The juggernaut of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has screeched to a halt — whether to take a pause until it gathers speed again is not clear but the latest by-election results alongside the earlier ones stretching from Bihar to Karnataka to western UP to Rajasthan and Gujarat show that Indians of all persuasions have decided to take a strategic time-out on Modi.

To call it a referendum of Modi’s 100 days is to trivialise it; these were essentially state elections but it does appear that Modi’s continued silence on the extreme views expressed by some in his party has dented his surge, though a contrarian view may be that the strategy to polarise and a create a Hindu vote bank was not done ruthlessly enough. In fact, his star campaigner Yogi Adityanath was of the opinion that he was not given a free hand and that accounted for this setback.

It is in the midst of all this that eminent jurist Fali Nariman’s recent lecture ‘Minorities at Crossroads’ needs our attention. He said, “Hinduism is losing its traditional tolerance because some Hindus have started believing that it is their faith that has brought them political power — and this belief is not being challenged by those at the top.” Nariman was elevated to the Supreme Court in July 2014; earlier he was the Solicitor General but resigned in 2013 due to alleged differences with the then law minister Ashwini Kumar. He is well known for many landmark judgements, but in the public mind he will always been remembered for defending playwright Vijay Tendulkar’s controversial play Sakharam Binder.

Words like appeasement, minorities, secularism and expressions like the ‘Hindu way of life’ have of late become part of the political lexicon with meanings far removed from its origins.

Benign setting

They have almost degenerated into dog whistles to speak to your constituency; hidden persuaders, the sender and receiver can decipher the message and yet not run the risk of overtly offending the lay public. Sadly the signalling has reached such proportions that even in a benign setting when someone extols Hinduism, he is seen as a Hindu rightist.

Nariman in his lecture brings historical and judicial context to words like minorities and appeasement. He tells us how the Supreme Court of India has always seen itself as the ultimate protector of minority rights but he also makes a clear distinction between majoritianism and minoritianism and the slow change in judicial pronouncements over the years.

He says when the founding fathers started out in the business of drawing up the constitution they began by defining minorities with a big ‘M’. But they accepted the fact that for a smoother functioning of the constitution in a vast land such as India they had to lower their sights and accept minority with a small ‘m’.

What he has to say next is best done in his own words: “Initially, when dealing with minority rights, courts in India had invariably conceptualised their role as that of a political party in opposition – until one of the political parties, the BJP, in the early 1990s characterised the policy of the Congress Party (the ruling party in power at the Centre for more than 40 years) as an “appeasement of the minorities”. The label stuck; “minority” became and has become an unpopular word.

We can see now why it is so difficult for someone such as Modi to speak out when his party members say madrassas are hot beds of terror or make hate speeches against minorities; for to take a stand would be to be demoted as a Muslim appeaser. Thus far, he and his party have had it both ways, let loose the fanatics to play to the Hindu constituency but distance your selves from them and sanitise the prime minister by letting him wax eloquent on development; run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.

Of course, when Nariman talks of minoritianism he does put the brakes on how far a society can go to accommodate its minorities. He quotes none other than Abraham Lincoln on this “the rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement is wholly inadmissible; so that rejecting the majority principle, anarchy and despotism in some form is all that is left”.

The middle path is the only way forward says Nariman, but it cannot be hidden that India has moved considerably away from what the founding fathers had conceived the nation to be; its identity is increasingly now caught up with its Hindu ancestry and to deny this is to be out of touch with ground realities. The small ‘m’ will define the minorities. And when the media in India question why Modi on his recent visit to Japan presented the emperor with the Bhagwat Gita, it plays into the hands of the Hindu right, strengthening unintentionally the fanatics within the BJP.

Modi has been handed out a commanding majority, he has the historic opportunity to reshape India, and if there is anyone who can put this Hindu-Muslim acrimony to rest, it is him. More than Nehru, the architect of modern India, Modi, spawned by the RSS, has destiny beckoning him.

Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer, working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.