This article is part of The Wire‘s ‘India Black Boxed’ series. Read it here: Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
In a recent piece titled ‘Introducing: India Black Boxed‘, The Wire underlined this regime’s carefully calibrated strategy of purveying multiple narratives unrelated to facts that nevertheless take flight through coopting, if not terrorising, the institutions of governance, of accountability, and of, dare I say, the boot-licking media. That piece has prompted a series of articles on the disjunct between the high-decibel hype of a conscienceless dispensation and wretched reality.
Such dissection of programmes and myths of this regime couldn’t have been planned at a more opportune time. We are on the cusp of the most crucial election in our history, a life-and-death combat that will decide whether India remains a bumbling democracy or chooses to be a Hindu rashtra, where minorities live on sufferance.
Early in his reign, our supreme illusionist spun that beguiling Socratic slogan “Sabka saath, sabka vikas“, which later saw the addition of “sabka vishwas”. It captured the essence of the nation’s foremost goal of fostering social solidarity premised on the doctrine that every human being matters. In 2015, he announced: “My government will not allow any religious group belonging to the majority or minority to incite hatred against others, overtly or covertly.” He called on Hindus and Muslims to work together to fight poverty instead of fighting one another. His message of reconciliation and hope was lapped up by the minorities, some of whom named their newborn “Narendra Modi”. But the stark truth is that his professed concern for the minorities, particularly Muslims, is an absolute sham, staggering in its audacious disingenuity. That’s what I intend to expound on – the ugly reality behind the fake rhetoric of this regime’s “minority outreach” that invariably surfaces at election time, like now.
The ordinary Muslim dreads the election season, which is when his community is yanked out of the shadows and becomes the dupe in the murky politics of the competing camps. That’s also when the wolf wears sheepskin. A few months back, the prime minister, going against the grain of his hardwired Hindutva ideology, called upon BJP workers to reach out to every section of society – Pasmanda Muslims, the Bohra community, Muslim professionals; to visit universities and churches; to accommodate and cherish different languages and culture; to highlight the government’s welfare schemes; and (hold your breath) refrain from making unnecessary remarks on irrelevant issues like movies as they deflect from the development agenda. It was the usual sanctimonious lecture about fostering bonding between communities, cultural empathy, tolerance and positive thinking.
The hypocrisy is stunning. Let’s begin by examining his rhetoric on the ‘irrelevant’ celluloid screen which rules most people’s lives. Just over a year ago, in 2022, the prime minister publicly endorsed The Kashmir Files, a movie based on the Kashmiri Pandit exodus from the Valley in 1990, saying that “it was incumbent on those who fight for the truth to ensure that all efforts to present history in the right perspective are supported”.
The film that he commends drips with hatred for the Muslim. To portray Muslim children chanting Taliban-style “Convert, leave or die”, to insinuate that all Muslims are terrorists, that Hinduism is in peril, that Hindu sages founded Kashmir and Muslim tyrants deflowered it, amounts to hate propaganda, and yet the prime minister was lead publicist for the film because it was right up the Hindutva alley.
As proof that the “Sabka saath…” and “justice for all, appeasement of none” slogans are no empty boast, the prime minister and his cohorts expatiate on the various welfare schemes that do not discriminate between communities as proof of this government’s even-handed justice. Implicit in their claim of “justice for all” is the belief, straight out of the totalitarian playbook, that economic well-being is all that matters, and every other value is dispensable. The prime minister needs to be reminded of great philosopher John Rawls’s definition of justice as ‘fairness in the distribution of life chances’. His sacred constitutional commitment is to secure for all citizens not economic security alone but: “Justice, social, economic, and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship…”
In the last nine years, we have been in the grip of a predatory Hindutva nationalism that is majoritarian in its sensibilities and flagrantly anti-Muslim. The unending litany of gratuitous cruelty – lynchings, ghar wapsi, anti-Romeo squads, beef vigilantism, bulldozer terror, the cowardly mob machismo in front of mosques and the ubiquitous rhetoric of pure hate – cannot be subsumed by catchy slogans of solidarity and togetherness.
