Protesters beat an effigy of Mehbooba Mufti in Jammu. (AP)

Jammu, Aug. 11: As reaction and counter-reaction stretches the state to violent polarity between Jammu and the Valley, the BJP is smacking its lips at the sweet political fruit this crisis has lobbed into its lap. With such relish that it doesn’t fear being superseded by today’s belligerent eruption in Srinagar and areas around the LoC in the Valley; that flare-up, party leaders believe, will only feed their political coffers.

The growing sense in the BJP is that the emotional surcharge over Amarnath will not only power it to recapturing its lost citadel of Jammu, it has also handed them a slogan to encash countrywide. “Jai Shri Ram” may have lost electoral potency, but the BJP has a new war cry in the works here: “Bam-Bam Bhole.”

For all their protestations about this upsurge not being communal, Bam-Bam Bhole has been the signature tune of this movement.

From public greeting to mobile ringtones, from emblazoned banner to the chorus rising off cantankerous barricades, its Bam-Bam Bhole all the way in Jammu. And the BJP is guaranteeing it will take that cry across the country.

“What’s wrong?” asks senior leader Nirmal Singh, “Amarnath is dear to people all over India and if they are going to be obstructed, people all over the country should rise and protest. This is not a communal issue, this is a national issue. It is about whether Indians have the freedom to practise their faith in any part of the country.”

Asked why a religious cry has come to spearhead a movement they call broad-based and regional, he snaps angrily in retort. “But don’t we have the freedom to say Bam-Bam Bhole in this country? Islamic cries are raised in political rallies in Kashmir 24 hours a day, nobody seems to object to that. Why question this?”

The BJP has so far been careful not to foreground itself for calculated and strategic reasons. It doesn’t want to reduce the cross-sectional nature of this upsurge to a partisan issue. That larger veneer serves its purposes better. With its eye on a constituency way beyond Jammu, the BJP would rather play this on “national” as opposed to partisan sentiment.

Not for nothing is the Tricolour the mascot of these protests and the BJP flag conspicuously absent. The conscious use of the national flag has afforded the party huge tactical propaganda advantage — the idea has been to project the Jammu protests as “nationalist” and the Valley demonstrations as “anti-national”.

BJP leaders are quite unabashed about the strategy they have employed. “Let the country see for itself, here we are carrying the Tiranga and there in Kashmir you see the Pakistani flag, let people judge where national interest lies.”

But this espousal of “national interest” barely masks the robust pursuit of political objectives. The slogan being chanted under the Tricolour is still Bam-Bam Bhole. It’s only too apparent the BJP is keen not to lose out on the collateral benefits that could come to it.

They wouldn’t state it openly but the radicalisation of sentiment in the Valley is pleasing them no end. The more protests Srinagar witnesses, the more it helps them consolidate ground in Jammu. The greater the push for a march across the LoC to Muzaffarabad, the more they are able to project the Valley as “anti-national”.

As reports poured in of an agitated and violent “Muzaffarabad chalo” build-up in the Valley’s border towns, a senior BJP leader here remarked: “That is the true face of the people of Kashmir, they will block Indians but open roads to Pakistan.”

Party leaders are loath to admit this is a “Hindu” rights movement, but they are equally loath to deny it will fetch them political rewards. “Of course we will gain from this,” Nirmal Singh says. “When the government of the day is ready to let national sentiment be held to ransom by a minority, people will be angry and they will react. I invite the Congress, too, to benefit from the anger, what is stopping them? Our leaders are taking this issue to the whole country, the Congress is free to do so, too.”

It’s an invitation that’s at once tempting and tormenting. Jammu Congressmen have succumbed to it; under mounting pressure from their constituency, they have been desperately pledging support and wanting to get on-stage with the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti (SASS).

Congressmen elsewhere are panicked by the prospect of lending their voice to the Bam-Bam Bhole cry. Nowhere more so than in the Kashmir Valley where party leaders, under pressure from a contrary constituency, are marking quite an opposite line. The discord emerging between the statements of Madan Lal Sharma, Congress MP from Jammu, and Saifuddin Soz, the state Congress chief, tells its own story of a fracture whose face is turning communal by the hour.

Sharma is clinging to the SASS coattails, Soz has been hammering it for “imposing an economic blockade” on the Muslim-majority Valley.

The more the SASS asserts, the more cornered people like Soz will feel. The louder the Valley protests, the more vociferous the counterblast from Jammu. That’s aptly symptomatic of the kind of polarisation this crisis is accelerating across Jammu and Kashmir — fringe feeding on fringe and toppling moderate opinion, such as it is, off-stage.