Gujarat’s phantom poll banner

Hindi news channel India TV’s programming on the morning of November 16 comprised the following:

1. A report that Rajput women in Chittor, Rajasthan, were protesting the release of the Hindi film Padmavati.

2. A story about Indian Muslim boys returning from ISIS and repenting their actions.

3. A photo-op of Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar meeting a member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board to find an amicable solution to the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute.

4. And, finally, a report that in east Surat, Gujarat, Muslims were demanding tickets from Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi for the upcoming assembly elections. The party’s new “soft Hindutva”, however, was alienating Muslims and keeping them from contesting elections, the report stated.

The last story featured a single photograph of a mosque with a green minaret. A banner hung from it read, in Gujarati, “If you don’t give us tickets, we won’t give you votes.”

The report didn’t have any further details — where these banners were hung, or by whom. One member of the Congress party and another from the BJP were interviewed on camera, but their names were not disclosed.

East Surat is the old part of town and has, what the locals call, a “mixed population” — namely, Hindus and Muslims living next door to each other in congested lanes, with the proportion of Muslims higher here than in other parts of the city.

In any case, India TV wasn’t breaking this banner story. It had appeared a day earlier on the syndicated news agency Press Trust of India’s feed, and the report even carried the Congress secretary’s response: “Though they (Congress youth workers) have put up banners out of fear and anger, we have convinced them to remove them.”

By November 16, The Times of India , The Indian Express and NDTV carried stories about these banners. The next day, Firstpost and Catch News had published opinion pieces about it.

But not a single story or report was able to locate the people who had put up the banners. Which raised three questions:

1. Why did the Congress believe the banners were put up by its youth workers?

2. How can we be sure those responsible were indeed Muslim?

3. Who was the candidate they were projecting instead?

My own investigation began at a Congress office in Surat. Ashok Jirawala is a local party heavyweight and had led Surat’s trader protests against GST. Asked if the party was fielding any Muslim candidates, he replied in the negative. When asked next about the banners, he became angry. “Why should we give them tickets?” his voice rose. “Have they won us seats?”

During the 2012 polls, Kadir Pirzada, a Muslim candidate fielded by the Congress, lost by a margin of around 15,700 votes. So it appears that the Congress, for lack of a better strategy, is simply going to outdo the BJP at its own game. In the process, Muslims are being sidelined.

But the circumstances surrounding the banners remained unknown.

Next, I tried the BJP’s Surat office, where I met members of the party’s minority morcha. They appeared optimistic about the party’s prospects in the Muslim neighbourhoods.

Mohsin Mirza, president of the minority morcha, said, “Earlier BJP people couldn’t even enter these Muslim areas. But now we get seven-eight per cent vote share. These banners are proof that this percentage is only going to increase. Educated Muslims like myself are slowly realising there’s no point thinking about the past. We should forget the past and move on.”

Asked if he knew where the banners were put up, he appeared unsure. “I think in Jhapa Bazaar,” was all he could muster.

There are many mosques in the Jhapa Bazaar area, including some with green minarets. At the few I visited, nobody had heard anything about the banners. It was a Sunday morning, and residents were hanging about on the pavements, reading newspapers or getting a haircut.

“All this is just afwah (hearsay),” one old man said. “There were no banners here.”

Another pulled me aside and whispered, “I’ve heard they were in Gobipura, near Khwaja Dana ki Dargah. Go check it out.”

At the dargah, again, nobody had heard of the banners.

“They were not here,” one shopkeeper said, adding he had heard the rumours. “Maybe you should check near Tarwadi masjid.”

That proved a dead end, too, as did a few more “leads”.

Imran Menon, an executive member of the BJP’s Yuva Morcha, directed me to the Khambati ni Vari area in Salabatpura, and had his friend drop me there. There were two mosques with green minarets, but nobody knew for sure about the banners.

A barber said, “The Congress comes once in five years. The BJP doesn’t come here at all. Our drainage systems are bad, we get water a few hours a day, but nobody cares. There’s been no activity here this election. No banners, no nothing.” Two other residents concurred with him and remarked that the Congress has played an inept opposition. More residents joined in, saying they’d seen only the photos of the banners on WhatsApp. They suggested I meet the local Congress leader, Jawedbhai Samosewalla.

“I’m sorry, madam, I was in Mumbai, so I don’t know about what’s happening,” Samosewalla sounded anxious, and hastily enquired if I was from the Congress.

As I went around the neighbourhood, a young man on a bike suddenly rode up to me and said, “Are you looking for the banners?” He dug out his phone and showed me a series of photographs of the banners, including the one used on India TV.

When I asked where they were put up, he pointed to the verandah above us.

The occupant of the house appeared appalled on hearing this.

“”What do you mean,” she demanded.

The young man dug out another photograph. The railings in the picture matched her verandah railings, as did the tiles.

Other residents gathered around the phone and all of them appeared surprised. None of them had seen the banners, yet here was undeniable proof that they had been hung from that very house. “Maybe someone put them up at night, took photographs, and then removed them before we noticed?” someone suggested. The others seemed to agree.

Slowly, the perturbed crowd began to disperse, some shaking their head in disbelief.

The young man said he’d received the photographs from a friend and recognised the verandah, but knew little else.

This begs two questions: Who took the photographs and shared them with the media? And, did no one in the media think to check who put them up and for how long?

And a third, more existential one:

If the banners were hung and nobody saw them, were the banners hung at all?

Sneha Vakhariais a freelance writer based in Bengaluru

COMMENT NOW