Modi ought to speak up against communal hatred

From 1984, when Sikhs were dragged out of their homes and killed in a revenge attack when former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh guards, to 2014, little has changed in India. Communal frenzy has hit the country hard with alarming regularity, vitiating the atmosphere of distrust and subterranean hatred that hang uneasily over its fragile multicultural ethos. In the recent past, it was witnessed in Mumbai’s Azad Maidan riots and the exodus of Northeastern natives from Bengaluru in 2012, the Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, and the latest was last week in Pune, a communally sensitive city in Maharashtra where I have been living for the last one year. Home to some of the most prominent IT companies and educational institutes, the city lived through a strong strain of violence — properties damaged and religious places vandalised — over a social media post of morphed photographs of the 17 Century Maratha warrior Shivaji and Shiv Sena supremo late Bal Thackeray. The face of this communal tension was 28-year-old Mohsin Shaikh, who, sporting his identity — a skull cap and beard — was bludgeoned to death by members of right-wing outfit Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS) for no fault of his own. This incident confirmed again the deep-seated prejudice in the daily life of the secular modern Indian republic.

News of a senseless killing should shock, but so many of us in India are not surprised. What is shocking is that it took more than a week for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make a statement condemning the murder. “...incidents [such as the Pune killing] must provoke us to look inwards and seek answers,” he said yesterday. He is yet to demand strict action against the outfit that conspired to kill Shaikh, while HRS’s Facebook page is yet to be blocked by the cybercrime cell.

Regardless of whether the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leaders approve, its ascendance to power in Delhi has filled its hardline supporters, especially the fringe groups, with a sense of empowerment. Its sweeping victory gave those groups a tacit validation. It is a fact that BJP leaders are often seen sharing space with an assortment of fringe Hindu groups, such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.

Also it will be naive to forget that volunteers of Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — who actively campaigned in the 2014 elections, using technology and sheer manpower to mobilise voters in the name of development — helped Modi oust the ruling Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in a seismic political shift. So now, it is payback time for them. The scripted nature of the so-called Modi Wave saw an unabashedly partisan corporate media, many owned by the same behemoths that backed Modi financially and ideologically. This scenario is not unfamiliar in the West, particularly in the US, but it bodes ill for dissent, fairness and justice.

Meanwhile, HRS chief Dhananjay Desai, who distributed objectionable pamphlets on June 2, the day Shaikh was killed, was arrested by police only on Tuesday (June 10) for his alleged involvement in a criminal conspiracy. Eight long days after the communal mayhem. Though courts have found no evidence to indict him, Modi has been tarred by critics as a Hindu extremist after sectarian riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002 left more than 1,000 people dead, mostly Muslims. But after more than a decade, he has emerged as a development messiah for at least 85 per cent of the Indian electorate that does not see itself as a minority. And when India’s newly-elected prime minister invited leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) for his swearing-in ceremony, he demonstrated that his anti-Pakistan diatribes did not come in the way of pragmatic relationship-building with neighbours, thus making an impact on secular opinion worldwide. Modi started with a clean slate, selling dreams of economic reforms and US President Barack Obama was quick to give him a stamp of approval by inviting him to the White House, even though he was barred from entering the country less than 10 years ago over massacres of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

Interestingly, now, Washington sees its relationship with India as critical. Obama has called it “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st Century”. Ironically, IT professional Shaikh was part of the economic dream that BJP has sold to young Indians, but that could not save him — he is the first casualty, post elections, of fringe group HRS, which has been functioning with impunity, having had more than two dozens of criminal cases registered against it. Shaikh’s killing is not an aberration. It was long feared by many. With the onset of campaigning for the Maharashtra assembly elections due in October, Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam told a news channel recently that the lynching of the Muslim youth was orchestrated with the aim of rousing communal tension. “This is BJP’s style of functioning. Wherever they have to fight elections, such communal sentiments are fanned,” he said.

Many feel that BJP and its affiliate outfits rarely miss an opportunity to rail against minority communalism, a worrying feature of the Indian social and political landscape for a while. They, however, prefer to ignore the larger danger posed by majoritarian communalism, nourished on the anti-Muslim rhetoric. Sweeping economic reforms aside, the message from many of those who voted for Modi is that with this communal flare, we cannot close our eyes, as there is a potential for these movements to grow. The Hinduising of politics is a real blow for a country with a constitution that elevates pluralism.

There will soon come a time when anyone who is even slightly critical of Modi and his government will be subjected to threats.

Between the mass manufacturing of consent and the violent suppression of dissent, the future for democracy looks grim. Shaikh’s death should be a wake-up call for the Indian prime minister, who is yet to be alarmed by the situation at hand. Mr Modi, given the circumstances, silence is not golden. Speak up.

Suparna Dutt D’Cunha is a freelance journalist based in India.