SOURCE :
http://www.msn.com/en-in/news/national/one-year-of-modi-9-features-that-define-the-new-normal-for-muslims/ar-BBjYSn7
FEAR OF NON EXISTENT
UNKNOWN
PART ONE OF TWO
:ONE YEAR OF MODI
- NINE FEATURES THAT DEFINE THE
' NEW NORMAL ' FOR MUSLIMS
BY
Ajaz Ashraf
© Provided by Firstpost
To understand the New Normal, we need to rewind to May 2014.
When Modi ascended to office, Muslims feared they would be besieged by the Hindutva forces, which would bring to the front-burner the contentious Ram Temple and the Uniform Civil Code issues. Worse, it was thought Narendra Modi would trigger minor tsunamis to sweep the BJP into power in states where Assembly elections were due. To have a BJP government at the Centre and also in the states seemed akin to Muslims being caught in a pair of red-hot tongs.
Feature No. 1 of the New Normal is the absence of major rioting - this descriptor doesn't apply even to last year's communal conflagration in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, where three persons died, scored were injured, and curfew imposed for days. Yet Saharanpur pales in comparison to the horrors we Indians are capable of inflicting on each other.
Horrifying rioting may not happen under the New Normal, but the communal cauldron is constantly kept simmering, brought close to the boiling point every time there is an election around the corner. This began during the byelections in Uttar Pradesh and stopped following the Delhi Assembly polls.
Feature No. 2 of the New Normal pertains to the methods of keeping the communal cauldron on a slow simmer. Over the past year, Sangh Parivar has enhanced social tensions through divisive programmes such as love jihad and ghar wapsi.
An additional ploy is to raise communally charged non sequiturs to spark furious debates.
These debates on non sequiturs leave not only the minorities aghast, but also many who are counted as Hindus. TV, newspapers, digital sites remind the BJP that it was voted to power for ushering in good governance and development, not for tearing apart the social fabric. The media clamour conveys a sense of social instability, turning citizens and investors apprehensive of the future. Perhaps it also enables the moderates in the BJP to mount pressure on the hardliners to retreat.
This kicks in Feature No. 3 of the New Normal. Commmunal rhetoric no longer dominates, the anxieties and fears of minorities ebb, and life seems as normal as when non-BJP governments rule at the Centre. Call it 'extreme normalcy' - for it defies credulity, feels illusory, and always seems on the verge of disappearing.
The Sangh scripts extreme normalcy periodically to allay the fears of Hindus opposed to Hindutva. The liberal-left and rightwing secular among them then begin to debate issues material, not cultural or religious, in nature.
Over the last two months the nation has witnessed extreme normalcy, manifest in the discussions, say, over the land ordinance. In the weeks of extreme normalcy under the New Normal, members of the minority often begin to speculate on its duration, whether it has been crafted only because there is no election around the corner.
For instance, many Muslims have already begun to predict that extreme normalcy will end as soon as Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav cobble together an electoral alliance. Should they fail to reach an agreement, the period of extreme normalcy may be extended, but it is guaranteed to end sometime next year, in preparation for the battle for Assam and West Bengal in 2016 and Uttar Pradesh in 2017.
Feature No. 4 of the New Normal is the political marginalization of Muslims, which underlines in turn the diminishing importance of their vote. As I had written after the Lok Sabha elections, "If you were to look at the results from just the narrow perspective of victory and defeat, Muslims have been effectively disenfranchised: for the first time in India's electoral history, the Lok Sabha election has been won without their contribution." And not a single Muslim was elected on the BJP ticket to the Assemblies of Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand - all three states where the BJP captured power in recent months.
As the Muslim vote becomes less key to electoral victory, Muslims and their sentiments are not taken into account in controversial policy decisions. Hence, the expansion of the ban on cow slaughter to include bulls and oxens, and rewriting of history books to portray the Mughals as despicable bigots Rewriting of history is aimed at communalizing the past for demonizing the Muslims in the present.
Feature No. 5 of the New Normal is establishment double-speak, where RSS pracharaks and the Prime Minister speak in conflicting voices, a trend which originated under NDA-I.
RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat will conflate India with Hindus, extol the superiority of their culture, and tacitly exhort them to assert themselves over others, besides taking potshots at Mother Teresa and her like. By contrast, the Prime Minister will speak of the supremacy of the Constitution, assert an Indian citizen's right to profess and propagate his or her faith. Since Bhagwat only heads a self-proclaimed (and self-attested) cultural organisation, we are asked to place our faith in the Prime Minister's words.
