BackWill Shaheen Bagh sway Delhi’s ballot?
The campaign rhetoric has been shrillThe protest has attracted attention enough to serve as a template for similar agitations across country
PremiumCould Shaheen Bagh determine the outcome of Delhi’s assembly polls due this Saturday? The state’s ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has 67 of the 70 seats in the House and has tried to tom-tom its local achievements, is up against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which seems determined to sway voters on issues of nationalism. The campaign rhetoric has been shrill, even ugly, and the overall noise levels may suggest it’s all about… well, a little park that’s now famous as a protest hotspot.
Shaheen Bagh, or “the falcon garden", has played host to a sit-in by women outraged by what they see as a new citizenship policy that could potentially leave Muslims in India hard pressed to prove they’re not illegal aliens, on pain of either being deported or locked up. The government has sought to allay such fears, but their protest has attracted attention enough to serve as a template for similar agitations across the country.
Given the religious overtones of Indian politics, it was bound to become a campaign issue. While BJP leaders have been trying to discredit the Shaheen Bagh movement, alleging that it’s sponsored by forces bent on breaking up the country, AAP has hedged its bets by saying that citizens have the right to protest peacefully and also expressing exasperation with the civic inconvenience of traffic held up by it. For the BJP, its incessant reference to the Bagh seem like part of a strategy to rally the city’s—or country’s—Hindu majority behind it in casting the protesters as a dangerous “other". Will it work at the hustings? Dipstick opinions suggest not. Or not enough, at least, to rout AAP. Matters of local governance still hold appeal.
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