So, is the metamorphosis finally, truly off the block?
The development plank, the narrative of inclusive growth, the ‘ek Bharat, sreshth Bharat’ (one India, best India) bluster have won us the poll, so now let the strident trident take over and shear the wolf off its sheep’s clothing and let its menacing canines hold the collective consciousness of a secular state to ransom ... Instil fear, instil distrust in every nook and corner of a nation that prides itself on its fabric of plurality, its multitude of voices, its plethora of ethnic and religious identities so that the dominant discourse is not one of diversity and tolerance, but one of conformity to a monochrome, a meek subservience to a linear pattern where the slightest divergence from the instruction manual will be construed as contempt and dealt with appropriately.
A man lynched over his choice of food, a noted academic shot dead for his liberal views, a face blackened over right to endorse a piece of intellectual creation, an artist denied permission to perform, a sporting fraternity’s meeting disrupted… the list is already quite long and there is every likelihood of fresh entries to it in the days ahead.
In the last couple of months, the secular ethos of India and its socio-cultural plurality have come under repeated attacks from right-wing, Hindu bigots who seem to be on a do-or-die mission to tar the country’s development agenda with deft brush-strokes of intolerance. And make no mistake: Bigotry and fanaticism in India now seem to have found their ultimate ally — the establishment!
It has taken weeks for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come out with even a semblance of a reaction to the kind of mindless acts that have been reported from different parts of the country. His delay in reacting to acts of intolerance could perhaps only be compared with the kind of deafening silence that had gripped the Prime Minister’s Office when Manmohan Singh was the incumbent, as one scam after another kept tumbling out of the government’s closet. But the danger now is far more serious than the one that India had faced during the tenure of the last government. A trillion rupee scam hits the national exchequer hard and ultimately hits the common man’s pocket, but lynching someone over his choice of lunch or dinner menu or blackening someone’s face just because he decides to endorse a certain book are acts of crime that hit at the very psyche of a nation that has always taken a lot of pride in preserving its secular ethos, its freedom of opinion. All the recent acts of bigotry are therefore walking-talking threats to the very notion of India and that is why it is not just the killers or the vandals who need to be dealt with an iron hand, but the very ideology that exhorts one to indulge in such extremes of behaviour that needs to be attacked right at the root.
And there lies the crux of the problem.
The ruling party of India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and most of those embellishing its higher echelons, have their political, cultural and religious moorings firmly anchored in the ultra-right ideology as propounded by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). It is indeed difficult for the BJP top brass to act against the wishes of the RSS and VHP mandarins or to take a radically stringent stance against right-wing allies such as Shiv Sena and chart a political course that is truly more inclusive. Even in terms of sheer electoral logistics, the huge corpus of RSS and VHP volunteers had come in extremely handy for BJP to run its campaigning and road shows in vast stretches of Northern India in general, and in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in particular, that helped tilt the balance so decisively in favour of the saffron brigade — as the poll results for the 2014 general election bear testimony.
Given such an existential stasis that BJP finds itself in, the rightist fringe in India has sniffed a huge opportunity to occupy centre stage like never before. With every passing day since the current government came to power last summer, realising that the establishment at the Centre is soft on its ideological leanings, the fringe has taken giant strides towards establishing itself as the mainstream. And that is shocking indeed.
It is precisely because of such a damaging trend that BJP, and Modi in particular, ought to acknowledge in the most concrete terms possible the need to check the growth of such a Frankenstein that may one day grow big enough to engulf the institution itself!
Modi and the BJP top brass are possibly smug with the confidence that the electorate has shown in them — giving them a clear majority in the last election — and they may therefore not feel any urgent need to bottle up the genie of religious and cultural intolerance. After all, if polarisation of votes along communal lines can help one win an absolute majority, who needs minorities?
But let the ruling dispensation at the Centre not ignore the fact that even the vast multitude of Hindus who had voted for the lotus (BJP’s electoral symbol) in the 2014 election, did so not out of any allegiance whatsoever to a right-wing Hindu fervour, but to the development agenda that Modi had so assiduously tried to drill onto his campaign template. And let it also be said in as many words that despite all those tears shed at the Facebook headquarters, despite all the bonhomie that Modi shares with United States President Barack Obama at a personal level and despite all those memorable photo ops with some of the best minds of the tech world, right at the heart of Silicon Valley ... not a single dollar worth of foreign investment can still be steered to the shores of India if the country shuns its dialogue of plurality and continues to embrace a monologue of hatred.
A false sense of political invincibility saw former prime minister Indira Gandhi clamp Emergency on the country in 1975 — a move that resulted in her ignominious defeat in the 1977 general election. The Emergency was a draconian measure that struck at the very heart of the democratic credentials of the world’s largest democracy. Indira committed the cardinal sin of taking the electorate for granted because she strongly believed that her wish was the writ that ran throughout India. She had perhaps even started believing in the adage: “Indira is India”! But the 1977 election was a watershed in the true sense of the term. Not only did it hand a humbling experience to Indira, but it also pitch-forked a new political alternative in the form of the Janata Party. The subsequent fizzling out of the Janata experiment notwithstanding, the 1977 election proved beyond doubt that the Indian electorate is immensely mature and any political leader who takes the intellectual faculties of voters for granted will be doing so at his or her own peril. A similar lesson may await Modi in 2019 if he doesn’t act firm right NOW. It is time the establishment at the Centre realises that entities such as the RSS, VHP or Shiv Sena are mere footnotes in India’s timeless tale of unity-in-diversity. To try and catapult the footnote to being the title of that timeless tale will only be the domain of fools. Can Modi or the BJP risk such a venture? Will they be happy imprinting their signatures on just a few tiles, whose colours and patterns suit their liking, or will they be eager to leave a lasting watermark of their sensitivity on the entire mosaic that is contemporary India? The choice is theirs. And the nation is watching…
India was never a Hindu rashtra (state) and should never be one. And let no one — not even in his or her wildest dreams — try and reinvent the wheel!
