How Narendra Modi is remaking India into a Hindu state
The prime minister and his party are laying waste to the secular underpinnings of the constitution
| DELHI
THE PATTERN is plain to see. On the occasion of a religious festival, youths affiliated to the sangh parivar, or the Hindu-nationalist “family of organisations”, march through a densely packed slum. When the rowdy young men, sporting saffron-coloured clothes or flags and brandishing swords, reach a mostly Muslim neighbourhood, their chants turn to taunts and insults. Muslim boys start throwing stones. In the ensuing fight shops get looted, houses burned and lives lost. Reporters tally the damage. This is typically lopsided, inverting the proportions of India’s 79% Hindu majority and 15% Muslim minority. No matter. The sangh gleefully choruses its mantra: “Hindus are in danger! Unite!”
Over the past 50 years, Indian governments have repeatedly dampened such local eruptions by mouthing words of regret, paying a bit of compensation and tapping some retired worthy to write a soon-forgotten report. No longer. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which rules both at the centre in Delhi, the capital, and in about half of India’s states, is itself a child of the sangh. Many of its top leaders started as foot soldiers in just the sort of gangs that so predictably spark trouble.
Small wonder that as a bigger-than-usual spate of nasty
communal clashes broke out across a swathe of central India during this
spring’s festival season, BJP officials made scant effort to calm
things. Instead they loudly invoked the right of Hindus to “practise
their faith”, blamed Muslims for the violence and demanded exemplary
punishment. Following a mini-riot in Delhi on April 16th, provoked once
again by sword-waving youths menacing a mosque, Kapil Mishra, a local
BJP leader, quickly spun the events as a Muslim conspiracy. “They should
be identified and their homes should be bulldozed,” he declared. A few
hours later bulldozers duly rolled in, smashing Muslim property for
alleged building-code violations.
The
increasing use of summary collective punishment is disturbing
enough—the demolitions in Delhi followed identical post-pogrom targeting
of Muslims in three other BJP-ruled states. More telling still has been
the response from higher up in the party, and in particular from
Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister. The leader’s reaction to months
of sporadic communal violence and rising social tension, and to loud
calls from activists, politicians and even retired civil servants for
him to do something has been absolute silence.
...
India
has long stood out proudly in Asia, precisely because of its success in
building a nation from an extraordinary diversity of religions and
ethnicities. It has enjoyed both democracy and relative peace, even as
its neighbours succumbed to majoritarianism. Pakistan tried to shove the
Urdu language down Bengali throats, sparking a bloody war that gave
birth to Bangladesh. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority sought to lord it over
the island’s ancient Tamil minority, triggering a 26-year civil war
that left 300,000 dead. Even tiny Buddhist Bhutan hounded out its entire
Nepali Hindu minority—a sixth of its population—in the 1990s. Majority
muscle-flexing has reduced all too many Asians from citizenship to
tenuous subjecthood.
With
its robust democracy, independent courts, noisy press and fissiparous
diversity even within big categories such as Hindus, could India really
embrace majoritarian rule? Surely this goes against the grain of its own
history. In the messy partition at the end of British rule in 1947,
Muslims who feared Hindu majoritarianism created the new state of
Pakistan, while those who hoped for an all-embracing, secular country
remained with India.
...
[Over
the decades, however,] Hindu-nationalist dogma has filtered into
mainstream discourse by a slow-drip process. This has been propagated by
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, a volunteer service corps
founded in 1925 and once regarded by many Indians as cranks. Myriad
affiliated groups (including the BJP) with tens of millions of members,
amplify the word. Their main message, that Hindus must unite to face
imminent danger, may sound absurd in a country with an unassailable
preponderance of Hindus. But the urgency and passion of the cry, set
against the heroic narrative of a Hindu reconquista after centuries of
Muslim and European rule over Mother India, is irresistible for many.
...
At
the most extreme end of the Hindu-nationalist spectrum, speakers at
public rallies across northern India in recent years have launched
bidding wars of threats against Muslims, from mass rape to mass
expulsion. On May 7th Hari bhushan Thakur Bachaul, a BJP politician in
Bihar, in eastern India, declared that Muslims should be burned alive
just like effigies of the Hindu demon Ravana.
All
but a tiny portion of Hindus regard such talk as madly over the top.
Yet in part because of the reluctance of either Mr Modi or his RSS
mothership to intervene, the demonising tone has become commonplace, and
not just regarding the Muslims minority. Other groups such as Dalits,
leftist activists (dismissed as “urban Naxalites”) and liberal
do-gooders (smeared as “libtards” and “pseudo-seculars”) have become the
targets of digital troll armies and, dismayingly often, of the law.
The
large Christian (35m) and Sikh (25m) minorities are not spared, either.
False rumours of conversion, in many cases fanned by BJP-appointed
officials, have led to mob attacks on priests and church-run schools.
When farmers, many of them Sikhs from Punjab, protested against farming
reforms last year, the BJP tried to link them to Sikh separatist groups
that mounted an armed insurgency in the 1980s.
...
So
far, India’s Muslims have responded to the accumulating humiliations
with remarkable cool. When the city’s bulldozers growled into a Muslim
part of Delhi on May 9th for more punitive “enforcement of building
codes”, residents simply surrounded them in such numbers that they could
not move. But it would be foolish of Mr Modi to imagine that more and
more wood can be piled on a pyre, without risk of burning the whole
village down.
