Twilight in India

Nothing seems to be going right for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Protests across India have snowballed against the rising intolerance for which Modi is being blamed, rightly or wrongly.
That too when he has not completed 17 months of his 60-month tenure on the hot seat. More importantly, the red lines for Modi are enlarging and multiplying while he and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are in the middle of politically crucial Bihar elections.
Modi is not only being kicked around like a football by the opposition but also being stabbed in the back by his allies.
As though the recent ink attack on former BJP ideologue Sudheendra Kulkarni was not enough, yet another similar attack was perpetrated on Oct.19 by right-wing activists when they blackened the face of independent MLA of Jammu and Kashmir Assembly Sheikh Abdul Rashid in protest against his hosting a beef party in Srinagar.
A few hours before this attack on Rashid, activists of Shiv Sena, a post-poll partner of the BJP and a coalition partner of the BJP in Maharashtra, stormed the office of the Board of Cricket Control in India (BCCI) in Mumbai and aggressively confronted BCCI President Shashank Manohar before his scheduled meeting with Shaharyar Khan, chief of Pakistan’s Cricket Board (PCB). As a result the Mumbai meeting was called off work, only to be rescheduled in New Delhi.
The same Shiv Sena had earlier launched an ink attack on Kulkarni and successfully scuppered a concert by Pakistani ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali in Mumbai. Now Ali will be performing in several Indian cities where the BJP is not in power.
In another bad news for the Modi government, popular Urdu poet Munawwar Rana shocked the entire nation as he returned his Sahitya Academy award along with a check of Rs100,000 (about $1,500) on live national television on Oct.19. He said he returned the award as people on social media were targeting him. He complained that he was being called “durbari,” an allegation that he was close to Congress President Sonia Gandhi and was her courtier.
Yet another bolt from the blue came for the Modi government almost simultaneously when Azam Khan, a high profile politician and a minister in the Samajwadi Party-led government in Uttar Pradesh tore apart the government at a press conference and urged President Pranab Mukherjee to dismiss the Modi government, impose emergency and order new general elections.
The situation in restive Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab was no different. In the former, the state government suddenly found itself tackling a mob incensed over the killing of a trucker on suspicion that he was a beefeater. This triggered a chastising statement from Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Syeed, a coalition partner of the BJP, saying that India’s pluralism was under attack because of increasing cases of intolerance.
In Punjab, the Sikhs’ holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, was desecrated last week, triggering bloody protests and clashes. As a result, the situation in the holy city of Amritsar is tense like it was never before in decades. Punjab is another state where the BJP is in power, though as a junior partner to Shiromani Akali Dal.
All this bodes ill omens for the Modi government. The message going across is that the Modi government has failed to manage law and order in different parts of the country even though law and order is a state subject.
In a large country like India these challenges are normal and inevitable for any central government. The previous Indian government’s too had to deal with this scourge, virtually on a daily basis. But the difference this time, and a vital one, Is that such widespread instances of intolerance have come at a time when Modi and his party are in the middle of politically crucial Bihar elections.
The snowballing instances of intolerance have an inevitable political fallout as events like these threaten to polarize voters in Bihar. Its possible fallout is that it may turn the Bihar polls into a Modi versus the rest kind of situation.
Modi and his BJP had successfully played the card of polarizing the voters at the time of the general election in April-May 2014. But this time Modi may find himself at the wrong end of the stick in Bihar.
This is the most important political fallout of the present wave of intolerance in India.