The Bharatiya Janata Party has brazenly defied the law of the land and used despicably communal means to try to win votes by producing a virulently anti-Muslim compact disc (CD). This was expressly commissioned for the Uttar Pradesh election campaign and officially released with fanfare by senior state party leaders Lalji Tandon and Kesri Nath Tripathi on April 3, four days before the first round of polling in the seven-phase election.

So obnoxious was the CD that the BJP hastily withdrew it, fearing legal action. It has “disowned” it and tried to pretend that it knows nothing about it. Yet, faced with a First Information Report filed by the Election Commission, party president Rajnath Singh staged a melodramatic act by courting arrest. The rustic, crude and pugnacious Mr Singh wasn’t solely responsible for this low tactic. The BJP’s supposedly “sophisticated” veterans Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani fully went along with it.

Since then, the BJP has also taken out lurid advertisements in newspapers in western Uttar Pradesh. Emblazoned with the lotus symbol and Chief Ministerial candidate Kalyan Singh’s picture, these accuse the BJP’s opponents of shielding terrorists, opposing Saraswati Vandana and appeasing Muslims. They show a neighbourhood with Islamic flags hoisted from every housetop, with a slogan: “kya inka irada pak hai?” (Is their intention pure?) Pak is shorthand for Pakistan.

The BJP’s stand on the CD is deeply, and egregiously, contradictory. On the one hand, its leadership wants to dissociate itself from it while blaming low-level “party workers” for adding “undesirable elements to it.” On the other hand, it behaves as if it owned the CD and felt proud of it—and was wrongly punished for it. That’s why the feigning of injured innocence.

This duplicity comes naturally to the BJP and is integral to its politics. After the Babri mosque’s razing, Mr 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”. After Gujarat, Mr Vajpayee “hung his head in shame”. But within days, he was asking: “Lekin Aag Kisne Lagayee”, thus blaming Muslims for the pogrom. The BJP has seamlessly vacillated between expressions of shame and achievement/pride for the same act!

However, it just won’t do for BJP leaders to pretend that they weren’t consulted before and during the CD’s production. According to Virendra Singh, director of the Bulandshehr-based Fakira Films, which produced the CD: “At every stage of writing the CD, the leadership of the state BJP was consulted, the script modified, (words) added and fine-tuned….” This stands to reason.

“Withdrawing” the CD doesn’t mean much. Its copies are in unrestricted circulation—indeed, excerpts have been aired on many television channels. The CD’s potential to vitiate the election process remains unmitigated. The EC is thus perfectly right to treat the CD’s use as unfair electoral practice and object to it under its Model Code of Conduct, and sections of the Indian Penal Code and Representation of the People Act, 1951, which pertain to “inflammatory material capable of creating enmity/hatred among different communities”.

The CD pours hatred upon Muslims as treacherous “anti-Hindu” citizens who will again divide India. It’s designed to provoke a strong reaction from Muslims—and a Hindu backlash. Its central theme emphasises that Muslims are duplicitous: they kidnap, forcibly marry and convert Hindu women; they kill cows while offering to look after them; they run madrassas which are dens of “anti-national activities”; only the BJP can “save India”.

The pivotal message is: “This time if you don’t vote for the BJP, disaster will strike this country. The country will be destroyed. The BJP is a party that thinks about the country. It thinks about the Hindu religion. … All other parties are agents of the Muslims.”

The CD contains all kinds of false, malicious allegations. It says Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav organised iftaar parties on the ghats of the Ganga; and the new textbooks published under the United Progressive Alliance say Goddes Durga is fond of liquor and 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 election campaigns and organisational meetings. It did so last December during its national executive meeting in Lucknow, where it distributed a similar CD as part of its press kit, duly stamped with the lotus symbol and the Vajpayee-Advani duo’s pictures. This too falsely alleges cow-slaughter.

In content, the December CD is not markedly different from the present one. The BJP’s intent to use religious identities as political instruments in its bid for power is well established. Its communal practices have long been objects of study by social science scholars keen to understand how political mobilisation happens through the spreading of religious hatred often wrapped in “nationalist” attire.

Such communal practices should be altogether banished from our public discourse. Unfortunately, they aren’t effectively banned. A great deal of hate speech and many hate acts directed at certain religious or ethnic communities go unpunished in India. A sordid example of such majoritarianism is the questioning the patriotic credentials of minorities, especially when terrorist incidents occur. But we do have an electoral law developed under an independent and assertive Election Commission, which explicitly prohibits the use of inflammatory means—on pain of disqualification of the concerned candidate.

Such disqualifications have indeed taken place in some Shiv Sena leaders’ case because they used communal means during their election campaign. But disqualification isn’t enough to deter communalists. We need a far more explicit code of conduct, and a set of solemn commitments by political leaders that they won’t resort to innuendo (“Hum Do, Hamare Pachees”), vulgar slang, or indirect references to particular communities while canvassing electoral support for themselves.

The present case offers an important opportunity to undertake such reform. The Election Commission has done well to file an FIR on the CD issue under sections of the IPC pertaining to communal hate speech/act. It must seriously consider de-recognising the BJP as a political party if the charges are established. This minimally means preventing it from using the lotus symbol in the UP elections.

The EC must supplement this by proceeding to extract from BJP leaders serious pledges that they won’t use appeal or reference to religion as “a loyalty test”, that they won’t use the Ayodhya temple or other religious monuments for electoral gains, nor depict the Babri mosque’s razing in triumphant colours, as the present CD does. Should the BJP violate these assurances, it should automatically face de-recognition and its candidates must be disqualified for six years.

It is vitally important to institute such reform now. Secularism is not an option. It’s a mandatory and categorical imperative. It’s part of the “basic structure” of the Constitution and a precondition for the survival of India as a pluralist society and a vibrant democracy which respects diversity and minority rights.

As Supreme Court Justices B.P. Jeevan Reddy and S.C. Agrawal put it in the Bommai case (1994), the Constitution requires not just the Indian 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 insofar as it seeks to transform India into a Hindu-majoritarian entity. Like its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, and its parivar associates, the BJP has incited communal passions and violence to win votes. It must be prevented from doing so.

There’s an urgent need to watch the BJP very, very closely in UP, where it’s desperate to keep its already narrow base from fragmenting further. According to the NDTV-Marg and CNN-IBN opinion polls, the BJP and its allies are likely to do much worse in these Assembly elections than in 2002, winning respectively just 80-90 or 55-60 seats compared to the earlier 107. The BJP’s support-base among the upper castes has shrunk from 72 percent to 50 percent.

Extremist, illiberal parties like the BJP act in especially wayward ways when faced with political defeat. They must not be allowed to damage India’s secular fabric and shift the goalposts of democratic politics itself.

The Election Commission deserves the unstinting support of broad layers of the citizenry in its efforts to impose a modicum of discipline on the BJP. The party has in the past got away with murder, and worse, in its cynical pursuit of communalism, thanks to the reluctance of the Establishment to assert the law of the land and bring it to heel—witness the Babri demolition and the Gujarat carnage. The BJP must be legally punished and politically isolated for the CD. This can only happen if the EC and enlightened citizen opinion remain unshaken by the BJP’s bullying.