One doesn’t need to go far to understand why Bihar Elections are possibly the most important elections since the 2014 General Elections. You can easily trace it in PM Modi’s announcement of a financial package worth 1.25 lakh crores and the rhetoric of #TakeBackYourWords – an online campaign, led by Nitish Kumar’s supporters, asking Modi to retract his DNA comment. While BJP is desperate to win Bihar to regain its loosing political capital after the Delhi defeat and the recent parliament log-jam, the alliance of JDU-RJD too can’t afford to loose another election, especially after criticizing and often mocking both BJP and Modi’s politics at every step.
With the stakes so high, political parties are bound to leave no stone unturned. However, the recent investigation put forward by the Indian Express prove a scary trend: how political parties stoke communal tension in order to polarize votes to their advantage. This investigation, that included analzying police records across 18 districts of Bihar, shows a three-fold spike in communal incidents in the last two years. With the break-up of the JDU-BJP alliance overlapping with the timeline of rise in communal incidents, it could be seen as a repetition of what happened in Muzzafarnagar last year. Not only has BJP benefited the most, since the increase in communal violence, in both the Lok Sabha Elections and the Bihar by-poll elections, these instances have also largely dominated areas with Muslim population less than the state average of 16.5%. Watch this video to find out more:
