Modi a Hindu democrat
For a Hindu democrat, any dissenting voice against this journey is unwelcomed
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) concedes defeat in the eastern state of Jharkhand. PHOTO: FILE
India’s Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu asked the demonstrating protestors to “express dissent in a democratic way.” Before he became the Vice President, Naidu was the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Naidu’s comment came in the backdrop of a nationwide protest against an exclusionary set of laws and policies sets to make India a majoritarian state. Comprising the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Population Register (NPR), and the National Register of Citizens (NRC); these laws and policies have thrown India into a constitutional crisis.
Naidu could have made a right appeal; however, he was talking to the wrong audience. The protest was peaceful until the state decided to respond in an undemocratic way. The campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMIU) in Delhi was turned into a “battlefield” when the police fired rubber bullets and teargas on the demonstrators. Students were beaten up mercilessly and thrown in jail without medical treatment. A similar vandalism was at display at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), when on December 15, 2019, police launched a crackdown in the university using stun grenade and teargas. Students were hounded out of their hostel rooms and beaten. Sustaining serious injuries, at least 70 students were taken to the AMU’s Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (JNMC) Hospital in a single day. A 26-year-old doctoral student of chemistry lost his right hand to a smoke shell. A few students lost their eyesight to rubber bullets.
Though according to an estimate, students from at least 50 colleges and universities participated in the nationwide protest, the clampdown was precipitated only against the JMIU and AMU students.
It was, however, not the first time that the police had entered the campus of these universities.
In 2000, the police entered the JMIU campus to forcibly quell a demonstration being held to protest the death of an engineering student who was killed in an accident by a privately owned bus service. They assaulted a professor who tried to stop them from entering the campus, beat up students and detained 66 of them. An investigation into the raid revealed that besides roughing them up and snatching their belongings, the students were questioned about their patriotism towards India. A similar enactment was played out in 2008, to chase down terrorists hiding in the university’s vicinity.
With terrorism becoming a catchphrase after 9/11, a deliberate suspicion has been woven around Muslims to establish them as unpatriotic and rabble-rousers. Had there been a trust in the Muslims, the BJP would not have decided about the political fate of Kashmir unilaterally. Not only dissent is unwelcome in the BJP lexicon, it invites the ire of the magnitude reserved only for out-castes in the Hindu scriptures. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology around which the BJP has established its persona considers Muslims an “internal threat” to the Hindu Rashtriya (Hindu polity).
It was not only Naidu who made a one-sided comment, Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of India’s largest province Uttar Pradesh, also talked about taking “revenge” from those who had damaged the property during the protests. He has demanded millions in compensation from some 200 people. A similar jibe was heard from a police officer in a Muslim neighbourhood of Meerut. He was asking a group of Muslim men to “go to Pakistan if you do not want to live here.”
What is staggering in all these comments is the absence of empathy for the Muslims. Property mattered and not the lives lost in the skirmishes, which could have been prevented had the BJP shown tolerance towards the “dissenting voices.”
From killings over cow slaughtering to the passage of the CAA, there has been a muted reluctance to assimilate Muslims, any further, in the so-called Hindu polity.
Narendra Modi has been repeatedly saying that he or his party had not gone against the democratic principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Well, Modi could be right. From the Hindu lens that Modi and his cronies have worn they could see democracy painted in anything but Hindu.
Modi is a Hindu democrat. Just like Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese democrat. Modi and Kyi understand democracy and other universal values in a Hindu and Buddhist way, respectively. When she clamped down on Rohingya Muslims and perpetrated one of the worst ethnic cleansing mayhems leading to an exodus of 700,000 Rohingya Muslims from Burma’s Rakhine State, she was using democratic principles in a “Buddhist” way.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, a Polish writer, was invited to Burma by U Nu’s government, in 1952. On his return, he penned down his observation about the Burmese elites as: “Conservatism in family life, colonial snobbism in Victorian dress, and a thin layer of Europeanism in their exterior outlook.” In her book, The Moral Democracy: The Political Thought of Aung San Suu Kyi, Michal Lubina, interpreted Grudzinski’s observations as: “The Burmese elites of the 1950s dressed in a Western manner, yet this was only a thin layer that covered a deeply ingrained local, Buddhist identity.
Therefore, Modi or Amit Shah or others from the RSS clan cannot behave otherwise. Whenever the founding fathers of the RSS, such as MS Glowalkar or Vinayak Savarkar talked about their relationship with Muslims they used terms like pratishodh and pratikaar, all synonyms for revenge, retribution and retaliation.
The universe of a Hindu aligned to the RSS and the BJP is one strictly divided into “friends” and “foes,” “us” and “them”, “Hindus” and “Muslims.”
The “otherisation” of Muslims reached its climax when on the eve of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990, the foot soldiers of the Hindutva lobby (the BJP-VHP-Bajrangdal combine) walked through the streets of India, raising the slogan “Musalman ke do hee sthaan, Pakistan ya qabarstan.” (Muslims have only two places, Pakistan or cemetery). Underlying the slogan was a muted message that India belonged to the Hindus.
