India: I’ve met Bharat Mata, but am scared of her new avtaar

The Tribune, Mar 13, 2016

I’ve met Bharat Mata, but am scared of her new avtaar
Saba Naqvi

Enter Bharat Mata. I have met her before, many times. I am specially privileged as a journalist to know some people in the RSS and VHP (besides the BJP). For nearly two decades now I have attended their events and seen them begin with an invocation of Bharat Mata

Yesterday, I heard full-throated cries of Bharat Mata ki Jai coming from the street outside my first floor apartment. For a split second let me confess to being a little afraid: had the social media trolls (who keep calling me a Jehadi terrorist) or some not-so-fringe group decided to come to my home to abuse/attack me? As it turned out, my fears were unfounded. The RWA in my locality was marching in demand for building an over-bridge connecting a Metro station.

It was interesting that they had decided to add Bharat Mata to their slogans. I live in an area with a very mixed Hindu-Muslim population, but the RWA does not have a single representative from the minority community. Beyond the rather obvious community division, there's an economic dimension to what goes on. Most RWA members are interested in the value of their properties in an area where Muslims, being poorer, are part of the squalor of the slum. A resident told me with refreshing honesty that the little boys from a nearby madarsa walking around with skull caps has put off buyers for his rather nice flat in an apartment building. Too many Muslims, therefore, do nothing for an already depressed property market.

Enter Bharat Mata. I have met her before, many times. I am specially privileged as a journalist to know some people in the RSS and VHP (besides the BJP). For nearly two decades now I have attended their events and seen them begin with an invocation of Bharat Mata. I have observed that the Bharat Mata they worship is inevitably an idealized fair skin deity. I have read commentaries about how this is an upper caste Aryan depiction, but I am not going there. That aspect of Bharat Mata did not scare me but I do remember being aesthetically a little disturbed at the rendition of Vande Mataram that followed. The original All India Radio version and the AR Rahman versions are set to Raga Desh, and I never heard any singer at the RSS events do justice to it.

I again met Bharat Mata in 2011 during the Anna movement. In those days Anna Hazare, a self-proclaimed Gandhian, held his fasts on a stage under a big image of Bharat Mata that I had till then largely seen as an emblem for the activities of the sangh parivar. The first story I wrote on this was titled "Jagran at Jantar mantar" because Yoga Guru Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar were part of the early articulation and mobilization that made the Anna movement into such a phenomenon.

The Anna movement had shades of the same hyper nationalism that is sought to be created today. Had Arvind Kejriwal remained tethered to Anna, I do not think he would have become what he is today. Thankfully, he would deliberately change the iconography around his movement and party. But I do wonder if the old link to Sri Sri is the only reason why he has supported the controversial Art of Living event in Delhi?

I covered every stage of the Anna movement. It was fascinating and at times exhilarating but some unpleasant things also happened to me during those days. Along with the late editor Vinod Menta, I was also sent a legal notice for writing about a particular individual's links to the Sangh. As it turned out I was right and the case was never followed up. Around the same time, I was also accosted in a south Delhi car parking lot by two angry men who were apparently waiting for me. They called me a gaddar and some uglier expletives, one of them pulled my arm and pushed and then they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared because onlookers would have intervened.

Bharat Mata is again being invoked in my neighbourhood. I worry that it is designed to provoke as much as invoke. I also know that the upright citizens who march in protest do not wish to invoke a riot as that could impact their property values even further. They are just asserting the new nationhood.

As I said earlier I am privileged to have contacts across the political spectrum so I am not worried for myself. But I do not like the climate where prejudice thrives under the guise of nationhood. I have no doubt that it is about relentless demonization of the other, be it minorities, leftists or liberals. Between attacking JNU and patronizing Sri Sri, there's been a lot of abuse that's going round. The lawyers who thrashed women journalists and Kanhaiya Kumar in court also invoked Bharat Mata.

Among the abuse I have had to endure in the last few weeks is a cut and paste version of some words uttered by me in a TV show, on a page with an image of Bharat Mata, under which sexually explicit and/or communal comments about me are written. The abnormal thing is I have become used to it. But I am clear that some of these worshippers of a mother goddess are also frustrated misogynists.