Advocate Prashant Bhushan hinted at ‘Pulwama 2.0’ being planned by the Modi Government ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2024

On August 2nd, Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court and one of the most respected Public Interest Lawyer, Prashant Bhushan, tore into the Modi Government where he divulged the instances of electoral manipulations and a repeated mechanism of orchestrating pogroms to polarise the electorate on communal lines to secure a stronghold ahead of every Lok Sabha election.

Advocate Bhushan illustrated various discrepancies in his attempt to exemplify how such attacks conveniently appealed to the BJP and its overtly ‘nationalistic’ approach to establishing electoral dominance. He even prompted the audience to brace for an impending state-orchestrated terror attack on the Ayodhya Ram Mandir, by which the BJP would consolidate votes on communal lines. 

The pioneer of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, Bhushan, cautioned the nation about the Modi Government’s plan of trying to cook up the next Pulwama or Balakot attack, yet again to sway Indian voters towards voting for the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections of 2024. However, this time, a malicious communal agenda is likely to invigorate the previous highs of nationalism among the core-BJP voters

The Pulwama tragedy of 2019: More than just an outcome of negligence.

A significant part of Advocate Bhushan’s speech was dedicated to the discrepancies around the tragic martyrdom of 40 CRPF Jawans during the Pulwama Attack of 2019. In his lecture, he reiterated many claims made by the former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, Shri Satyapal Malik, regarding the shady turn of events that claimed the lives of forty soldiers when a Truck loaded with RDX crashed into the military convoy.  

Prashant Bhushan used the podium to raise extremely pertinent questions on the Mo-Shah Government:

• Why was such a huge convoy denied ‘airlift’ despite repeated appeals to the former Defense Minister Rajnath Singh?

• Why were the Jawans provided low-safety buses for travel?

• Why did the concerned authority shun eleven intelligence alerts that resulted in a lapse of ‘Standard Operating Procedure’? One of the greatest blunders was: not barricading the nodes that led to the main road used by the convoy.

• How did a full-fledged RDX truck get procured under the nose of defence authorities?

• Why did the Armed forces not deter the RDX truck from crashing into the convoy? 

He demanded accountability from the Prime Minister for his 3-hour-long silence post-tragedy and the reason behind his instructing Satyapal Malik to “stay quiet and low” after Malik had frantically informed him about the tragedy.

The concerned authorities behind the security lapse did not get punished but got promoted:

He reminded the audience about the Modi Government’s failure to keep the promise of a thorough investigation into the incident. The report nehind this tragedy remains unpublished even after five years, and Bhushan alleges that the concerned officers, who should have been brought under the book, got promoted instead. 

In his brief lecture, Advocate Bhushan lashed out at the corporate  media by sharing examples of sensitisation of the tragedy by their TV hosts to allure TRPs and how they shamelessly acted on cue of their ‘masters’ by compromising the interest of the nation. The martyred Jawans of the Pulwama tragedy got denied justice, and the Modi Government politicised their martyrdom to secure electoral gains.

Prashant Bhushan divulges an alarming information:

During his speech, Advocate Bhushan hinted at ‘Pulwama 2.0’ being planned by the Modi Government ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2024. Although he refrained from authenticating the source of his claims, Bhushan gave the premonition of a second Pulwama getting planned; when the newly built Ayodhya Mandir would supposedly get attacked by Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad.

To emphasise his claims further, Bhushan claimed that the Modi Government would carry out a second ‘surgical strike’ in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), not to reclaim the territory but to simply encash points of nationalism by engaging the nation in a charade of vengeance. 

Exemplifying how the BJP had turned all the odds in its favour before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections by carrying out an unfounded airstrike at Balakot, Bhushan maintained that the Modi Government would not shy away from repeating a ‘tried and tested’ method of reeling the voters through a belligerent electoral campaign. 

Bhushan alleged that PM Modi would either:

• divide the entire country like Manipur;
• or, carry out ‘Pulwama 2.0’ and ‘Balakot 2.0’ to feed hypernationalism to the masses.
• He connected the dots of the violence in Haryana and the Maharashtra Train shootings to illustrate how the BJP had already started weaving a communal binary before the general elections. He uttered, “Yeh log chunaw jeetne ke liye kuchh bhi kar sakte hain…” (These people can go to any extent to win elections.)

Prashant Bhushan’s appeal to the masses:

He appealed ardently to the nation to foresee ‘a staged attack’ before the 18th Lok Sabha elections in 2024. Expressing concerns regarding the publications made in numerous BJP-inclined journals and newspapers regarding a potential attack by Pakistan-based terror outfits at the Ram Mandir, Bhushan said that an actual attack would act as a litmus test before the nation.

He maintained that the onus remained on the Government to tighten security across all the pilgrimage sites of our countries. Thus, should an attack happen on any of these sites; the BJP’s attempt at polarising the masses ahead of the elections shall get bared before the nation. 

Before concluding his speech, Prashant Bhushan appealed to the nation to be conscious and active before falling prey to electoral stunts. He urged them to seek accountability from the Modi Government regarding the dubious aspects of the Pulwama tragedy and seek the investigation report on the same before the BJP tried to sway the narrative away from pertinent issues that might throw them out of power.