PM stirs beef pot first, then serves Pranab's recipe

Sankarshan Thakur, TT, Patna, Oct. 8: RJD boss Lalu Prasad's beef gaffe has become a hatchet for the BJP and a headache for the Mahagathbandhan. Posterity may well remember 2015 as Bihar's beef election.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in the province for yet another string of poll rallies today, quite open to using cow slaughter and consumption as campaign fodder.

"Lalu Yadav kehte hain unke andar shaitaan ghus gaya hai, Lalu ne Yaduvanshiyon ka apmaan kiya hai, pata nahin kya khate hain, kya nahin (Lalu says Satan has entered him, he is insulting Yadavs, I don't know what he eats and what not)."

He made passing references to Hindu-Muslim unity, quoting President Pranab Mukherjee for "leading the way on harmony".

"Development is the key," Modi told poll rallies in eastern and southern Bihar. "I had said this at my rally in Patna in October 2013, please remember, I said do Hindus and Muslims want to live in peace and move forward or do they want to fall upon each other? Development is the way ahead, there should be no encouragement to communal disharmony anywhere."

But having eloquently used the beef controversy to berate Lalu, the Prime Minister fell silent on the origin of what has become a spiralling fracas - the murder on September 28 of Mohammed Akhlaque Saifi by a mob in a village near Dadri for allegedly consuming a meal of beef. Not a word of condemnation for the lynch mob, not a word of succour for Akhlaque's shattered family.

Modi didn't utter the "B" word but the import of what he said was hard to miss. In the front rows of his Munger gathering, young BJP supports were swift to translate the Prime Minister's message and cry out shrill chants against cow slaughter and beef eaters. Those slogans don't bear repetition here.

And if the Prime Minister was tangential to bring up beef on his campaign trail, his senior Bihar colleagues have been quite unabashedly frontal.

Bihar BJP spearhead and would-be chief minister Sushil Modi tweeted a few days ago a warning that if re-elected, Nitish Kumar will "open slaughterhouses" in every Bihar district.

Sushil Modi, in fact, fell headlong in his enthusiasm to grab beef as a meaty campaign ploy --- he proceeded to promise that if elected, the NDA would ban cow slaughter in Bihar.

Slaughter of a range of cattle --- cow, calf, bull, bullock, she-buffalo --- stands banned in the state since 1955 by the Bihar Preservation and Improvement of Animals Act.

The Union minister and BJP MP from Nawada, Giriraj Singh, has matched his senior Bihari colleague's alacrity on strewing social media with the beef invective against Lalu and Nitish Kumar.

"Nitish is with gaumaas (beef) and jungle raj," Singh first said and followed it up with a punchier allegation: "Lalu says throw meat in Durga mandir."

Singh, who blistered the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign saying all those opposed to Narendra Modi should head to Pakistan, has also littered his Twitter timeline with "anti-national" jibes at Nitish and Lalu.

Bhupender Yadav, the BJP's Bihar "prabhari", wasn't to be left behind. His tweet of October 7 read: "I haven't seen a Yaduvanshi who eats beef, Laluji has hurt the sentiments of millions."

BJP and Sangh cadres have taken quick cue from their leaders and launched into a multi-pronged campaign on cow slaughter and beef. It ranges from anti-cow slaughter prabhat pheris (morning vigilante marches) through some of Patna's middle-class neighbourhoods to virulent WhatsApp group messaging to alarmist whisper campaigns that have quickly needled their way into rural areas --- "Beware of Lalu, he says Hindus eat beef!"

What impact this may or may not have on the ensuing elections is yet uncertain, but the BJP's effort to leverage it is plain. And that has the Mahagathbandhan leadership in a bind.

Lalu Prasad having to repeatedly clarify and confront the issue is evidence of their concern.

"I am a cow worshipper, who is to deny that?" he said before embarking on his campaign this morning.

"We put cow dung on our foreheads as a mark of respect, has Modi or any BJP leader ever even picked up cow dung with their hands? They are demons trying to use this non-issue to divide people and somehow win this election. I am up to their games, let's see how they succeed."

On the face of it, JDU and RJD leaders are happy to pooh-pooh the tactic as proof of the "mounting desperation" in BJP ranks.

"The BJP's electoral fortunes are visibly sinking in Bihar," JDU spokesperson Pavan Varma told The Telegraph.

"They are trying to clutch at any straw in the wind to revive their flagging campaign. It is exceptionally unfortunate that they have chosen to play politics over beef and communalise this election."

Privately, though, they admit the BJP's beef campaign, now turning unabashedly overt, has gained "some traction".

As yet, they are at a loss on ways to counter or neutralise it. "The tricky thing," as one RJD leader put it, "is that not engaging will mean letting the campaign go unchallenged. On the other hand, the more we engage, the more central beef becomes to the discourse."