Yet Modi didn't publicly admonish the Hindutva footsoldiers engaged in the ghar wapsi and love jihad programmes, or when the churches in Delhi were vandalized or desecrated before the Assembly elections there. His strategic silence gives lie to that Red Fort speech, made early in his tenure, which included an appeal to citizens to put a 10-year moratorium on caste and communal violence. Muslims would have preferred Modi to speak against the ideological basis of such violence instead of appealing for a moratorium.
However, the Delhi debacle prompted Modi to speak at a Church function about the "undeniable right" of people to "adopt or retain the religion" of their choice without coercion. Weeks later, he reiterated to Time magazine his government's intention to provide "total protection" to all communities.
Modi's interview to Time magazine, unwittingly, underscored
Thus, under the New Normal, Muslims' fear of the Hindutva projects are dismissed as plain paranoia. This also entails pumping journalists with statistics suggesting that the communal situation under Modi is the same as it was under his predecessor, Manmohan Singh. Genuine fears and anxieties of a community that can never be captured or communicated through the curvy lines of graphs are dismissed as baseless.
The severe drubbing the BJP received in Delhi has belatedly resulted in Feature No. 7 - that it is possible for minorities to hope for change under the New Normal. For one, it shattered Modi's aura of invincibility. Two, the Delhi debacle could prompt the BJP to rethink its strategy of Hindu consolidation. After all, its attempts to trigger communal tension didn't yield a rich harvest of votes for it.
Three, since there are no permanent majorities in democracy, Muslims and other minorities will stive to align with other segments of the electorate to vanquish the BJP. For instance, in the 2013 Assembly elections, the Congress bagged five out its eight seats from Muslim-dominated constituencies. All these five constituencies voted overwhelmingly in favour of AAP in Feb. In this sense, the New Normal is no longer about adjusting to the existing reality. It is also about striving to reconfigure it.
The Sangh's policy of menacing Muslims spawned the tendency among Muslim voters - who have largely chosen to vote mainstream non-BJP outfits since 1950 - to rally behind parties anchored in Muslim identity. This possibly explains the success of Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM in Maharashtra recently. It has been the factor behind Badruddin Ajmal's AIUDF in Assam performing extremely well. This trend is likely to be arrested byAAP's spectacular victory in Delhi.
Feature No. 8 of the New Normal pertains to periodic reminders to Muslims that there are issues other than threats to their religious-cultural identity. For instance, their own experience of agrarian distress is similar to that of Hindus; the fear of dispossession the land ordinance has triggered grips them as it does others as well.
This could become the basis for consolidation cutting across caste-religious divides. Under the New Normal, even as the Sangh presses on with the Hindutva issues, Muslims will therefore also feel the pull of the politics of interests. They will therefore feel the pressure of choosing between parties predominantly focussed on their religious insecurities and those more inclined to promoting material interests. Their choices will determine the electoral impact in rural areas having substantial Muslim peasantry - for instance, in west UP, which has become a veritable Hindutva laboratory. (Nor prescriptive any more, I hope)Feature 9 of the New Normal entails religious minorities keeping their fingers crossed in the hope communal relations don't deteriorate to the point where their anxieties and fears are enhanced beyond the current levels. For instance, that could happen in case the BJP launches a vigorous movement for building the Ram Temple in Ayodhya before the UP Assembly elections, as is widely feared; or roads having Muslim names are changed. That would, for sure, lead to redefining the New Normal. Watch this space next year.
(Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores. Email: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com)
PART TWO OF TWO
SOURCE:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/listening-to-the-sounds-of-silence/82224.html
LISTENING TO THE SOUNDS
OF
SILENCE
BY
SHIV VISVANATHAN
May 19 2015
Whether Muslim or Christian, Indians who have felt Indian and believed they were Indian citizens are now being forced to reach out to their minority status for protection. There is a new insecurity, a ghettoisation of the mind taking place
REPORT cards are liturgical rituals, acts of trusteeship. There is something about report cards that gives citizens and experts a sense of empowerment. For that moment, one feels in control or command of a process of history. But this time the report cards of the Modi regime speak a different language. It is not his “Make in India” as a world of manufacture one wants to talk about. It is the unmaking of another India that one waits to record.
