Mainstream WeeklySri Ram College of Commerce is one of the most prestigious colleges of Commerce and Economics in India and no less in the Delhi University campus. Now they call it North campus. But in our times that was the only university campus. Late Arun Jaitley, one time Delhi University students’ union president, and ABVP leader, also a solid pillar of support to Prime Minister Narendra Modi till he lived, an alumnus of this college, chose his alma mater to introduce the BJP’s prospective PM candidate to the elite youth of Delhi in 2013.
Those supposed bright and aware crème de la crème of economics and commerce studies, cheered and clapped wildly when Modi bragged that “the tea you drink every morning, the milk comes from my Gujarat”. Modi either suffered from ignorance or lied. I have studied in Aligarh Muslim University for 5 years and ever so often we travelled from Aligarh to Delhi in the overnight Doodhiya (milk) Passenger train which reached Delhi in the wee hours before dawn. Soon after Khurja milk farmers and vendors from several small villages on the way including Dadri, Dankaur and Maripat abandoning their bicycles by the side of the railway track, would load those huge milk cans within minutes. Before Ghaziabad the entire Doddhiya was full of those huge milk cans. Similar trains and other vans transported milk from Rohtak and nearby Haryana villages arrived in Delhi before every dawn as well. And this was before the Mother Dairy came up. As growing children we drank full cream buffalo milk from the Delhi Milk Scheme (DMS) bottles.
The point I am making much before Amul came up through the painstaking efforts of Dr Verghese Kurien, there was so much milk supply in Delhi from its suburbs and still is that there never was nor is any need for Mr Modi to carry his can of milk to provide us a cup of tea. Like always he fibbed. But be it 2013 and even after his 12 years rule in 2026, there is a certain class of students fed on anti- reservation rhetoric who for reasons peculiar to them still clap at whatever lies Modi utters.
He also yet again bandied there his new coinage “Dimagi Naxal”, floated on the annual Independence Day speech at Red Fort last month. But he failed to respond to such ‘Dimagi Naxals’ even in 2013—Delhi university students who stood in larger numbers outside SRCC raising anti Modi slogans.
With Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar’s deliberate and wilful striking off crores of poor living in ghettos, be they Muslims, Dalits backwards or any poor vendor or daily wage earner, anywhere in the country from the electoral rolls, to ensure BJP return to power, election after election and the Supreme Court sitting by silently and watching in an act of complicity, it would be no surprise if BJP wins every election in future. But having lost the Lok Sabha polls in 2024, Modi can never regain legitimacy in occupying the Prime Minister’s chair. In that sense Modi’s plight is so much like General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq who pronounced himself the President of Pakistan but was never accepted by the people as a legitimate ruler.
Nor does it reduce Modi’s or his fellow Sanghis’ fear of the growing anger and frustration of the people of India. Such is the aversion to people’s reaction to their illegal and patently unconstitutional act that that Bhogi-dhongi Uttar Pradesh chief minister had to demolish a more than a hundred years old mosque on whose land the collectorate is situated, before dawn by imposing a curfew like situation even preventing the Kairana MP Iqra Hasan to leave her house to reach the spot of UP administration’s arbitrary act of aggression against one more mosque. In fact, the Samajwadi MP was virtually pushed back into her house by the UP Police when she was already sitting in the car to drive down to Saharanpur collectorate, to question the administration’s action. Bhogi-dhongi has only one card up his sleeve he has been playing for more than a decade to retain his chief minister’s chair, to find one excuse or the other to attack Muslims as hard as it hurts and humiliate them in the eyes of his kept Sanghi voter. Even in 2022 he returned to power with very questionable means preventing Muslim women voters of Rampur from reaching the polling booths with a police inspector outside the booth aiming his pistol at them daring them to cross the threshold in full view of the camera and no action was taken against that police officer, presumably because he was efficiently fulfilling the task given to him and other police officers to rig the polls. The world knows that this Ajay Bisht was the choice for the CM post by none other than the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and not Modi or Amit Shah and he is doing everything to consolidate his position in the eyes of the Sanghi leaders.
But Bhagwat goes to New York and tells the diaspora in Madison Square Garden that anyone who harasses Muslims, Christians and other minorities, is no Hindu. Good thing about the Sanghis is they tell lies with a straight face and naturally the best of them leads the Sangh. But here a street loafer calling himself Swatantra Bhardwaj (I am not sure if that is his real name, because Bhardwaj is not a common surname in Bihar, his native state) goes around dealing a murderous assault on the father of a poor Dalit girl participant in the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) dharna at Jantar Mantar in July this year and went around proudly boasting before camera that he enjoyed full patronage and protection of Kapil Mishra, Chirag Paswan and even Narendra Modi showing his photos with these BJP leaders in the government claiming the Police dare not touch him leave alone, act against him. As for the Muslims he says, “I am not threatening, I will do it” (attack Muslims). Will Mohan Bhagwat then excommunicate him from Hindu religion. Will he ban his entry into Hindu temples.
Then what will he do to the Police officers of Saket Police station in South Delhi who dragged away two young Muslim women reporters Shaheen Khan of ‘4 pm News’ channel and Nafeesa Khan a freelance journalist also working for the same channel to the Saket Police station where they were badly assaulted by a women police officer on finding Khan as their surname. They alleged in a press conference hurriedly held by their editor Sanjay Sharma at the Press Club of India soon after.
In the runup to the Bengal assembly elections which is now established beyond any doubt were rigged in connivance and at the instance of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, the BJP candidates were going around campaigning with a fish in their hand or around their neck as a medal, deceiving the Bengalees that they are as much non vegetarian and fish consumers as they come in Bengal. But with the Durga Puja approaching the VHP has issued a diktat to not just not allow any non-vegetarian item in and around the Puja pandal but to close down all meat shops and eating joints serving non veg throughout the nine days of puja. One wonders whether chief minister Suvendu Adhikari or his ministerial and party MLAs and other BJP workers have, as good Sanatani Satvik Hindus, also given up meat and non veg cuisines for ever and ever. That has to be probed.
Ever since we knew, Calcutta was a cosmopolitan city with not just Hindus and Muslims living in amity and eating whatever they chose. Chinese community settled in Calcutta since 1790 lived in China Town. Over the years we have New and Old China Town. The popular Nizam’s joint famous for Kathi rolls are originally from Calcutta where their popularity is for serving Beef Kathi rolls, which any new visitor to Kolkatta goes specially to relish. But the Sanghi goons have started going to Churches to harass and interrupt Sunday masses. Similarly in Bombay another metropolis, the poor pastor is seeking the church goers to give in writing that they attend Sunday mass of their own volition, for Devendra Fadnavis government has put the pastors on a notice falsely charging them with forced conversion. Every BJP chief minister is competing with the other to enforce Uniform Civil Code (UCC). But this UCC is no UCC for there are more exceptions than those under the Uniform Code. For instance, the TRiBALs are exempt and so is the Hindu United Family (HUF). It is only to humiliate Muslims and to make them feel alien in their country. But Bhagwat goes Abroad and tells people no one is under threat in New Sanghi India. What hypocrisy!