Is Rahul Gandhi being an alarmist when he warns that a third term for the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi will see fires raging in the country, that it will be a real catastrophe for India? Is he indulging in ‘unwarranted spectre-peddling’, as a section of big media would have you believe, when he expresses his fear that if the BJP wins this election, it will change the Constitution, which will tear the country apart?

It must have taken great courage for these media players to even cover the rally of the INDIA bloc parties at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi, where Rahul Gandhi made this inflammatory reference. To quell the conditioned reflex of keeping the focus on Modi and blocking out the Opposition couldn’t have been easy. But Rahul Gandhi’s ‘apocalyptic’ warning was too much for the commentariat that likes to take a ‘measured’ and ‘balanced’ view of everything.

In a house ravaged by fire, they’d like to assure us that the heavens are not falling, the roof and walls are still intact, and there is no need to panic. So, when Rahul Gandhi presses the panic button, they run him down: after all, it doesn’t behoove a senior leader like him to indulge in such scaremongering.

“Poore desh mein aag lagne jaa rahi hai (fires will rage in the country),” he said. Hyperbole, you think? Or justifiably strong words, unpalatable to our delicate bellies that have got used to a diet of ‘balanced’ words? I felt like telling him that the fire is raging already, though sadly a large section of India is not yet feeling the heat.

We don’t want to admit that many of us feel safe from this fire, the fire of hatred and violence directed at the Muslims of this country. If you got close and looked inside the hearts of Muslims, you’d see what this fire is doing to their spirit. Many of us don’t see it, perhaps because........

© National Herald