Every regime tries to build a positive vision of the future but to build such a favourable future, one must exorcise the past. The past was a double burden for the adherents of the Bharatiya Janata Party because the past as history is read as being unfair to them. Secondly, the categories of the past, the idioms of secularism articulated the logic of a world the majority in India felt uneasy with. They wanted a world which was less English, more modern, a world where the secular and the minoritarian strip-mined their lives asking them to deny their inner selves. Therefore, the majoritarian self was a repressed self and when the BJP won, an order of repressions was domesticated into the everydayness of policy.
The BJP as an electoral majority represented an array of dangers. Firstly, it equated electoral majoritarianism with democracy. Instead of democracy being syncretic and plural, the majority acquires a new role in history. Its dominance is physical and threatening and when paradoxically a dominant class behaves as if it has been victimised, it becomes doubly repressive. It wants to rectify history and teach the minorities a lesson. In fact, in majoritarian regimes like the BJP, politics becomes the fine art of changing minority responses. It has been decided that the minority must be cut to size and taught its sense of place.
Muzaffarnagar was a classic example of such a political pedagogical act that the media hardly confronted.
The BJP over the year has done this act of bullying in a wonderfully distributed way. Its political leaders ask Muslims to accept the duties of citizenship and join the mainstream. This allegedly subtle hint is actually a coercive way of warning the minorities that assertions of ethnic identity are not welcome. While the legislature seeks uniformity, the other incarnations like the RSS, the VHP, even the Shiv Sena, seek to rectify history and purify identity. Culture becomes the basis of contestation and majoritarian culture asserts their primacy twice. This asserts the language of loyalty to the nation-state, calling patriotism the new secularism because for the RSS the state is the secular god.
When patriotism is equated with national development and national purpose, any challenge to growth in terms of social justice or ecological cost is termed as sedition. In fact, a new hybrid of minority-dissent is seen as threatening law and order. One of the first and most publicised acts of the regime was to attack sustainability advocates on grounds of security. Civil society groups which objected to mines destroying soils, or to pollution or displacement were defined and treated as anti-national. Green and Red became brothers under the skin, when Green Peace and Naxalism were treated as equivalent threats. Dissent and minoritarianism both become threats to law and order.
The BJP as a majoritarian regime operates at four different levels. Firstly, it treats patriotism and citizenship as sacred-thread ceremonies, often denying such rite or rights to people from Kashmir or the North-East. Instead of citizenship being part of the taken for granted, it begins as part of a politics of suspicion.
Secondly, it feels minorities should not be pampered on grounds of ethnicity but be part of the secular citizenship of the majoritarian society. The BJP regime has not gone as far as the French regime of Sarkozy, which denied citizenship to the Romany people turning them homeless or by disallowing the veil in schools and other public places. In fact, it has campaigned for Muslims to join the party. Whether this is fatalism on part of the Muslims or a temporary tactic is difficult to decipher.
Thirdly, the majoritarian community operates in terms of the politics of hurt. Hurt is an all-encompassing word in the majoritarian glossary. Hurt is an injury, damage, disrespect, real or imagined, to the identity, integrity, ego, the respectability of the group, to its history or to its collective identity. Such a broad view of hurt has virtually created an epidemic of politicians who specialise in hurt. A Dalit might find it troublesome to establish humiliation but hurt is like a mimosa plant, it triggers even at an imagined wound. The politics of hurt has been used to ban, censor, silence authors,who d writers, musicians, painters who not suit the majoritarian imagination.
Such majoritarianism which creates a surveillance corridor to police history, culture, also becomes a form of moral policing. One witnesses this in the activists of groups like Bajrang Dal which harass young couples holding hands in Manipal Beach. There is an attempt to domesticate sexuality, creating a tacit understanding between populist groups and police while harassing minorities and women. Any Muslim boy dating a Hindu girl becomes a target of harassment. The hoardings installed on the beach are clear. It says: “Be educated, do not hold hands.” The moral policy of majoritarian groups is almost like pollution ritual, a cordon sanitaire, protecting the majority from being “infected”. Antics like moral jihad were slapstick illustrations of this policy.
Fourthly, the RSS and its cohorts feel that the syllabus should be a part of politically correct and approved history. Dinanath Batra and other self-styled educationist and historians become peripatetic Savonarolas deciding which books do not fit the official space. Syllabus reform and censorship becomes two forms of thought rectification.
The inner circles of hysteria by which majoritarianism keeps real and imagined threats at bay has an outer penumbra of indifference. The middle class as an aspirational class is indifferent to many forms of suffering. Its indifference to farmers committing suicide shows that growth is a greater value than suffering, that casualties are an acceptable consequence of development. One must admit that in many cases of majoritarianism brutality, the regime does not participate actively. By threat, by intimidation, by symbolic manipulation, the regime and the majority create a tacit constitution of categories, taboos, fear, preferences which literally create a fence around thought. Various forms of dissent, eccentricity, minoritarianism and radicalism remain outside the fold. It is this tacit constitution which envelops the formal constitution and makes it feel effete and meaningless. The state as a policing apparatus and the informal economy of coercion both combine to create a structure of threat which minorities feel uneasy with.Whether Muslim or Christian, Indians who have felt Indian and believed there were Indian citizens are now being forced to reach out to their minority status for protection. There is a new insecurity, a ghettoisation of the mind taking place. Old words like pseudo-secularism now sound effete and harmless as the majoritarian judgement moves ruthlessly.
If the minority or the dissenter is less Indian than others, the diaspora with its long-distance nationalism is seen as doubly patriotic. For the majority, this is the great Indian ideal, to be Hindutva with an American style of consumption, to belong both to one of the oldest civilisations and to one of the most modern of nations and claim an authenticity from both. It is a win-win situation that every aspiring Indian dreams of.
Demise of the Nehru Era
Deep down, the victory of electoral majoritarianism and its repressions has allowed the demise of the Nehru era. In seeking to create a Congress Mukta Bharat what the BJP sought was a Nehru Mukta Bharat void of minority sensitivity, pluralism and secularism. In a way the first year of the regime has cleared the way for this new era.
In fact, while Modi and his regime talk of communication, what one senses starkly is the silences of the regime. In fact, one is reminded that progress is articulated through the noisy rhetoric of development, while suffering exists in an ecology of silence. In such a regime, citizenship and its entitlement, speech is only available to those who accept a majoritarian code.
The elliptical imaginations of radicalism, dissent, minority, the availability of eccentricity is lost in the drumbeat of a new patriotism which creates a brutal majority. Accompanying this is a religion of the nation-state, an uncritical acceptance of science, an attempt to exorcise history. Given this, it is not speech that marks the regime but silences pregnant with meaning that promise critique but refrain from it.
Christians participate in mass prayer to protest against the attack on Delhi churches, in Bhopal. AFP/PTI
The writer calls himself a social sciences nomad
http://www.msn.com/en-in/news/national/one-year-of-modi-9-features-that-define-the-new-normal-for-muslims/ar-BBjYSn7
FEAR OF NON EXISTENT
UNKNOWN
PART ONE OF TWO
:ONE YEAR OF MODI
- NINE FEATURES THAT DEFINE THE
' NEW NORMAL ' FOR MUSLIMS
BY
Ajaz Ashraf
In the scorching month of May 2014, the Muslims of India slipped into a dark mood of pessimism at the prospect of living under a BJP government swept into office with a decisive majority.
Over the course of the year, that somber mood has since been dispelled. This is not because the NDA-II has proved to be a different kettle of fish, but because Muslims have adjusted to what can be called the New Normal. This is the condition in which it is considered normal to have anxieties and fears triggered by political developments - and pessimism, to a degree, is deemed realistic.
To understand the New Normal, we need to rewind to May 2014.
When Modi ascended to office, Muslims feared they would be besieged by the Hindutva forces, which would bring to the front-burner the contentious Ram Temple and the Uniform Civil Code issues. Worse, it was thought Narendra Modi would trigger minor tsunamis to sweep the BJP into power in states where Assembly elections were due. To have a BJP government at the Centre and also in the states seemed akin to Muslims being caught in a pair of red-hot tongs.
Looking back some of the fears haven't thankfully materialized; for example, widespread riots haven't broken out. But it doesn't mean nothing has changed. For the religious minorities, life under the Modi government can be considered 'normal' only because the very definition of the word has been altered.
This New Normal has 10 distinct features.
