With the election season at its peak, the BJP has decided to use its tools to create propaganda in a no-holds-barred manner.
How big a part will disinformation play in the 2024 election campaign? The question has been asked by so many people on so many platforms. As the big fat Indian election season reaches its climax, the answer is quite clear. At the moment, the BJP’s Lok Sabha 2024 election campaign stands firmly on falsehoods, disinformation and communal hate. These are tools with which the party has always sought to create propaganda in its favour – it is the raison d’etre of the IT cell and Amit Malviya – but with the election season at its peak, the BJP has decided to use them in a no-holds-barred manner.
Modi leading the way
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Banswara speech on April 21 — in which he served his audience a cocktail of disinformation and communal hate – was just one example. His denigrating reference to Muslims as ‘infiltrators’ and ‘those who produce more children’ out to take away the wealth of the Hindus drew sharp reactions from the Opposition and the international media while Right Wing trolls like OpIndia editor Nupur J. Sharma celebrated it. And then he claimed that the Congress manifesto had said the gold owned by women, particularly their mangalsutra, would be taken away and given to Muslims. Alt News has already shown that the manifesto does not say anything remotely similar to this, by any stretch of the imagination.
Other than deepening communal polarisation, what Modi’s speech was also able to achieve was to steer the entire political discourse, bang in the middle of the elections, to what he saw as a Congress-Muslim nexus to harm Hindus. Every top BJP leader has repeated the trope since. And this villainisation of Muslims – their projection as a devil out to devour the jobs and wealth of Hindus – fits well within the RSS-BJP’s larger communal agenda of ‘Hindu khatre mein hai’ (Hindus are in danger in this country).
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
