Dear reader, The fallout of BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma's remarks on the Prophet casts a lengthening shadow. It began with her suspension from the party, and the unprecedented firefighting the Modi government had to do in the face of outrage expressed by West Asian nations, including Delhi's friends and allies. But it did not stop there. There were protests in several cities last Friday, a rash of arrests and roll-out of stringent laws (National Security Act, UP Gangsters Act) and bulldozers in Uttar Pradesh, a continuing knife's edge in West Bengal's Howrah. AIMIM MP Imtiaz Jaleel said that Nupur Sharma should be "hanged" from "this very square" in Aurangabad. Though party chief Asaduddin Owaisi distanced himself from his colleague's comment the day after, saying that "Sharma should be punished as per the law" and even as Jaleel himself tried to play down his shocking intemperance, saying that he was only speaking "the language of the crowd", it's an example of how the BJP's Opposition may be reacting in terms set by the BJP. Statements like Jaleel's, protests that teeter into violence, only play into the hardliners' script. The Nupur Sharma Show that so strikingly embarrassed the BJP-led government internationally could be becoming the Nupur Sharma Trap for non-BJP parties at home. Columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote for our pages on Tuesday ('Beware of half victories', June 7), on how liberals will need to be careful about how to handle this trap. "The purpose will be to make speech an object of competitive mobilisation and drive home one point: To instigate the view that there are double standards, that Hindu gods are victims left to fend for themselves, while the whole world rushes to defend the Prophet, using state power". The episode, he wrote, requires a follow-up that "does not just exult in a short-term victory, but displays moral and political sophistication". Certainly, the choices that non-BJP parties make in this moment will have consequences -- including within the BJP. While there is a strong argument that the Nupur Sharma episode is only an example of the BJP being called out for speaking in its own voice - senior Congress leader and Express columnist P Chidambaram made it most sharply in our Sunday pages, saying that Sharma has been only seemingly punished for listening to the "Master's voice", parroting the lines of her party seniors, from Modi to Shah and Yogi ('The Gramophone Company', June 12) - a counter argument can also be made. The episode and the blowback could mark, as our Sunday Story put it, "A new red line" - for the BJP, within the BJP. For all its appearance of a monolith with no self-doubt, it could be that the party faces a new question: "How does it walk the tricky line between the cultural revivalism and ideological project that forms the bedrock for its growth and the emotions it has uncorked in the process among millions of Indians?" What happens when the simmering pot boils over? The answers to those questions are not immediately clear. But what is evident is this - while for the Opposition, struggling for both space and relevance, there are stark choices to be made urgently, the BJP is not confronted with either-or choices, or those that it must make in a hurry. For the BJP, it is a matter of calibration and rebalancing within the room for manoeuvre created by its several electoral victories. At any given point, the party of Modi-Shah has several balls in the air. And on the minority question, for now, and until the Opposition finds a way of challenging and redrawing the rules of the game, they all have a way of falling where the BJP wants them to. Till next week, Vandita | 
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