Feature No. 1 of the New Normal is the absence of major rioting - this descriptor doesn't apply even to last year's communal conflagration in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, where three persons died, scored were injured, and curfew imposed for days. Yet Saharanpur pales in comparison to the horrors we Indians are capable of inflicting on each other.
Horrifying rioting may not happen under the New Normal, but the communal cauldron is constantly kept simmering, brought close to the boiling point every time there is an election around the corner. This began during the byelections in Uttar Pradesh and stopped following the Delhi Assembly polls.
Feature No. 2 of the New Normal pertains to the methods of keeping the communal cauldron on a slow simmer. Over the past year, Sangh Parivar has enhanced social tensions through divisive programmes such as love jihad and ghar wapsi.
An additional ploy is to raise communally charged non sequiturs to spark furious debates.
Sample just two of these - since Muslims and Christians drink from the same fount of culture, why can't they call themselves Muslim Hindus or Christian Hindus? Since most Muslims and Christians were either compelled or lured into leaving Hinduism, why can't they be brought back into its fold?
These debates on non sequiturs leave not only the minorities aghast, but also many who are counted as Hindus. TV, newspapers, digital sites remind the BJP that it was voted to power for ushering in good governance and development, not for tearing apart the social fabric. The media clamour conveys a sense of social instability, turning citizens and investors apprehensive of the future. Perhaps it also enables the moderates in the BJP to mount pressure on the hardliners to retreat.
This kicks in Feature No. 3 of the New Normal. Commmunal rhetoric no longer dominates, the anxieties and fears of minorities ebb, and life seems as normal as when non-BJP governments rule at the Centre. Call it 'extreme normalcy' - for it defies credulity, feels illusory, and always seems on the verge of disappearing.
The Sangh scripts extreme normalcy periodically to allay the fears of Hindus opposed to Hindutva. The liberal-left and rightwing secular among them then begin to debate issues material, not cultural or religious, in nature.
Over the last two months the nation has witnessed extreme normalcy, manifest in the discussions, say, over the land ordinance. In the weeks of extreme normalcy under the New Normal, members of the minority often begin to speculate on its duration, whether it has been crafted only because there is no election around the corner.
For instance, many Muslims have already begun to predict that extreme normalcy will end as soon as Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav cobble together an electoral alliance. Should they fail to reach an agreement, the period of extreme normalcy may be extended, but it is guaranteed to end sometime next year, in preparation for the battle for Assam and West Bengal in 2016 and Uttar Pradesh in 2017.
Feature No. 4 of the New Normal is the political marginalization of Muslims, which underlines in turn the diminishing importance of their vote. As I had written after the Lok Sabha elections, "If you were to look at the results from just the narrow perspective of victory and defeat, Muslims have been effectively disenfranchised: for the first time in India's electoral history, the Lok Sabha election has been won without their contribution." And not a single Muslim was elected on the BJP ticket to the Assemblies of Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand - all three states where the BJP captured power in recent months.
As the Muslim vote becomes less key to electoral victory, Muslims and their sentiments are not taken into account in controversial policy decisions. Hence, the expansion of the ban on cow slaughter to include bulls and oxens, and rewriting of history books to portray the Mughals as despicable bigots Rewriting of history is aimed at communalizing the past for demonizing the Muslims in the present.
Feature No. 5 of the New Normal is establishment double-speak, where RSS pracharaks and the Prime Minister speak in conflicting voices, a trend which originated under NDA-I.
RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat will conflate India with Hindus, extol the superiority of their culture, and tacitly exhort them to assert themselves over others, besides taking potshots at Mother Teresa and her like. By contrast, the Prime Minister will speak of the supremacy of the Constitution, assert an Indian citizen's right to profess and propagate his or her faith. Since Bhagwat only heads a self-proclaimed (and self-attested) cultural organisation, we are asked to place our faith in the Prime Minister's words.
Yet Modi didn't publicly admonish the Hindutva footsoldiers engaged in the ghar wapsi and love jihad programmes, or when the churches in Delhi were vandalized or desecrated before the Assembly elections there. His strategic silence gives lie to that Red Fort speech, made early in his tenure, which included an appeal to citizens to put a 10-year moratorium on caste and communal violence. Muslims would have preferred Modi to speak against the ideological basis of such violence instead of appealing for a moratorium.
