Letting out the communal genie

The politics of hate is flourishing in India unchecked, with New Delhi having let out the communal genie. A 55-year-old Muslim man was beaten to death in the Indian state of Bihar. According to local reports, an angry mob swarmed around the man, Mohd Kabul, and lynched him to death after accusing him of ‘cow theft’. This is not an isolated incident but one that fits neatly into a pattern of violence unleashed in the neighbouring country against its largest Muslim minority. One can have a peep into the kind of mentality that drives such wanton aggression if one samples the vitriol uttered by no less a person than the lawmaker of the ruling Bharatia Janata Party (BJP).

In unabashed comments, BJP member of assembly Vikram Saini said that those who feel unsafe in India should be bombed. In a video, the BJP representative can be seen issuing one threat after another: “Those who are unsafe in this country are anti-nationals and do not deserve to be [here]. Give me a ministry and I will attach bombs on their posteriors and blast,” the BJP aspiring minister thundered. He also lashed out at the Congress for repealing previously mandatory recitation of Vande Mataram in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Hate-mongering such as this and mob violence illustrated above are seeping into Indian society to a degree that a group of retired Indian bureaucrats recently felt impelled to voice their concern in public. Speaking of the December 3, 2018 incident in the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh (UP), in which a police officer was murdered in cold blood as he tried to pacify a mob, they described it as “the most dangerous turn yet in the direction taken by the politics of hate.” They were candid in their observation that the chief minister of the state acts as a “high priest of the agenda of bigotry and majoritarian supremacy”.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2019.

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