Ahead of the 7th phase of Lok Sabha elections in the country, a pro-Congress ‘journalist’ named Kapil Komireddi cast aspersions on the Indian democracy under the Narendra Modi-led-BJP government.
While he is not the first one to carry out a hit job against the Modi government during elections, Kapil Komireddi chose to use his dead father to further his agenda.
And this goes on to show that some ‘journalists’ loyal to the Congress party could stoop to any level to disseminate their political propaganda.
An imaginary fight to reclaim the Indian Republic
Kapil Komireddi wrote a vicious article titled “My Father’s Fate and India’s”, which was published in The New Yorker on Friday (31st May).
At the very onset, he reminisced how his deceased father would console friends and family about ordinary Indians reclaiming the Indian Republic from the Modi government.
“If you can bring yourself to look beyond the regime, you will see a people fighting with all their strength to preserve their dignity and realize the promise of democracy,” Kapil Komireddi recounted a statement allegedly made by his father in 2021.
In his desperate bid to suggest that the ordinary people of India somehow wanted to overthrow the Modi government, the pro-Congress ‘journalist’ conveniently forgot that the BJP was elected to power by the ordinary people.
The Indian experiment in democracy has not failed. It has spawned a tenacious citizenry that is staging the most spirited fight to preserve its rights and dignity. What lets it down is India's muddled opposition.
— Kapil Komireddi (@kapskom) June 2, 2024
My essay in the @NewYorker https://t.co/SygCGfPEhD
In 2014, the BJP got 17.16 crore votes (31% vote share) and emerged as the single largest party. In 2019, it was re-elected with an even bigger mandate of 22.90 crore votes (37.36% vote share).
If exit polls are to be believed, the saffron party is slated to win even more seats with a mammoth vote share in the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
If there was resentment among the common people as Kapil Komireddi’s late father had allegedly prophesied, it should have been reflected in the voting pattern by now.
In reality, the fight to reclaim the Indian Republic from the Modi government only seems to exist in the fantasy of the doomsday prophets and has no connection with ground reality.
A picturesque make-believe story
Kapil Komireddi, who had previously cried foul over the Central Vista Redevelopment Project in the National Capital, narrated a picturesque make-believe story involving his deceased father and (not surprisingly) a politically opinionated pro-Modi voter who has a change of heart.
The story revolves around the pro-Congress propagandist’s visit to Varanasi to scatter the ashes of his late father and an accidental meeting with a 29-year-old man named Ajit Kumar Singh.
According to Kapil Komireddi, Singh had voted for the BJP in 2014 but was left impoverished after the demonetisation exercise of 2016. The once pro-Modi voter had to quit studies to support his father, whose business was supposedly destroyed by the surgical strike on black money.
The same guy somehow voted for the BJP again in 2019 due to PM Modi’s supposed over-emphasis on the Hindu identity.
Towards the end of this make-believe story, the pro-Congress ‘journalist’ claimed that Singh had a change of heart and decided to vote against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
“But now he was done. “All that has happened in the past five years is ‘Hindu-Muslim,’ ‘Hindu-Muslim,’ ” Singh said. “How is this going to fill my stomach? How will this get me a job?”“Kapil Komireddi concluded.
Madrassa education and a funeral story like no other
If we keep all his pre-conceived notions and concocted stories aside, we can focus on the most crucial aspect of Kapil Komireddi’s upbringing – He was enrolled in a madrassa (Islamic seminary) by his late father to teach him the ethos of ‘secularism.’
In his article for The New Yorker, the pro-Congress journalist wrote, “In the nineties, as India opened up its economy and Hindu nationalists began proliferating in Parliament, he (my father) enrolled me at a madrassa, an Islamic seminary, in the hope that the experience of mixing with Muslim children my age might inoculate me against the snare of Hindu-supremacist temptations later in life.”
The skewed understanding of secularism perhaps explains how the funeral of Kapil Komireddi’s late father became a spectacle for ‘inter-faith harmony’.
The controversial ‘journalist’ claimed, “A sea of mourners attended his funeral. They came uninvited. And it was in them that my father’s optimism about India, which had seemed so misplaced to me for many of the Modi years, truly cohered. A Muslim religious leader, blind and barely able to walk, threw himself on my father’s body and sobbed inconsolably. Then came a finely robed pastor, who whispered thanks in my father’s ear for having volunteered legal work for Christian communities. He read from the Bible. Only then did my father’s body pass to Hindu priests. None of this had been orchestrated. It was India being India.“
Nehruvian inclusivity that doesn’t spare the dead for politics
Towards the end of his long article, Kapil Komireddi highlighted how his late father was a follower of the inclusive nationalism of Jawaharlal Nehru.
“On the morning of April 5, 2023, my father died. He belonged to a generation of Indians who had internalized Nehru’s inclusive nationalism. Nearly killed in the carnage that attended the Partition, he sought throughout his life to defy the many attempts to deform India’s capacious character,” he wrote.
Jawaharlal Nehru was extremely ‘inclusive’ so much so that he expressed ‘relief’ when 400 Hindu peasants were killed in the aftermath of the Noakhali riots of 1946.
True to this deranged form of inclusivity, Kapil Komireddi could think about the Modi government while scattering his father’s ashes in Ganga.
“A year after my father’s departure, dispersing his ashes in the sacred waters of the Ganges, I came to share his hopefulness about our country. India, I felt, will pull through,” he wrote.
Conclusion
It’s fascinating how the pro-Congress ‘journalist’ managed to share the demise of his father and simultaneously weave his anti-Modi agenda in the form of a story.
To my mind, it is rather magical how different characters that Kapil Komireddi allegedly met during his trip to India align with his political ideology and help him further the Congress talking points.
It’s an unfortunate reality that political propagandists can now stoop as low as to not spare their deceased parents to cast aspersions on Indian democracy under Narendra Modi.