However, the Delhi debacle prompted Modi to speak at a Church function about the "undeniable right" of people to "adopt or retain the religion" of their choice without coercion. Weeks later, he reiterated to Time magazine his government's intention to provide "total protection" to all communities.
Modi's interview to Time magazine, unwittingly, underscored
Feature No. 6 of the New Normal, when he said,
"My Government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed, and religion. So there is no place for imaginary apprehensions with regard to the rights of the minorities in India."
Thus, under the New Normal, Muslims' fear of the Hindutva projects are dismissed as plain paranoia. This also entails pumping journalists with statistics suggesting that the communal situation under Modi is the same as it was under his predecessor, Manmohan Singh. Genuine fears and anxieties of a community that can never be captured or communicated through the curvy lines of graphs are dismissed as baseless.
The severe drubbing the BJP received in Delhi has belatedly resulted in Feature No. 7 - that it is possible for minorities to hope for change under the New Normal. For one, it shattered Modi's aura of invincibility. Two, the Delhi debacle could prompt the BJP to rethink its strategy of Hindu consolidation. After all, its attempts to trigger communal tension didn't yield a rich harvest of votes for it.
Three, since there are no permanent majorities in democracy, Muslims and other minorities will stive to align with other segments of the electorate to vanquish the BJP. For instance, in the 2013 Assembly elections, the Congress bagged five out its eight seats from Muslim-dominated constituencies. All these five constituencies voted overwhelmingly in favour of AAP in Feb. In this sense, the New Normal is no longer about adjusting to the existing reality. It is also about striving to reconfigure it.
The Sangh's policy of menacing Muslims spawned the tendency among Muslim voters - who have largely chosen to vote mainstream non-BJP outfits since 1950 - to rally behind parties anchored in Muslim identity. This possibly explains the success of Asaduddin Owaisi's AIMIM in Maharashtra recently. It has been the factor behind Badruddin Ajmal's AIUDF in Assam performing extremely well. This trend is likely to be arrested byAAP's spectacular victory in Delhi.
Feature No. 8 of the New Normal pertains to periodic reminders to Muslims that there are issues other than threats to their religious-cultural identity. For instance, their own experience of agrarian distress is similar to that of Hindus; the fear of dispossession the land ordinance has triggered grips them as it does others as well.
This could become the basis for consolidation cutting across caste-religious divides. Under the New Normal, even as the Sangh presses on with the Hindutva issues, Muslims will therefore also feel the pull of the politics of interests. They will therefore feel the pressure of choosing between parties predominantly focussed on their religious insecurities and those more inclined to promoting material interests. Their choices will determine the electoral impact in rural areas having substantial Muslim peasantry - for instance, in west UP, which has become a veritable Hindutva laboratory. (Nor prescriptive any more, I hope)Feature 9 of the New Normal entails religious minorities keeping their fingers crossed in the hope communal relations don't deteriorate to the point where their anxieties and fears are enhanced beyond the current levels. For instance, that could happen in case the BJP launches a vigorous movement for building the Ram Temple in Ayodhya before the UP Assembly elections, as is widely feared; or roads having Muslim names are changed. That would, for sure, lead to redefining the New Normal. Watch this space next year.
(Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores. Email: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com)
PART TWO OF TWO
SOURCE:
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/listening-to-the-sounds-of-silence/82224.html
LISTENING TO THE SOUNDS
OF
SILENCE
BY
SHIV VISVANATHAN
May 19 2015
Whether Muslim or Christian, Indians who have felt Indian and believed they were Indian citizens are now being forced to reach out to their minority status for protection. There is a new insecurity, a ghettoisation of the mind taking place
Children attend a class at a madrassa in a relief camp for displaced Muslim residents in Muzaffarnagar. Threat perception and fear have put the minorities on the defensive. The drumbeat of a new patriotism creates a brutal majority
REPORT cards are liturgical rituals, acts of trusteeship. There is something about report cards that gives citizens and experts a sense of empowerment. For that moment, one feels in control or command of a process of history. But this time the report cards of the Modi regime speak a different language. It is not his “Make in India” as a world of manufacture one wants to talk about. It is the unmaking of another India that one waits to record.
