India is gradually sliding into anarchy. The trend of radicalism flowing out of divisive politics has dented its democratic credentials. It is now an apartheid state where communal harmony is getting hard to find, and voices of rationality are being silenced at the behest of state power. This is no charge-sheet against the world’s largest democracy, and fourth biggest economy of the world, but are grievances that are off and on narrated by saner voices in India and abroad. Mahatma Gandhi’s great-grandson, Tushar Gandhi, is just an addition to the men of repute who think closely as to where India is heading, and are worried about its secular fabric. Tushar, in an interview in Mumbai recently, proclaimed that the ideology of hate, polarisation and divisions is eating into the vitals of the republic, and created a worrying resonance in India.
The scion of Gandhi, and his likes, must be heard by the Indians at large. It is a fact that the sense of otherness has gained dividends owing to the hate politics of BJP and its radical body, the RSS. It is unfortunate that cadres of the ruling party eulogise the assassin of the Founder of the Nation, and there have been moves to segregate the society on the lines of belief. This is largely attributed to the tectonic shift in extremism since the rise of BJP, and its divisive agenda of Hindutva in a country of more than a billion people.
It’s time for India to return to its original state. Its social mosaic is ranted, and a sense of cohesion is missing. Communal based violence in Kashmir, and other flashpoints of the country, are merely owing to disgust and excesses in human rights. The legacy of inclusiveness and egalitarianism that the founding fathers and writers of a secular constitution imbibed has been thrown to the wind. No society can thrive on hate politics and contempt for the belief of others, irrespective of the fact how developed or technologised it is. India’s diaspora and its intellectual community must mark this radicalism phenomenon as a threat to their very existence.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2023.
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