UNITED ABROAD, DIVIDED AT HOME

How does one then make sense of a political milieu which is stoutly batting for India on foreign soil but throws bouncers at each other at home with no cohesion or decorum?

- Rajdeep Sardesai

I has taken a horrific terror attack and an 87-hour military operation against Pakistan for India’s right wing army to confer a certificate of ‘nationalism’ to AIM-IM chief Asaduddin Owaisi.

For years, Owaisi’s strident politics was demonised by the BJP as representing ‘anti-national’ sentiment. Wearing his distinct religious identity on his sherwani made him an ‘enemy’ figure for those whose politics revolves around ‘othering’ the Indian Muslim. Today, the same Owaisi is being feted as a ‘patriot’ for aggressively espousing India’s case on Pak-based terrorism in global fora. The articulate Hyderabad MP's politics haven’t changed: he has on several previous occasions also taken on Pakistan and the ‘two nation’ theory, only his over-sized image as a staunch Indian Muslim opponent of the BJP meant that he is easily typecast as an advocate of narrow Muslim interests and little else. This is no image makeover, only areflection of a post Pahalgam political environment which remains divisive and hyper-partisan at home but united and consensual abroad.

Take also Home Minister Amit Shah's recent remarks in Bengal where he accused the Mamata Banerjee government of ‘vote bank politics’ over Operation Sindoor. The TMC, like most Opposition parties, has been mostly supportive of the Modi government on the ‘war’ with Pakistan. While Shah was addressing BJP workers in Kolkata, TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee was spewing fire against Pakistan’s army state as part of an all-party delegation in East Asia. And yet, with elections in Bengal less than a year away, Shah’s rabble rousing speech was designed to sound the election bugle.