God as currency a strategy fraught with risk

God as currency a strategy fraught with risk

AAP may think divinity on rupee notes is a clever move to outsmart the BJP — but it's also too clever by half.

At first look, and some would aver, at second look too, Arvind Kejriwal’s latest intervention invokes the theatre of the absurd. The Delhi chief minister and AAP chief has, in a letter, requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to include pictures of Hindu gods, Lakshmi and Ganesh, on currency notes, for the sake of the nation’s economic prosperity. In his leap of faith in favour of divine intervention, Kejriwal looks like an actor who is letting his performance become his caricature. After all, the AAP’s meteoric rise in successive elections in Delhi and more recently in Punjab has been on the back of its promise of change from a discredited status quo. It has loudly projected itself as a political alternative, a harbinger of change. But here it is now, wearing its religiosity on its sleeve like the BJP, speaking lines that might have been written by the BJP too. And yet, look again at the AAP’s recent moves and you might also see an actor struggling to carve out space for itself on a narrowing stage. At a time when the dominant player has successfully set a trap for its Opposition — you are with “Hindus” or against them — Kejriwal’s party is trying to weave its way around and up, without falling into it.

The BJP is not just winning successive elections at the Centre and in the states, its dominance also appears to draw upon and to confirm a shift of the centre of political gravity. The party’s multi-pronged political pitch includes an assertion — that it alone is the voice of Hindutva. Many of the AAP’s manoeuvres — from Kejriwal reciting the Hanuman Chalisa to his government’s subsidy to pilgrims in Delhi, to his party’s promise to sponsor free trips to Ayodhya in Gujarat — are attempts to challenge the BJP’s monopoly on this count. That is, the AAP seems to be reclaiming religion, or at least challenging the BJP’s sole proprietorship of it. It is doing so to win, of course. But in its best version, also to reconstitute public religiosity in ways that blunt the anti-minority edge lent to it by the BJP. This attempt enlivens an Opposition space that has seemed to be subdued and sagging under the weight of complacency and entitlement, and a lack of imagination in times of BJP dominance.

But the AAP’s strategy, even in its best version, is fraught with risks. One, given that the space on a party’s manifesto is not unlimited, its moves on religion and nationalism could crowd out other initiatives that have underscored its success so far — its perceived diligence on bijli-paani-padhai issues, and attention to health care. Two, invoking faith is a slippery slope — there is always a danger of backsliding. And finally, as much as the AAP’s moves enliven the non-BJP space, they also speak of a depletion of its possibilities — the dwindling of a challenge to the BJP that does not adopt the BJP’s idiom, one that finds a political language of its own.