India’s age of extremism

Earlier this week India’s flag carrier introduced a change that has come to symbolise the world’s most populous democracy’s descent into the extremist paradigm. Flyers aboard Air India will no longer have the option of enjoying a non-vegetarian meal. The change that Air India customers will be experiencing is part of an aggressive campaign across India against beef products and, unfortunately by extension, users of beef products spearheaded by the ultra-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The RSS, a group once banned by the British Indian government, and thrice banned by New Delhi, has many claims to infamy, often being cited as the prime instigator of communal tensions across India. In 1992, the group was said to be behind the demolition of Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh. The demolition led to an unprecedented wave of communal violence across India that resulted in the immediate deaths of around 2,000 people, most of them Muslims. To this day, the demolition plays a vital role in the underlying simmering communal tensions across India and has inspired groups from across the spectrum to resort to violent counter-ideologies, essentially rupturing India’s communal fabric in the long term.

The RSS and its often violent brand of Hindu nationalism took a back seat in the last few decades as successive regimes of the more secular Congress party guided India towards substantial economic growth and development. In his tenure as prime minister, Manmohan Singh, an Oxford educated economist and Congress party leader, oversaw a period of development and growth that in many ways cemented India’s position as a major world economy. It is often argued that India continues to enjoy the fruits of Singh’s earlier reforms in the form of economic development even today. Singh has therefore been the subject of much acclaim as an economic policymaker. The aspect of Singh’s regime that has garnered much less appreciation however is his uncompromisingly secular outlook for India. As the only Sikh Prime Minister in India’s history, Singh often reiterated India’s need to remain a secular republic, and to ensure that “religion did not become the basis for public policy.”

While Singh’s regime was known to be secular it wasn’t appreciated a lot as such back in the day. It was only when the BJP, a political party with deep ties to the RSS, came to the helm and enacted its policies that Singh’s regime began receive retrospective appreciation. Soon thereafter, India experienced the implementation of policies inspired by what was once described as the extremist rhetoric of the RSS. It was as if a white wall had to be painted black to appreciate the earlier whiteness of it.

Just as the Congress’s policies of economic development and secularity had been epitomised by Manmohan Singh, the BJP’s Hindu nationalist policies would be epitomised by, Narendra Modi, a man who had come to be known by fellow Indians as the “Butcher of Gujrat.” The Gujrat reference is to the communal riots that took place across the state in 2002, whereby the then Chief Minister of Gujrat was accused of having condoned communal violence that led to thousands of deaths in his state alone.

Since the BJP’s electoral decimation of the Congress and Modi’s ascension to the position of prime minister, India has experienced an unprecedented surge of Hindu nationalism in the realm of public policy. Minorities in India have become increasingly marginalised while inter-communal differences have become more entrenched. India’s long touted secular status is also under constant attack from a government that is bent on revisiting a definition of secularity put in place by the founders of the modern Indian nation. Ultimately what has come to symbolise a full-fledged campaign by the Modi government to undermine India’s secular roots, is a policy that has been termed the “beef ban.”

Beef has important religious connotations for many Indian faiths and as such cow slaughter, sale and beef consumption have been regulated throughout India’s history so as to respect the religious sentiments of India’s Hindu majority. It is erroneously thought that the beef regulations have been put in place only recently under Modi and that the same have resulted in the surfacing of communal tensions. What has changed with the advent of Modi is that a regulation previously used sparingly to strengthen secularity in India is now being forced on unwilling segments of the population, often with resort to violence. Under Modi, an emboldened RSS has inspired its followers to personally enforce crowd-sourced beef regulations not necessarily mandated by parliament, through lynch mobs, targeting of minorities, discrimination and other violent tactics.

The Modi government has tacitly supported the actions of these nationalists by refusing to condemn them, and by suppressing any form of dissent across India. The Modi regime has even gone so far as to try and ensure that legislative cover is provided to the sentiments and policies of the RSS. This is largely because Modi’s survival as prime minister is dependent on a growing electorate inspired by the ultra-nationalist policies of an increasingly emboldened and vocal RSS. Modi himself is a member of the RSS, a fact that furthers his commitment to the ultranationalist agenda.

And yet, Modi may now be growing wary of the RSS. Since, becoming prime minister, Modi has quite obviously taken a liking to being an active statesman. A pro at photo-ops, diplomatic hugs and international outreach, Modi may have come to prefer his role as a global statesman as opposed to a local nationalist. He may even have finally come around to understanding how acting as the latter threatens his standing as the former. Thus, his recent and long-awaited condemnation of the growing mob violence related to beef across India.

The condemnation is contrary to Modi’s commitments as an RSS member, but are quite apt as a leader aspiring to be an active member of the global community. Modi may then be trying to control the ultranationalist Frankenstein he helped develop. One wonders though, if the wheels set in motion by Modi and his RSS allies are stoppable, if the intolerance and divisiveness that grow every day in India can be rolled back or even controlled.

On the 30^th of January 1948, an estranged Hindu nationalist with links to RSS’s predecessors, climbed up the steps of the Birla House in New Delhi and shot Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi three times in the chest while Gandhi attended a multi-faith prayer. India had lost an irreplaceable part of its secular character then. One wonders, if Modi and the RSS have not again shot the fragile secular fabric of Indian society in the chest, perhaps this time, fatally.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2017.

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