The imperilled idea of India

Indian cyber trolls who often attack us on our own pages may not realise this but the rise of intolerance is no reason to gloat for any Pakistani. It is frightening to watch. And no, not because it can lead to a military misadventure or a nuclear war. It is because our nation finally seems poised to recover from the tragedies that resulted from allowing hate to grow as a cottage industry for decades. We worry about a relapse as the penitent Pakistani state and society continue to pay with lives and every other thing that is considered precious for the expedient miscalculations made in the past. Hate is among the most contagious plagues. It is about time Indian fence-sitters started worrying too. That what is happening right now is not easily reversed. Ask us. We will tell you. And while the world does not seem much bothered about Pakistan except for the safety of its nuclear arsenal, it cannot turn a blind eye to the sinking of another Titanic with over a billion souls on board.

Let us face it. Collapse of reason, crash of democracy and secularism can take place in any society. Good, intelligent men can become complacent for personal gains or spontaneously lose sanity for no obvious reasons. But it becomes seriously appalling when society already has seeds of every form of inequality. The fact that the founders of modern India wisely chose it to be a constitutional democracy and a secular polity helped the entire world overlook the deep flaws in Indian society. India, after all, has an incredible amount of soft power. But with the unstoppable rise of the RSS, its Parivar and political mascot, the BJP, all those inadequacies have been thrown into sharp relief. We knew about the ethnic and lingual division in the country. We called it cultural diversity. We knew about the tense peace between the religious communities. We called it secularism. We knew about sharp inequality among the social classes. We called it thriving capitalism. What we did not have time to notice, however, was the abject and cruel casteism in Indian society.

Casteism is more troubling as a social malady than most Indian woes put together. Why? Because unlike other prejudices, it goes against the very grain of democracy, egalitarianism and humanism. It professes that all men are not born equal. Still not convinced? Consider this. If you have grown up in a society that prides itself on being a secular democracy and yet lets a huge chunk of society (in this case, the forward castes) treat another huge chunk (backward castes) as lesser humans, in some cases inferior to brutes, and do nothing about it, you have a gaping hole in a vital inner chamber.

This is prejudice at its worst. And while we allow its exotic name to obscure reality, casteism is racism with another name. Rings a bell? Yes, it sure does. Combine racism and all-pervasive intolerance and you get Hitler’s Germany. Elsewhere I have already written how the second supreme leader of the RSS, and the founder of the ruling BJP’s sister concern the VHP, MS Golwalkar, rationalised even eulogised the Nazi methods and purges in his book, We, or Our Nationhood Defined. And that sitting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS member, wrote a passionate profile of Golwalkar in his book Jyotipunj (Beams of Light) and called him his inspiration.

Within the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, rank two men, namely LK Advani (through his Ram Rath Yatra of 1990 that led to the demolition of the Babri Mosque) and Modi (2002 Gujarat violence), who have changed the criteria of promotion. Now the party upstarts think the crueller and more outrageous your actions, the better chance you have of rising to the top in the shortest possible time. As a result, India’s DNA is being rewritten. Word has it that the plague of radicalism is spreading like wildfire among Indian youth. After a litany of beef-related incidents, the scenes of intolerance on university campuses, and why even on the premises of courts, show what India is becoming. Indian moderates will have to push back hard if they want to escape extinction. The world will also have to stop its complacency or the idea of India will be lost forever.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 20^th,  2016.

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