Sunil Gatade | Prajwal spells trouble for BJP as questions growing

Prajwal Revanna has become an albatross around the neck of the BJP with videos of the NDA candidate’s horrific sexual abuse, making the party the favourite punching bag amid the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.

With the grandson of former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda escaping to Germany, it is virtually the BJP that has to carry the cross on this shameful episode. Prajwal’s father, H.D. Revanna, has been arrested on charges of abduction of a woman to protect his son. An Interpol blue corner notice is set to be issued against the 33-year-old JD-S MP.

The Prajwal bomb has exploded at the most inopportune time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah as the JD-S is virtually a non-player and it will be the BJP that will be in the dock for the company it keeps. Such are the wages of association, accidental or opportunistic.

The sex abuse case also punctured the PM’s campaign on “mangalsutra” and the BJP’s “Nari Shakti” boasts, with the Opposition questioning Mr Modi’s silence on Prajwal, who has since been suspended from the JD-S.

What is worse is that Opposition leaders are latching on to the case to target the PM, insisting that what Prajwal has committed is the biggest sex scandal in Independent India and accusing the PM of campaigning for the perpetrator of “mass rape”. Nothing less than an apology from the PM will do, so goes the refrain.

The questions being asked by the Opposition are relevant. How can a PM who knows every foreign trip of an Opposition leader remain in the dark about Prajwal’s plans of sudden departure abroad?  

Worse still, their refrain, right or wrong, is to ask why Mr Modi did not object to Prajwal’s renomination. They wonder how he could have been ignorant of Prajwal's dubious past given the PM’s alleged penchant for keeping a tab on every friend and foe.

The JD-S has been in the process of gradual extinction and no one in the democratic firmament will shed a tear for its predicament. For the BJP, the fear now is that Deve Gowda’s party will pull it down in its most fertile state in the South.

The BJP and media outlets which treat it with kid gloves have gone out of their way to project that Prajwal has nothing to do with the party, clearly ignoring that he is an NDA candidate. Reports claimed that local BJP leaders had cautioned against Prajwal’s candidature, warning the top leadership that he was a shady character and the party should keep its distance.

For the Opposition, the issue is a godsend in election season. One may recall how the BJP had exploited to the hilt the Nirbhaya affair in Delhi ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.  The tandoor murder case in Delhi in 1995 involving then Congress leader Sushil Sharma was used to target the grand old party ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

While the BJP would be much weary, the Prajwal case will bring focus on the less than fair treatment of women by the Modi establishment, be it the protests by Olympic women wrestlers,  the Hathras incident or the Bilkis Bano case. 

In the past, Mr Modi has benefited immensely from the sudden surfacing of CDs of the detractors of the then Gujarat CM. They made good use of selectively destroying the leaders from Opposition parties or within the BJP who acted against his interests. 

With the expose of the Prajwal affair, the elections to the remaining 14 seats in Karnataka could be an added worry for the BJP. In faraway Uttar Pradesh, the BJP has been forced to deny renomination to the controversial Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who has been accused by the women wrestlers of sexual harassment, and nominate Brij Bhushan’s son in his place.

Besides, the worry for the top BJP leadership is that the Prajwal scandal will further aggravate the fissures in the state unit, with a section feeling that the B.S. Yediyurappa dynasty is being promoted.

The worry is that if the results are not good, the Modi-Shah duo would be targeted for going into an alliance with the JD-S by keeping the state unit in the dark. Former Union minister Sadananada Gowda, who was denied a Lok Sabha ticket this time, had claimed that even Mr Yediyurappa was not aware of the plan to align with the JD-S.

The Modi-Shah tactics and strategy in Karnataka are taking the party on a slippery slope. They forced Mr Yediyurappa out of the chief minister’s post and brought in Basavaraj Bommai in his place as CM without much preparation. All the problems for the BJP in the South started from the Karnataka polls a year ago, where the controversial campaign by the PM fell flat due to bread and butter issues.

Strange things are happening for the BJP in the South. In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, TDP supremo N. Chandrababu Naidu’s move to align with the BJP has helped chief minister and YSRCP leader Jagan Mohan Reddy to gain some ground.

In Congress-ruled Telangana, however, the decline in the BRS/TRS fortunes is now helping the BJP.

In Odisha, discussions of an alliance between the ruling BJD and the BJP led to so much dissensions in both parties that the situation is far from stabilised. The Congress, which has been in the cold for the past three decades, is sensing a feeble chance but still looks unprepared. 

Reports say that in Madhya Pradesh, the sensational withdrawal of the nomination by Indore Congress candidate Akshay Kanti Bam is an “explosive manifestation” of the BJP’s nervousness in the face of the unexpectedly low voting in the first two phases.

In Maharashtra, what is worrying the BJP is the sympathy factor for Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, whose parties were split by it to gain power two years ago. The BJP’s narrative that the state is witnessing a tussle between Mr Modi and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has not worked.

In Bihar, chief minister Nitish Kumar and his JD-U are becoming an acute source of trouble for the BJP amid growing signals that they are not fighting fit and are losing ground.

In the Northeast, the ethnic violence in BJP-ruled Manipur and its consistent neglect by the Centre, especially the PM, is casting a shadow over the entire region. 

Amid all this, Mr Modi’s attacks on the Opposition, especially the Congress, are becoming louder. Much louder than that is his silence on the issues that have come to haunt the BJP.