Why is BJP silencing Kangana for echoing the party’s thoughts?

Even by the notoriously transient nature of political honeymoons, the camaraderie between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Kangana Ranaut has been remarkably short-lived.Barely months after parachuting her into Parliament over the heads of more senior and serious contenders, the BJP has dispatched its celebrity MP from Mandi (Himachal Pradesh) to the doghouse for her comments about the recent farmers’ agitation, which she alleged was part of a plot to destabilise the Narendra Modi government.The manner of her unceremonious fall has attracted a lot of comment.The BJP was not only notably quick to disown her remarks but in a rare move it issued her a very public reprimand, advising her to desist from speaking out of turn in future.In an unusually strongly-worded statement, the party said she was not authorised to speak on its behalf and “she has been directed to not make such remarks in future”.Strong words from a party that has allowed its members to get away with worse, including inciting hate against certain communities.Even as I write this, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is facing criticism for his divisive remarks against Muslims. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/ljNOUV25lMY?si=UcApD4hT9UYZa2nxCompared with his anti-Muslim rant, Ranaut’s remarks were pretty run-of-the-mill stuff.“It is rare for it (BJP) to issue an official statement in such situations. At the most, it verbally disowns controversial remarks by its members,” said one commenter.In fact, much of her statement was broadly consistent with the BJP’s own line that the farmers’ agitation was propelled by forces inimical to the Modi government.Remember dark references to George Soros, the Hungarian-American businessman, who was accused of using his Open Society Foundations to interfere in India’s internal affairs?And the talk of how Opposition parties were conspiring with shadowy foreign elements to use the agitation to destabilise the government?So, now let’s see what Ranaut said.In a clip she posted on social media from her interview with Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, she suggested that a “Bangladesh-like situation” could have erupted in India because of the farmers’ protests, but the situation was saved thanks to the country’s strong leadership.She alleged the involvement of China and the US in the “conspiracy”. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/SwaG7eVTl-k?si=y2iB-zxly5d4sjqBShe then claimed that bodies were hung from trees and rapes took place during the protests.Except the last bit, the rest of her conspiratorial claims were straight from the BJP’s own script.There’s a long Wikipedia entry on which BJP leader said what about the protests at the time.It starts with recalling that the “protests were often criticised by the Indian government to be a foreign conspiracy”.“In a statement to the Supreme Court, the government stated that the protests have been infiltrated by Khalistanis,” it said.This is what Piyush Goyal, the then food and consumer affairs minister, told TOI: “Going by the demand for release of so-called poets and intellectuals, who are facing serious charges, as well as reports in media, including your own, it is evident that Leftist and Maoist elements have infiltrated the movement. Media reports also suggest that some leaders over there have such a history. Probably, they are hell-bent on disrupting this movement and creating chaos.”Other party leaders joined the chorus of how the protests had been “hijacked” by all sorts of unsavoury anti-India lobbies — from the so-called “tukde-tukde” gang to “terrorists” and “urban Naxals” as Delhi BJP MP Manoj Tiwari described the faceless plotters.Several Union ministers at the time, including Ravi Shankar Prasad and Narendra Singh Tomar, chipped in with allegations of an international conspiracy to defame the Modi government.The whole conspiracy thing got so bizarre that a BJP leader from Rajasthan, Madan Dilawar, claimed that the protesting farmers were “conspiring” to spread avian flu by “eating chicken biryani and cashewnuts/almonds”.Calling them “thieves and looters” in a video, he said: “They are merely relishing biryani. They are eating kaju-badam (dry fruits). They are enjoying in all ways. They are changing their appearances frequently. There could be many terrorists among them. Thieves and looters, too. They could be the enemies of farmers.”“I suspect that if the government does not remove them in the next few days, either by pleading or by use of force, then the country will face the problem of bird flu,” he said following reports of some cases of avian flu.A video posted by BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya was flagged by X (formerly Twitter) as “manipulated media”, placing a warning below the video that the content shared by Malviya was “deceptively altered or fabricated” with the intention of misleading people. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/xCuu767Cug8?si=hxWX_weagkcPKaglIt related to his claim that an elderly farmer had not been attacked by the police as alleged by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.The question is what did Ranaut say that crossed the party’s red line, if there was ever one, and so upset its leadership?The fact is that, on the face of it, she appeared to be merely repeating the party line. Almost verbatim.Ranaut’s mistake, it seems, was that she appeared not to have noticed that the party had changed its own stance ahead of the assembly election in Haryana.The realpolitik behind the BJP’s change of heart is that the Jat-dominated farmimg community in the state constitutes a critical vote bank that it can’t afford to alienate.BJP leaders from Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh were reportedly furious about Ranaut’s statement and conveyed their concerns to party president JP Nadda.By the way, I’m no fan of the Bollywood star. She is an attention-seeker given to making provocative statements and unsubstantiated accusations against her critics, particularly targeting the liberal class.Which was what perhaps endeared her to the BJP in the first place. She became effectively its unofficial spokesperson with her polarising tweets to her nearly 3mn followers, including reportedly Prime Minister Modi.Twitter suspended Ranaut’s account in May 2021 for “repeated violations” of its code on “hateful conduct and abusive behaviour” which could lead to offline harm. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/afMnakUQsFc?si=rF5Dj0nMoBgfmMFZIt was restored two years later.The suspension followed a tweet in which she urged Modi to “tame” West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, calling her an “unleashed monster” after the BJP accused the Trinamool Congress of instigating attacks against its members.“We need super gundai (hooliganism) to kill gundai… Modi ji please show your Virat roop (larger-than-life form) from the early 2000s,” she tweeted in what some interpreted as an apparent reference to the 2002 Gujarat riots that took place when he was the chief minister.At the time, of course, the BJP defended her.The BJP’s problem is that in recent years, it has acquired too many loose cannons and over-promoted them, to boot, because they came handy when it came to roasting the Opposition.But the trouble with loose cannons is that you can never tell when they might boomerang on their own bosses as Ranaut has just shown.Read more from the author here.