Around the same time the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won back three majority Hindu states from the Congress, the National Crime Registration Bureau (NCRB) report for the last two years was published. It almost got lost in the din that followed the BJP sweeping three out of four states in the crucial Hindi belt.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The NCRB data gives us invaluable insights into the direction we are headed. It reports that the last two years have recorded a 45% rise in hate speech and other acts that deepen and promote enmity between groups on grounds of language, religion, race, and place of birth registered under IPC(153 A).
The number of such cases reported has risen from 993 in 2021 to 1,444. It is no accident that maximum cases of hate speech were reported from UP (217), followed by Rajasthan (191) and Maharashtra (178). All these states have seen bitterly contested state elections in the last two years. It is also notable that the number of hate crimes registered a peak in some northeastern states and in Telangana, which have had state elections recently.
Elections in India kindle extraordinary emotions and hopes. Winning an election is seen, among the contestants, equivalent to stumbling upon a treasure. Not only does it trigger a process during which most winners speedily get rich, it also strengthens a sort of mystical conviction that it is all to be credited to ‘The Leader’ looking upon the ‘Chosen Ones’ with an eye of grace that elevates them above all others as infallible.
Many photographs preserve such moments of teary-eyed joy and feet touching among showers of rose petals. Look at the faces and the background carefully. The vigour, glory and significance it confers upon the Hindu religion as the divine wind under the party’s sails are obvious. Religion and a brilliantly aggressive leadership, both the winners and their voters are convinced that they have together created this period of accelerated expansion, winning coalition partners and influencing new voters from among the faithful. Jai ho! Jai ho! Such euphoria among the winners is a quintessentially Indian phenomena.
But before many begin to lament the degradation of the land of the Buddha and Gandhi, let’s cast an honest look at our past where hate speech, bombast and revenge, it seems, have frequently moved hand in hand whenever empires were being built and razed from Saindhav Pradesh to Magadh or from Tungbhadra region to Calicut.
The Kaushitaki Upanishad has a tale about Indra, by then self-proclaimed king of kings among Aryan gods. He had Pratardan, the son of Divodas, as his sidekick. Pratardan helped Indra plan his first coup against his own father. “O Son of Divodas,” Indra drunk on this victory, tells his mate Pratardan, “I shall grant you a boon now. What is it to be?” Pratardan gave the standard reply, saying he wanted nothing for himself, only love and welfare for all the people. Indra’s reply to Pratardan makes it clear how empire building is not about happiness and public welfare, but about raw power and merciless and sustained aggression: “The boon of power I give you is not for dispensing public welfare. Behold, I am The Truth. Study me closely for your own good. I have killed Tvashtr,a the creator of the Vajra. I fed the band of Aroormaga monks to Salavrik (dogs or wolves). I have broken up countless treaties made on earth, in sky and further up in heavens. But not a hair on my head was disturbed. If after receiving this wisdom from me, you can fathom the whys and wherefores of my acts, even if you go and murder your own kin, you shall cease to hesitate and not allow any emotions to cross your face ever again.”
Also read: Divided Cadre, Soft Hindutva and Other Factors That Don’t Help the Congress
Peace returned briefly to their valley. But such absolute power among gods and men is usually followed by hubris. The fall began. Indra lost out to the younger priest-led pantheon of Sanatan gods. Hari or Vishnu a Vaishnavite god joined the company of Hara (Shiva) and the coalition of Harihara was born. Enraged by the rising popularity of Krishna, now deemed the Avatara of Hari, Indra sent a terrible cloud burst to drown the region that defied his authority. At this Krishna is said to have picked up a whole mountain (Govardhan Parvat) on his little finger as an umbrella to protect his people and their herds and foiled the cyclonic deluge sent by an ageing Indra.
Krishna’s own rise is associated with considerable violence after barely evading the efforts by uncle Kamsa to kill the infant born to jailed parents. As a teenager, he killed the royal tormentor of his parents and the killer of his siblings and proceeded to crown one of his close associates as king of Mathura. Then he got busy with his dream project: to form a coalition of republics. Today, there are countless temples to him, none to Indra, now remembered only at the beginning of festivals by a token flag (Indra Dhwaja)!
Thus the rise and fall of empires in India.
Political victories of the sort we have just seen are reminders that like Indra, like Krishna traumatised by an abusive childhood, leadership may often harbour a grudge resulting in reprisals and revenge. Recent mocking of the Opposition and their brilliant early leaders while celebrating victory of the party sweeps away the popular western games theory, according to which politics is like chess, complex but always played with inalienable rules.
Truth is in the wars for absolute power, each side fights for itself, with neither the referees nor the audiences.
“What,” Indra jauntily asks Pratardan, “exactly are rules, or ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ ?” Hadn’t he, the king of kings killed his own first contact, his chief arms dealer Tvashtra by his own hand without hesitating or allowing an emotion to cross his brow?
Myth proposes, action disposes.
For generations our parents had handed us homilies about right and wrong – civil speech, civil rights, and good manners. Today, they are just handing out laptops, the internet, and 3D printers. The more gifted and curious among the millennials, like Indra in his time, will at some point access not only the darknet to hack archives and lives but also AI and sophisticated spyware destroying all those who may bear witness against them later.
Through this 75-year journey as one nation, we are now facing a period when privileged star kids in The Archies reveal a generation that is not interested in all that s**t. English literacy and markets have created bubbles for the privileged where they live and love and have their being. Vision 2047 means nothing to them. They are, like many grown ups, in denial about reality: environmentally driven migrations. The political dominance of the Delhi-led north pitted against a southern resistance from the highly literate and prosperous southern states. Punjab is slowly evaporating as an agricultural haven like Bihar did in the 19th century. And more bedraggled semi-literate migrants will soon be streaming down south from the north. Will they leave any footprints in southern states other than Bhojpuri and Punjabi pop, full of more abusive words and images?
Language extinctions driven by social hubris and political spite and the confrontations over ‘imposition’ of an artificial uniformity – One Nation, One Flag, One Law – have been alien to our democracy. And our people have always fiercely rejected the efforts at homogenisation of local cultures. The new North versus South debate is alarming because it signals a democratic environment increasingly under the threat of a xenophobic intolerance of our smaller cultural republics. The only way to survive such toxicity is to pause, look back and make an honest assessment of our own past history of elections, of Indians from across the Wagah border and their culture and languages coming in, settling in happily, creating their own forms of pidgin dialects and enriching our and culture. It is the 75th year of our democracy and we are shrinking on many fronts.
“Iti Varnavidah perhoornipunam tam nibodhat.” (Thus words to the wise from the linguists. Try to make what you will out of them.)
– Paniniya Shiksha
Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.
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