Apologists for the regime play down the sheer horror inflicted on Muslims, arguing that stray incidents of criminality by individuals cannot be generalised to make definitive judgements on the prevailing social milieu. But that’s a clever dodge which needs to be countered by fleshing out a few happenings which tell the tale of a society that has lost its humanity and moral core.
How can we ever live down our devilish, inhuman response to the Covid pandemic when death had full dominion, killing without consideration for caste or creed? At that godforsaken time, this government, aided by the ever-biddable media, launched a venomous campaign of calumny against the Tablighi Jamaat. A petty government babu played Goebbels, appeared every day on TV spreading falsehoods, even making the ridiculous claim that the Tablighi Jamaat was the dominant single cause for the epidemic. The truth-challenged BJP IT head added his poison by comparing the Tablighi congregation with an “Islamic insurrection”. In a country that is now bereft of a social conscience, scores of Tablighi Jamaat members were incarcerated in jails and detention centres across India for allegedly flouting corona virus guidelines – absurd charges that were all quashed by various high courts. And yet not a single individual has been held accountable for this diabolical miscarriage of justice. (Aakar Patel’s piece of January 9 recapitulates the sheer horror.)
Martin Luther King had famously observed that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Nice sounding words but then, what does one make of a society where injustice against Muslims has not just wide acceptance but is applauded?
How can one ever forget the ogre, Shambhulal Regar, who hacked to death Afrazul Khan for the unpardonable crime of being Muslim while Regar’s 14-year-old nephew filmed the horror and uploaded it for the world? Even more Kafkaesque was the subsequent honouring of Regar with a tableau during the Ram Navami celebrations for vindicating “Hindu pride”. As haunting for its sheer inhumanity was the cold-blooded, ‘tactical’ rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim shepherd girl in Kathua to frighten away the Bakharwal tribals. Here too, sections of society, including the Bar Association of Kathua, were vehement in their support of the killers. And then you have a Union minister, Jayant Sinha, felicitating eight men convicted for killing Alimuddin Ansari, on suspicion that he was carrying beef, and getting rewarded with a handsome win in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. In Gujarat, 10 Muslim youth who were arrested for allegedly disrupting a garba function were, by turns, pinned to an electric pole and flogged by policemen in front of an applauding crowd. And let’s not forget the nightmare of Bilkis Bano! What’s terrifying is that such incidents are now so routine that they no longer shock us.
In today’s India, supremacist, ethnocentric Hindutva with its explicit anti-minority bias provides the ideological underpinning for State social policy. In blatant disregard of the Constitutional mandate, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which legitimises discrimination against Muslims will soon be implemented. The government’s justification is that the law has been passed by Parliament. But then, so were the Jim Crow and Nuremburg laws! In like vein, the anti-conversion, anti-cow slaughter laws, the abrogation of Article 370, the looming Uniform Civil Code (UCC) are of a piece with the majoritarian character of the State.
In these schismatic times, our religious identity trumps every other identity. One is first a Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh or Christian even before one is recognised as an Indian. However eclectic a person’s beliefs and practice, he is nevertheless transfixed to his religious identity. As a Christian, I am embarrassed by the shenanigans of the higher Christian clergy who are actively abetting the communal agenda of this regime. They have wilfully fuelled communal tensions and joined in Muslim-bashing with baseless allegations of love jihad and narcotic jihad against Muslims. These small men in holy robes who are playing footsie with this regime for reasons of expediency, need to be reminded of Pastor Niemoller’s warning: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”
The latest spin of this morally bankrupt and dangerously dishonest regime is that the magnificent Ram temple has heralded the dawn of Ram Rajya. But what we are seeing is a satanic distortion of Lord Ram’s sacred law of governance based on justice, equality and non-violence. The Ram Temple is being used not for healing but for further dividing us. Further, if ‘aastha’ or faith was hurt by the destruction of a temple by a non-believer centuries ago, is it okay if temples are now razed to build arcades to the Ram Mandir or for beautifying Varanasi? Is the aastha of a Muslim or Christian so unimportant that destruction of their places of worship in the larger interests of the majority community is permissible?
And now, the Gyanvapi mosque has been broken open for puja! We are staring into an endless darkness.
Mathew John is a former civil servant and Annie Mathew teaches history.
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