Vision of the Future
The BJP as an electoral majority represented an array of dangers. Firstly, it equated electoral majoritarianism with democracy. Instead of democracy being syncretic and plural, the majority acquires a new role in history. Its dominance is physical and threatening and when paradoxically a dominant class behaves as if it has been victimised, it becomes doubly repressive. It wants to rectify history and teach the minorities a lesson. In fact, in majoritarian regimes like the BJP, politics becomes the fine art of changing minority responses. It has been decided that the minority must be cut to size and taught its sense of place.
Assertions of Ethnic Identity
The BJP over the year has done this act of bullying in a wonderfully distributed way. Its political leaders ask Muslims to accept the duties of citizenship and join the mainstream. This allegedly subtle hint is actually a coercive way of warning the minorities that assertions of ethnic identity are not welcome. While the legislature seeks uniformity, the other incarnations like the RSS, the VHP, even the Shiv Sena, seek to rectify history and purify identity. Culture becomes the basis of contestation and majoritarian culture asserts their primacy twice. This asserts the language of loyalty to the nation-state, calling patriotism the new secularism because for the RSS the state is the secular god.
Patriotism Unbound
The BJP as a majoritarian regime operates at four different levels. Firstly, it treats patriotism and citizenship as sacred-thread ceremonies, often denying such rite or rights to people from Kashmir or the North-East. Instead of citizenship being part of the taken for granted, it begins as part of a politics of suspicion.
No Pampering
Thirdly, the majoritarian community operates in terms of the politics of hurt. Hurt is an all-encompassing word in the majoritarian glossary. Hurt is an injury, damage, disrespect, real or imagined, to the identity, integrity, ego, the respectability of the group, to its history or to its collective identity. Such a broad view of hurt has virtually created an epidemic of politicians who specialise in hurt. A Dalit might find it troublesome to establish humiliation but hurt is like a mimosa plant, it triggers even at an imagined wound. The politics of hurt has been used to ban, censor, silence authors,who d writers, musicians, painters who not suit the majoritarian imagination.
Surveillance Corridor
Fourthly, the RSS and its cohorts feel that the syllabus should be a part of politically correct and approved history. Dinanath Batra and other self-styled educationist and historians become peripatetic Savonarolas deciding which books do not fit the official space. Syllabus reform and censorship becomes two forms of thought rectification.
Indifference of Middle Class
If the minority or the dissenter is less Indian than others, the diaspora with its long-distance nationalism is seen as doubly patriotic. For the majority, this is the great Indian ideal, to be Hindutva with an American style of consumption, to belong both to one of the oldest civilisations and to one of the most modern of nations and claim an authenticity from both. It is a win-win situation that every aspiring Indian dreams of.
Demise of the Nehru Era
Deep down, the victory of electoral majoritarianism and its repressions has allowed the demise of the Nehru era. In seeking to create a Congress Mukta Bharat what the BJP sought was a Nehru Mukta Bharat void of minority sensitivity, pluralism and secularism. In a way the first year of the regime has cleared the way for this new era.
In fact, while Modi and his regime talk of communication, what one senses starkly is the silences of the regime. In fact, one is reminded that progress is articulated through the noisy rhetoric of development, while suffering exists in an ecology of silence. In such a regime, citizenship and its entitlement, speech is only available to those who accept a majoritarian code.
The elliptical imaginations of radicalism, dissent, minority, the availability of eccentricity is lost in the drumbeat of a new patriotism which creates a brutal majority. Accompanying this is a religion of the nation-state, an uncritical acceptance of science, an attempt to exorcise history. Given this, it is not speech that marks the regime but silences pregnant with meaning that promise critique but refrain from it.
Politics of Majority
- The BJP equated electoral majoritarianism with democracy. Instead of democracy being syncretic and plural, the majority acquires a new role in history.
- Its dominance is physical and threatening and when paradoxically a dominant class behaves as if it has been victimised, it becomes doubly repressive. It wants to rectify history and teach minorities a lesson.
- In fact, in majoritarian regimes like the BJP, politics becomes the fine art of changing minority responses. It has been decided that the minority must be cut to size and taught its sense of place.
- One must admit that in many cases of majoritarianism brutality, the regime does not participate actively. By threat, by intimidation, by symbolic manipulation, the regime and the majority create a tacit constitution of categories, taboos, fear, preferences which literally create a fence around thought.
Christians participate in mass prayer to protest against the attack on Delhi churches, in Bhopal. AFP/PTI
The writer calls himself a social sciences nomad
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