Brahmin and Brahmin vote bank is the flavour of the season. Opposition political parties in Uttar Pradesh, ahead of next year’s assembly elections have collectively started to serenade Hindus and especially Brahmins. However, their habits and modus operandi to garner the votes remain eerily similar to their abhorrent style of Muslim appeasement. Meaning, they are asking for votes by victimizing the Brahmin community and singling out the Brahmin outlaws as the ones being unfairly targeted by the Yogi Adityanth administration. Unfortunately for them, Brahmin voters do not have a high tendency towards being sympathetic towards criminals from the same community, and unlike the Muslim vote bank, they disown criminals such as Vikas Dubey instead of appearing at their funeral processions.
As reported by TFI, BSP last week started a Brahmin conference in the holy city of Ayodhya, aimed at bringing the Brahmin community into the fold. Mayawati’s Brahmin outreach program was led by party general secretary and Brahmin face Satish Chandra Mishra who paid obeisance at the makeshift shrine of Ram Lalla in the temple city before kickstarting the “Sammelan’. But the Sammelan is a failed approach. Mere photo-ops will not entice Brahmin voters.
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Ever since the Ram Mandir construction started, parties like BSP that used to treat Hindu votes like an afterthought are making themselves appear as the biggest Ram Bhakt.
However, more peculiarly, the opposition is now evoking Vikas Dubey, the notorious ‘Brahmin’ gangster as the unfair victim of Yogi’s onslaught on the criminals. Recently, BSP’s Brahmin face and senior lawyer, Satish Mishra took up the legal battle to secure bail for the 17-year-old widow of slain Brahmin gangster Vikas Dubey’s nephew, Amar, who too was shot in an encounter after the Bikru massacre.
It is an interesting development because Satish Mishra or BSP did not think of aiding Khushi the past year. However, with elections approaching and BSP battling for survival by gambling on the Brahmin vote bank, it makes sense, at least according to the BSP think tank to help the kin of the Brahmin gangster.
It is a usual trope in minority appeasement that criminals are provided with a deep sob story to create a false sense of victimhood which is later connected to the religious identity. And in most cases, the Muslims and other minority communities chug down this trope in overwhelming quantities but that, unfortunately, isn’t the case with Hindus as BSP likes to believe.
If we rewind the clock, when Hizbul terrorist Riyaz Naikoo was slaughtered by the security forces, we would remember how the entire left-liberal ecosystem was sympathising with Naikoo. India’s mainstream media outlets and terror romanticists couldn’t stop making a benign mathematics teacher out of a brutal terrorist. The same thing happened when another Hizbul Commander, Burhan Wani was killed in 2016. Even then the elitist intelligentsia suffered from definitional issues.
However, Vikas Dubey was a notorious gangster charged in sixty criminal cases including serious offences like murder, kidnapping, extortion and rioting. He murdered eight officers in a shootout in cold blood. While he was arrested and later killed in the encounter, one did not see a single Hindu invoking his caste, that is, Brahmin identity and presenting him as a victim. In fact, the Hindus batted on the front and cheered for the Yogi administration for its swift justice process.
While BSP is trying to present Dubey as a victim in the backdrop of the Brahmin sammelan, SP supremo Akhilesh Yadav had last year started playing the same tune. The former CM unashamedly called Dubey an innocent man, “Kya nirdosh aadmi ko marna, custodial death ho jana, ye kanoon vyavasta kahenge aap (is killing an innocent man in custody a sign of proper law and order?)”
While Akhilesh is sorting the mess in his family and is comparatively less active in the state politics, one can be assured that he will pick up from where he left and that is, using the Brahmin identity of Dubey to entice gullible Brahmins to his corner.
Read More: Gangster Vikas Dubey is an upper-caste Hindu, but no law-abiding Hindu cried foul over his arrest
Similarly, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is trying to find its footing in UP has tried to milk the issue as well. Party’s UP in-charge, Sanjay Singh, last month chaperoned jailed Khushi Dubey’s mother before newsmen in a press conference in Lucknow and demanded that Khushi and three other women and a minor child languishing in jail be set free.
Left-liberal publications like The Print had last year published op-eds with the headline, “Vikas Dubey’s death is the perfect launchpad for Akhilesh Yadav to mount 2022 UP race” to give a blueprint to the opposition on how to attack Yogi. A year late but the opposition has started its campaign and it is trying to tap into the persecution complex of Brahmins under the Yogi government, but the truth is, that such a complex does not exist.