We are on the threshold of an exercise that will see 824 MLAs chosen by 17.4 crore people come to power by early May. It is, in fact, the largest assembly polls cycle in our state electoral system and encompasses four states and one Union territory. If you see the union of Indian states like a giant jigsaw puzzle, this region – Peninsular India Looking East – could be seen as defining, in and of itself, the essential unity of the country. Yet every election in each of these states is leaving the country more fractured and acrimonious.

Kerala, which has, perhaps more than any other state, demonstrated the ability of the votaries of its three main faiths – Hindus, Muslims and Christians representing 54.73%, 26.56%, and 18.38% of the population respectively (2011 census figures) – to live in harmony over centuries, now has a candidate of the Guruvayur assembly constituency arguing publicly that the “soil of Hindus should be regained”.

About 3,500 kilometres away, in the state of Assam, a chief minister borrows a symbol of communal hatred, the bulldozer, from his Uttar Pradesh counterpart. He vows publicly that he will evict every “Bangladeshi encroacher” from Assam by bulldozing their abodes. In recognition of his intent, his party workers decided to give him a “bulldozer salute” during his Jan Ashirwad Yatra in early March. What the bulldozer signifies is not lost even on a child. Just the other day, a cherub, perhaps all of four, handed over a toy bulldozer to the UP Chief Minister Adityanath, and received a beaming smile from him. Adityanath may have been the original ‘Bulldozer Baba’, but today there are many chief ministers who could lay equal claim to that title, and Assam’s Himanta Biswas Sarma is emphatically one of them. The Assam election which will take place on April 9, has only sharpened his appetite to bring bulldozer perdition on those he terms as “infiltrators”, while across the state border in West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, Leader of the Opposition, keeps harping that Hinduism is in danger in the state in all his election speeches.

Even Tamil Nadu (poll day, April 23) proud of its Dravida and atheistic legacies, has seen the move to light the Karthigai Deepam on a stone pillar which rises from the Thiruparankundram Hill near Madurai. Its political significance is that it is conveniently situated near the Sikandar Badusha Dargah. Through rulings of the Madurai bench of the Madras high court, the lighting of this lamp was allowed to take place in January just ahead of this important state election, giving those behind the move a chance to claim a “great victory for Hindus”.

Meanwhile in West Bengal, which will go to the polls in two phases on April 23 and 29, the pressure to disenfranchise people, largely Muslims, labelled as “Bangladeshi infiltrators” has taken on a dynamic of its own through the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. This unprecedented “cleansing” exercise has seen 61.7 lakh names removed from the rolls. The outrage among large sections of the population that have had their names deleted in this way has grown to such levels that protestors have taken to blocking highways leading to traffic jams several kilometres long. The related incident of seven judicial officers being held without food or water for more than nine hours at a government office in the Mothabari BDO office, Malda district, was driven by the same outrage. As a Wire piece noted, the “Mothabari unrest is now being seen not only as an administrative flashpoint, but as an expression of a wider crisis of trust in the state’s ability to protect both minority rights and electoral fairness” (‘How Political Betrayal Played a Role in the Siege of Judicial Officers in Bengal’, April 3). 

Each one of the communal flashpoints listed here emerge out of the BJP-Sangh Parivar’s appetite to capture the country electorally and ideologically and they have been given a........

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