With Sena turning liberal, India goes topsy-turvy

support, he called for a secular monument like a school or a hospital on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, angering the Sangh Parivar no end.

But now when Uddhav cautions Indians not to follow the brand of Hindutva being perpetrated by the BJP, you know much has changed in the relationship between the two allies and, if the BJP wishes to continue the alliance, it will have to work very hard on it.

I do not take BJP president Amit Shah’s exhortation to his party workers that they will go it alone during 2019 very seriously. That statement was made out of pique, in a tit for tat, after the Shiv Sena walked out of the Lok Sabha during the no-confidence motion and rubbed salt on the BJP’S wounds by pouring fulsome praise on Congress president Rahul Gandhi. That, too, after Uddhav was the first person Shah met when he started his ‘Sampark for Samarthan’ campaign, thus placing him on the highest pedestal possible. But the BJP needs the Sena now more than ever before and I also think it unlikely the Shiv Sena will resist the alliance for too long in the weeks leading up to the Lok Sabha polls. What price it will extract from the BJP remains to be seen.

For the Sena is continuing to hedge its bets instead of a clean break as is evidenced by its walk-out in Parliament. The motion was brought in by a former BJP ally, the Telegu Desam Party, whose leader Chandrababu Naidu has been in constant touch with Uddhav. Yet, instead of taking as bold a decision as to vote for the motion, the Sena chose to leave a window open for a future reconciliation.

Be that as it may, Uddhav is bang-on about another thing – women are more unsafe now in this country than cows. He may have been referring to rapes et al but cows are definitely more privileged than women now. Why else would the government ban oxytocin, a lifesaving hormonal drug that prevents bleeding in women in labour just because it is misused by some dairy farmers?

The nation is truly going to the cows. And Abdullah is right — India has turned topsy-turvy in the process!