India’s Bharatiya Janata Party has resorted to foul communal means to win votes by producing a virulently anti-Muslim compact disc. The CD was expressly commissioned for the Uttar Pradesh elections and released with fanfare by its top state leaders Lalji Tandon and Kesri Nath Tripathi four days before the first round of polling.

So obnoxious was the CD that the BJP hastily “withdrew” it. It now pretends it knew nothing about it.

Yet, faced with a First Information Report filed by the Election Commission, party president Rajnath Singh melodramatically courted arrest. The rustic, crude and pugnacious Singh wasn’t solely responsible for this low tactic. The BJP’s “urbane” veterans Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani also colluded.

The BJP’s stand on the CD is egregiously contradictory. Its leadership wants to dissociate itself from it. But on the other hand, it behaves as if it owned the CD and was wrongly punished for it. So the feigning of injured innocence.

Duplicity comes naturally to the BJP and is integral to its politics. After the Babri mosque’s razing, Advani said December 6 was “the saddest day” of his life. But he has always defended the ideology that led to the removal of this “ocular insult” to “Hindu India”.

Gujarat-2002 made Vajpayee “hang his head in shame”. But within days, he was blaming Muslims for the pogrom.

The BJP seamlessly vacillates between expressions of shame and achievement/pride for the same act!

However, BJP leaders can’t pretend they weren’t consulted during the CD’s production. According to the Bulandshehr-based company (Fakira Films) which produced it, top state BJP leaders were consulted “at every stage….”

“Withdrawing” the CD doesn’t mean much. Its copies are in unrestricted circulation. Excerpts have been aired on television channels. The CD’s potential to vitiate the election process remains unmitigated.

The EC is perfectly right to treat the CD as an unfair electoral practice under the Model Code of Conduct and sections of the Indian Penal Code and Representation of the People Act, which pertain to “inflammatory material capable of creating enmity/hatred among different communities”.

The CD pours hatred upon Muslims as traitors who will again divide India. It’s designed to provoke a strong reaction from Muslims—and a Hindu backlash.

It says Muslims are duplicitous: they kidnap, forcibly marry and convert Hindu women; they deceitfully and illegally kill cows; and they run “anti-national” madrasas.

The message is: “[If] you don’t vote for the BJP, disaster will strike this country… The BJP [alone] thinks about [India]… All other parties are agents of the Muslims.”

The CD contains false, malicious allegations: e.g. about Mulayam Singh Yadav having organised iftaar parties on the ghats of the Ganga, and new textbooks saying that Emperor Aurangazeb was a saint.

Its purpose is unmistakable: to hurt, arouse hatred, and turn hatred into votes.

The BJP routinely distributes obnoxious propaganda material. During its national executive meeting last December, it distributed a similar CD as part of its official press kit, duly stamped with the lotus symbol.

In content, the December CD is no different from the present one. The BJP’s intent to use religious identities as political instruments is well established. It mobilises votes by spreading religious hatred, often wrapped in “nationalist” attire.

Communal practices should be altogether banished from India’s public discourse. Unfortunately, they aren’t effectively banned. Hate-speech and hate-acts directed at religious-ethnic minorities go unpunished.

A sordid example of concessions to majoritarianism is the questioning of the patriotic credentials of the minorities, especially when terrorist incidents take place.

But India does have an electoral law developed under an independent, assertive Election Commission, which explicitly prohibits the use of inflammatory means—on pain of disqualification of candidates.

Such disqualifications have indeed taken place—as in some Shiv Sena leaders’ case. But disqualification isn’t enough to deter.

India needs a more explicit code of conduct, and solemn commitments by political leaders that they won’t resort to innuendo, vulgar slang, or indirect references to particular communities while canvassing electoral support.

The present case offers an opportunity for such reform. The Election Commission must seriously consider de-recognising the BJP as a political party if its FIR’s charges are established.

The EC must supplement this by extracting from BJP leaders serious pledges that they won’t use religion as “a loyalty test”, won’t exploit the Ayodhya temple for electoral gains, nor depict the Babri mosque’s razing in triumphant colours, as the present CD does.

Should the BJP violate these, it must be automatically de-recognised.

Such reform is imperative. Secularism is not an option in India. It’s a categorical imperative. It’s part of the “basic structure” of the Constitution and a precondition for India’s survival as a pluralist, vibrant democracy which respects minority rights.

As two Supreme Court judges put it in the trend-setting (Bommai) case (1994), the Constitution requires not just the state, but “political parties as well”, to be secular in “thought and action”.

The BJP—with the Shiv Sena—stands apart from all other parties in seeking to transform India into a Hindu-majoritarian entity. Like Jana Sangh, the BJP has routinely incited communal passions to win votes. It must be prevented from doing so.

The BJP must be watched closely in UP, where it’s desperate to prevent a bad rout. According to two major opinion polls, the BJP and its allies are likely to do much worse in these elections than in 2002.

The BJP’s upper-caste support-base in UP has shrunk from 72 to 50 percent. Extremist parties like the BJP act waywardly when faced with defeat. They must not be allowed to damage India’s secular fabric and democratic politics.

The Election Commission deserves unstinting citizen support in its efforts to discipline the BJP. The party has got away with murder, and worse, in its cynical pursuit of communalism, thanks to the past reluctance of the Establishment to bring it to heel.

It must be legally punished and politically isolated for the CD. This can only happen if the EC and enlightened public opinion remains unshaken by the BJP’s bullying.