by the prime minister and the party.

Arguably, the BJP is counting on the short memory of the people about their agony when the second wave was at its peak and is expecting them to vote for the party during next year’s elections in U.P., Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Goa and Gujarat.

Apart from the hope that hoi polloi will forget what happened and forgive the BJP for its lapses during the medical emergency, the party will undoubtedly have other cards up its sleeve for display when the time is ripe In order to boost its position. One of them is harassing Mamata Banerjee. Having been unable to digest its defeat in the assembly elections, the BJP is now bent on creating various problems for her, both administrative and political.

Apart from targeting the former chief secretary, who is now her chief adviser, the BJP has organized a letter from notables aligned with the party to complain about the post-poll violence in the state. The RSS, too, is peddling the same line. The saffron brotherhood’s attempts to show the West Bengal chief minister in a poor light is intended to undermine her at a time when she is emerging as an alternative to Modi in 2024 because of her electoral triumph and because Rahul Gandhi remains cooped up in his Tughlaq Lane residence and appears unwilling to enter the battlefield.

As the nation watches the Modi vs Mamata vaudeville, the BJP has flourished another card – this one with communal overtones. It has now targeted another Muslim-majority Union territory after Kashmir. By banning beef and enacting the Goonda Act in a region which has the lowest crime rate in the country, the BJP has shown the minorities in the two Union territories and in the rest of the country that Hindu rashtra is coming.

As many as 93 bureaucrats have complained about the “disturbing developments” in the archipelago. But for the BJP, these are like water off a duck’s back just as similar protests by reputed national and international academics about the central vista project have been ignored by the BJP and the government.

The Hindu rashtra’s advancement can also be seen in the directives sent out to several district collectors to locate the non-Muslim refugees from the three neighbouring Muslim countries who are living in India and give them the citizenship rights under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) even if the rules for the law are yet to be framed.

As is known, the minorities are deeply upset by the CAA and its twin, the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), which, they believe, will raise doubts about their citizenship rights and pave the way for disenfranchisement. This is why they organized prolonged sit-ins in New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh area and in some other towns to voice their grievances till the pandemic forced them to disperse.

Yet another card in the BJP’s hands relates to the raising of the East India Company bogey which the party did when the economy first opened up after 1991 and foreign brands began to open their shops. The fear which the saffron apparatchiki expressed then was that McDonalds will oust Nathus. Now, similar apprehensions are being expressed about Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets on the grounds that they will influence public opinion. Hence, the new Information Technology rules to rein them in.

It is obvious, then, that the BJP has no dearth of issues which it can raise to divert attention from its failures on the Covid front and the party’s electoral drubbing in three of the four states – West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu – which went to the polls. Even in the fourth, Assam, there was only a two per cent difference in the vote share between the BJP-Asom Gana Parishad combine (39.7 per cent) and the Congress-United Democratic Front duo (36.9 per cent).

However, the BJP’s biggest advantage is the opposition’s lethargy as it remains mired either in its own internal squabbles (Amrinder Singh vs Navjot Singh Sidhu, Ashok Gehlot vs Sachin Pilot) or in the presence in its ranks of suspected saffron moles like Mayawati. Because of these deficiencies, the opposition is unable to move ahead decisively even when the BJP is in serious trouble. (IPA Service)