New India is running amok
A SMALL event is sometimes more revealing than a
cataclysmic one that grabs headlines. Last month, the government-run
Indian Institute of Mass Communication in Delhi became the venue for a
distasteful display of the ruling BJP’s ideology. The chief speaker at
the provocatively titled conclave, ‘Nationalist Journalism in Today’s
Context’ was a police officer notorious for his human rights violations
in Chhattisgarh state where a Maoist insurgency is under way.
As
a pointer possibly to how media is expected to behave in these changed
times, the event started with a yagna (ritual worship conducted before a
fire). The point of this exercise was simply to cock a snook at the
media in general and the liberals in particular. As the institute’s
director general said dismissively to outraged students, “If you can
listen to the Hurriyat, why can’t we listen to Kalluri [the discredited
police from Chhattisgarh]?” To be deliberatively provocative is the
leitmotif of the Narendra Modi regime which is constantly testing the
limits of outrage.
The new normal is scary. Attacks on cow traders and dairy farmers have grown bolder by the day and become routine.
Demonetisation of last November, unprecedented in its scale,
was another such operation. It was not with any idea of unearthing
black money or weeding out corruption as Modi initially claimed while
withdrawing 86 per cent of the currency in use but a ruthless exercise
in social engineering wrapped in the flag of nationalism. The insane
measure inflicted untold hardship on the poor and put the opposition
politicians and economists on the back foot while the prime minister
mocked them for their lack of patriotism for daring to criticise the
policy.
As the nation muddled its way through the chaos
of a policy that changed daily and sometimes several times in a day,
Modi used his minister for information and broadcasting M. Venkaiah
Naidu to tell Indians that demonetisation was actually aimed at
“ushering in a behavioural change at all levels of society”. It was, he
explained, part of a “grand cultural revolution that the PM is working
on” because “the entrenched old order needs to make way for a new
normal”.
The new normal is scary — an India running
amok. Attacks on cow traders and dairy farmers — mostly Muslim and the
Dalit (untouchables in the vile Hindu caste system) — have grown bolder
by the day and become routine. So, too, the operations of the lynch mobs
that string up or flog their victims in an outburst of violence and the
moral righteousness that recalls the excesses of the Klu Klux Klan in
the 1950s when it flogged people for suspected immorality, drinking and
not attending church. Six decades later and in a different continent,
the style of such hoodlums has barely changed. The Romeo squads that
prey on young couples, the cow protectors and the moral food police that
check people’s homes and food containers for beef, the goons that kill
couples in inter-communal marriages, are cut from the same cloth.
In
the three years since he has been in power, the changes in Indian
society have been more insidious than making every citizen obey traffic
rules and “discharge his duties honestly” as Modi claims is his goal in
making the New India. It’s nothing as banal as that. What he is
targeting are the most sacrosanct of India’s constitutional safeguards,
the fundamental right to equality and other rights such as freedom from
exploitation and the right to practise one’s religion. Society has been
divided into different classes of citizens, a categorisation that is
slowly being institutionalised. No longer do Muslims in various parts of
UP enjoy freedom of worship, much less the right to eat what they want.
In Amroha, Muslims have not been allowed to enter their mosque during
this Ramazan because the local BJP leader and the storm troopers of a
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organisation do not approve. In other
towns and villages, hate leaflets have warned the community to leave
their ancestral homes. The same goes for the Dalits who no longer have
the freedom to practise traditional livelihoods or marry partners of
their choice.
Through all this turmoil Modi has worn
his ideological agenda boldly on his sleeve. No attack by a lynch mob
has ever been condemned by the prime minister and no party man who has
been out of line punished. So lynching it would appear is not an act of
lawlessness but a calculated part of Hindutva politics that accords it
official protection.
Some of the prime minister’s
decisions are as egregious as they can get. What calculations prompted
Modi, in March this year, to once again thumb his nose at liberal and
ethical values by appointing Adityanath, founder of the extremist outfit
known as the Hindu Yuva Vahini, as chief minister of UP one can only
guess. Adityanath, a long time BJP MP, is accused of inciting riots and
other criminal charges including attempt to murder. His brazen espousal
of violence is clearly an asset.
But the monster he has
unleashed in the country’s most vulnerable and backward state is
alarming even the RSS and old BJP hands who have been checkmated by
Modi. Even the sycophantic media which was enthusiastically defending
Modi’s choice of Adityanath is beginning to sound a little uncertain
now. In the pervasive atmosphere of fear, few have had the courage to
call Modi out. The only insider to be fiercely critical is Arun Shourie,
an RSS ideologue and former BJP minister, who was ironically
instrumental in making Modi prime minister. He accuses Modi as running
“a pyramidal decentralised mafia state where local goons will belabour
anyone whom they think is doing something wrong. The central people will
look the other way.”
That would leave the battered
citizen, the poor and marginalised who have borne the brunt of the
economic mismanagement, in an even more vulnerable position. India is in
huge ferment although you would not guess it going by mainstream media
reports. Farmers in Madhya Pradesh, protesting the worst agrarian
distress in recent memory, are being shot and killed. Dalits in Gujarat
and elsewhere have become a target of upper caste mobs and at least one
corner of UP has turned into a bloody battlefield. The unbridled
savagery of the new India is an ominous sign of coming conflicts as the
regime ignores the economic realities in single-minded pursuit of its
core agenda.
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi.
