The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has chosen to combat the political fallout of the disqualification of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi from the membership of the Lok Sabha by projecting Gandhi’s comments, which were grounds for his defamation case, as an insult to the Other Backwards Community (OBC). The party fielded several key leaders around the day on Friday to highlight the “insult” to the community.
Gandhi had said at an election rally in 2019, “Why are all these thieves called Modi… Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi”. On Friday, hours before Gandhi’s disqualification notice was sent out by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, party president JP Nadda sent out a series of tweets saying that Gandhi has insulted the OBC community for political gains and that the OBCs will democratically take revenge for this insult.
“He called the OBCs a community of thieves, and also ignored the repeated options accorded by the court and the community of apologising, thereby hurting the sentiments of the OBC community,” Nadda tweeted.
The party also fielded union ministers Bhupendra Yadav, Dharmendra Pradhan and Anurag Thakur to take on the narrative, while criticising Gandhi. Pradhan and Yadav are both from the OBC community, like prime minister Narendra Modi who belongs to the Teli caste. Yadav said that Rahul Gandhi has continuously insulted the surnames of the OBC community, while Pradhan said at a press conference that Gandhi has used “casteist” words on the community.
Several key leaders said that the OBC community is crucial to the BJP as crucial state elections in Karnataka, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh inch closer, as well as the general elections in 2024. By bringing the narrative back to the OBCs, which the party sees as a key vote bank, it is also looking at undoing the damage done during the Ramcharitmanas controversy in Uttar Pradesh.
In UP, senior Samajwadi Party leader Swami Prasad Maurya started a campaign highlighting some remarks in the Hindu epic ‘Ramcharitmanas’ which had casteist implications. SP president Akhilesh Yadav asked UP CM Yogi Adityanath if he considered Yadav a “shudra” and the SP found support from several SC and OBC outfits. By standing by the OBC community, the BJP is gambling on steering the conversation back from the Hindutva-vs-Mandal space.
In addition to that, a presidential style wrestle where Modi is pitted against Gandhi suits the saffron party, said leaders. “The Congress will not be able to galvanise this and the Opposition will not stick together. There have been antecedents in the Lalu Prasad Yadav case, in the Azam Khan case, and most recently in the Mohammed Faizal case, and it did not change anything,” the chief of one of the party’s key departments said.
After AIADMK’s Jayalalita and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav were convicted in cases, a sympathy wave could not help them back to their feet, the leader added.
While the party does not have immediate plans of a countrywide campaign, smaller campaigns by state units is on the anvil. On Thursday, Maharashtra BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule said that the party will carry out statewide protests for the insult to the community.