Compassion Without Banners: How the BJP Turned Flood Relief into Electioneering

Flood victims needed dignity and relief. What they got instead was marketing

-Ramphal Kataria

Disaster has always been the truest test of human solidarity. When floods, earthquakes, or famines strike, societies instinctively drop their divisions to help. From ancient times, altruism has been the binding thread of civilisation — neighbours feeding neighbours, strangers saving strangers. That instinct is why langars sprang up during Partition, why aid poured in from 160 countries after the 2004 tsunami, and why ordinary Indians scrambled for oxygen during COVID-19 while governments floundered.¹

But in today’s Punjab, compassion has been repackaged. According to The Tribune, the BJP has been distributing flood relief ration bags stamped with the Prime Minister’s photograph and party slogans.² What should be an act of grace has been reduced to electoral pamphleteering. If this is the “world’s largest political party,” then why the need for such smallness? Relief work should not come with a logo. Grief is not a campaign rally.

This tactic is not new — Congress leaders once plastered their faces on drought relief schemes, regional satraps renamed disaster funds after themselves, and chief ministers often treat calamities as televised photo-ops. But there is something especially cynical about branding bags of food meant for the dispossessed. It is, quite literally, rubbing salt into wounds.

Contrast this with real altruism. After the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, Bollywood actors and industrialists organised massive fundraisers.³ When Uttarakhand was submerged in 2013, Khalsa Aid volunteers trekked into mountains with hot meals.⁴ In 1985, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid raised $125 million for Ethiopian famine victims — an effort remembered for its urgency, not its marketing.⁵ And after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, Sikh diaspora groups set up langars in Port-au-Prince, feeding survivors thousands of miles from Punjab.⁶ These gestures carried no banners, no slogans, no votes — only humanity.

Science itself confirms this instinct. Psychologists call it altruism; neuroscientists show that acts of generosity activate the brain’s reward circuits, releasing dopamine and oxytocin — nature’s way of reminding us that giving is as essential as breathing.⁷ Compassion is not propaganda. It is hardwired into who we are.

And yet, politics keeps trying to privatise compassion. Relief kits become billboards, and suffering becomes another backdrop for electoral theatre. The BJP is not alone in this; but its scale makes its hypocrisy glaring. A party that boasts of being the “largest” seems unable to rise above the pettiness of branding ration bags.

Punjab does not need ration kits with slogans. It needs schools reopened, roofs rebuilt, and fields restored. It needs solidarity, not selfies. It needs kindness, not campaign material.

Altruism has always been civilisation’s greatest achievement — a force that unites strangers across continents, religions, and classes. To cheapen it with propaganda is to betray not just the victims of Punjab’s floods but the very idea of humanity.

Relief must never be remembered for the banners it carried. It must be remembered for the humanity it embodied. Anything less is politics at its most disgraceful.

References

1. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), Indian Ocean Tsunami Humanitarian Response Review, 2005.

2. The Tribune, “Punjab BJP puts Modi photo on ration bags, hopes to expand influence,” September 2025.

3. Government of India, Gujarat Earthquake Relief and Rehabilitation Report, 2002.

4. Khalsa Aid International, “Uttarakhand Floods Relief,” Field Report 2013.

5. BBC, “Live Aid: The day music rocked the world,” July 13, 2015.

6. Khalsa Aid International, “Haiti Earthquake Relief,” 2010 Reports.

7. Jorge Moll et al., “Human Fronto–Mesolimbic Networks Guide Decisions About Charitable Donation,” PNAS, 2006.