অন্যায় যে সহে,
তব ঘৃণা যেন তারে তৃণসম দহে।
Those who are morally wrong,
And those who don't stand up against moral
wrongs,
Let your hatred burn them to cinders.
So said the poet who gave an almost new
language to the Bengali speech community. But Rabindranath Tagore could not use
strong words in personal life. Even if he was upset with someone, even when he
was seething in anger within, he couldn’t shout. Let alone burning anyone to
cinders, he would not even look directly at the person who had upset him, say
something quickly and indifferently, and be done with it.
But clearly, his standards of moral
positioning were different when it came to social injustice. Time and again in
his life he would leave the comforts of his writing desk and plunge himself in
mass movements against atrocities committed by the colonialists. Seventy-six
years after his death, and 69 years after the little man who united India first
time in history was shot dead, how do we, the people of India, deal with
instances of moral crimes in these turbulent times?
The question came to my mind when I read about
someone burning alive a poor, defenceless man in Rajasthan, and the aggressor’s
nephew filming the gory incident for the benefit of countrimen who couldn’t witness
it in real time.
Clearly, four kinds of people have seen the
video or read the news report. The first, people who are similarly placed like
the victim, that is, Muslims (and Dalits) in India today, who have been
physically attacked repeatedly, on some false pretext or other, since Mohammed
Akhlaq was lynched in his home in Uttar Pradesh on 28 September, 2015. A number
of them have been violently killed or physically harmed. But that is a relatively
minor statistic, what should disturb us more is the countless Muslims who are
freely insulted and abused in a so-called free society, but whose travails are
not headline-worthy. What should really disturb us is the silent terror in
which 17 crore Muslims live in India today.
In the second group are the ordinary Hindus
who accept the BJP-RSS ideology. They almost never protest against murders and
mayhem, and I wonder why. There certainly are millions of honest and morally
upright people among them. I do not know they aren’t upset by organised cowardly
violence against the weak. Do they condone it because they believe all this is
going to lead us to a more desirable society? Or do they condone it because
they feel it is fine if the BJP goons are paying it back to Muslims for the
atrocities committed against Hindus in medieval India, or against Hindus in
Bangladesh? I might add here that while
the historical evidence about the extent of persecution of Hindus under
medieval Muslim rulers is fuzzy, the basic premises could well be correct. On
the other hand, the ethnic cleansing that has happened in Bangladesh is an incontrovertible
– if largely ignored – fact. However, can any civilized human believe in the
doctrine of an-eye-for-an-eye?
Continuing with this group of people, a
cold terror runs through my spine when I think that many of the SS men who
routinely murdered and tortured Jews, who threw children in fire pits in the
death camps of Germany in the 1930s were “normal human beings” and happy family
men, who would tuck their children in bed at night, and kiss their wife
goodnight. Are we, by any chance, breeding such a group of cold-blooded killers
in India today?
In the third group are the political
masters, the BJP-RSS combo. They seem to me the most internally consistent
characters in this sad drama. They were the people in colonial India who
rejected our pluralistic history, and – like their ideological cousins on the
other side, the Muslim League – accepted the colonial doctrine that had begun
in 1818 with John Stuart Mill, a doctrine that viewed India as a Hindu-Muslim
binary and rejected the inclusive approach to nationalism. After many decades
of being in the fringe, and tireless efforts to create a political base by
doing social work (this the RSS have been doing, consistently), they are in
power today. (I would exclude Mr Atal Behari Bajpai’s 13 days and five years of
rule for this analysis. I believe he did not represent the political force that
Narendra Modi represents.)
That the BJP-RSS combine would now try to
push their advantage should surprise no one. What is new to their approach is
the replacement of their urban small-trader constituency by big capital. The
slogan Make in India stands for BJP’s
focus on industrialists, which should in turn help the aspirational urban
middleclass, another section that supports them in a big way. No problem there,
per se. But sadly, the party seems unconcerned about the poor and the less
privileged in general, including the trader community. This is seen by demonetisation,
a highly complex Internet-dependent GST, and forcing cashless transactions that
is likely to marginalise the unorganised sector even more, and the kid-glove
treatment given to the big business who owe thousands of crores to public
sector banks. This is also seen in the attempt to introduce the bullet train
while continuing to neglect the railway system for the masses, which offers
terrible facilities at subsidised rates, and where a derailment every week seems
to have become the norm. At a lower extreme of the spectrum, the main lifeline
offered to the poor by the previous government, the MGNREGA has been diluted
and AADHAR is sought to be made mandatory for everything from birth to ration
card to subsidy to death, with little concern for people on the fringe, who
find it extremely difficult to comply.
And most importantly, the pro-big-capital
tilt on the economic front has been going on parallel to nurturing BJP’s core
political constituency based on Hidutwa. This was seen, for example, when a
rabidly anti-Muslim Hindu priest was made the chief minister of the largest
state in India.
The BJP fought and won the general
elections of 2014 on the basis of the so-called success of the “Gujarat Model”,
or the economic growth in Gujarat during Narendra Modi’s 14 years as chief
minister. Christophe Jaffrelot shows[1]:
“While [Narendra Modi’s] government
achieved a remarkable growth rate, his public policies as well as his politics
have been on par with growing inequalities. The collaboration between the state
and the corporate sector—an old tradition in Gujarat—gained momentum under
Modi, businessmen benefitting from low wages, acquiring land more quickly and
at a better price, and obtaining more tax breaks, etc. Simultaneously, Gujarat
spent less than most of the other states of India on education and health.”
Therefore, we should not be surprised that India
today is suffering the worst of both worlds, the ruthlessness of capitalism and
the ignorance of theocracy reeking of the Middle Ages. But let me repeat, we
cannot blame the party in power today. They hadn’t denounced their political
ideology to come to power, they had only hidden it just a little.
*
And that brings us, rather belatedly, the
fourth piece in this jigsaw puzzle. We, the ordinary well-heeled Hindus of
India. There can be a little doubt that we are a vast majority. If we stand up
as a body and protest, the people that are trying to take us to a medieval
kingdom controlled by corrupt capitalists can certainly be defeated.
But first, we must agree that they need be
defeated.
Bangalore / Monday, 11 December 2017