Thirty-years down the road and the BJP has already taken the ominous journey of making India a Hindu Rashtriya to a new high. For a Hindu democrat, any dissenting voice against this journey is unwelcomed.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 2nd, 2020.
Naidu could have made a right appeal; however, he was talking to the wrong audience. The protest was peaceful until the state decided to respond in an undemocratic way. The campus of the Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMIU) in Delhi was turned into a “battlefield” when the police fired rubber bullets and teargas on the demonstrators. Students were beaten up mercilessly and thrown in jail without medical treatment. A similar vandalism was at display at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), when on December 15, 2019, police launched a crackdown in the university using stun grenade and teargas. Students were hounded out of their hostel rooms and beaten. Sustaining serious injuries, at least 70 students were taken to the AMU’s Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College (JNMC) Hospital in a single day. A 26-year-old doctoral student of chemistry lost his right hand to a smoke shell. A few students lost their eyesight to rubber bullets.
Though according to an estimate, students from at least 50 colleges and universities participated in the nationwide protest, the clampdown was precipitated only against the JMIU and AMU students.
It was, however, not the first time that the police had entered the campus of these universities.
In 2000, the police entered the JMIU campus to forcibly quell a demonstration being held to protest the death of an engineering student who was killed in an accident by a privately owned bus service. They assaulted a professor who tried to stop them from entering the campus, beat up students and detained 66 of them. An investigation into the raid revealed that besides roughing them up and snatching their belongings, the students were questioned about their patriotism towards India. A similar enactment was played out in 2008, to chase down terrorists hiding in the university’s vicinity.
With terrorism becoming a catchphrase after 9/11, a deliberate suspicion has been woven around Muslims to establish them as unpatriotic and rabble-rousers. Had there been a trust in the Muslims, the BJP would not have decided about the political fate of Kashmir unilaterally. Not only dissent is unwelcome in the BJP lexicon, it invites the ire of the magnitude reserved only for out-castes in the Hindu scriptures. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology around which the BJP has established its persona considers Muslims an “internal threat” to the Hindu Rashtriya (Hindu polity).
It was not only Naidu who made a one-sided comment, Yogi Adityanath, the Chief Minister of India’s largest province Uttar Pradesh, also talked about taking “revenge” from those who had damaged the property during the protests. He has demanded millions in compensation from some 200 people. A similar jibe was heard from a police officer in a Muslim neighbourhood of Meerut. He was asking a group of Muslim men to “go to Pakistan if you do not want to live here.”
What is staggering in all these comments is the absence of empathy for the Muslims. Property mattered and not the lives lost in the skirmishes, which could have been prevented had the BJP shown tolerance towards the “dissenting voices.”
From killings over cow slaughtering to the passage of the CAA, there has been a muted reluctance to assimilate Muslims, any further, in the so-called Hindu polity.
Narendra Modi has been repeatedly saying that he or his party had not gone against the democratic principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Well, Modi could be right. From the Hindu lens that Modi and his cronies have worn they could see democracy painted in anything but Hindu.
Modi is a Hindu democrat. Just like Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese democrat. Modi and Kyi understand democracy and other universal values in a Hindu and Buddhist way, respectively. When she clamped down on Rohingya Muslims and perpetrated one of the worst ethnic cleansing mayhems leading to an exodus of 700,000 Rohingya Muslims from Burma’s Rakhine State, she was using democratic principles in a “Buddhist” way.
Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, a Polish writer, was invited to Burma by U Nu’s government, in 1952. On his return, he penned down his observation about the Burmese elites as: “Conservatism in family life, colonial snobbism in Victorian dress, and a thin layer of Europeanism in their exterior outlook.” In her book, The Moral Democracy: The Political Thought of Aung San Suu Kyi, Michal Lubina, interpreted Grudzinski’s observations as: “The Burmese elites of the 1950s dressed in a Western manner, yet this was only a thin layer that covered a deeply ingrained local, Buddhist identity.
Therefore, Modi or Amit Shah or others from the RSS clan cannot behave otherwise. Whenever the founding fathers of the RSS, such as MS Glowalkar or Vinayak Savarkar talked about their relationship with Muslims they used terms like pratishodh and pratikaar, all synonyms for revenge, retribution and retaliation.
The universe of a Hindu aligned to the RSS and the BJP is one strictly divided into “friends” and “foes,” “us” and “them”, “Hindus” and “Muslims.”
The “otherisation” of Muslims reached its climax when on the eve of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990, the foot soldiers of the Hindutva lobby (the BJP-VHP-Bajrangdal combine) walked through the streets of India, raising the slogan “Musalman ke do hee sthaan, Pakistan ya qabarstan.” (Muslims have only two places, Pakistan or cemetery). Underlying the slogan was a muted message that India belonged to the Hindus.
Thirty-years down the road and the BJP has already taken the ominous journey of making India a Hindu Rashtriya to a new high. For a Hindu democrat, any dissenting voice against this journey is unwelcomed.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 2nd, 2020.