In the last couple of weeks, even that fig leaf of propriety has been tossed aside, and what it reveals is truly obscene. It’s not just the uglies — it’s the uglies twisted and turned upside down. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its supporters are calling it “nationalism”, but that’s just putting lipstick on a pig. It is really just its top priority on full display: Hindutva and hyper-nationalism, the creation of a majoritarian Hindu country in which, if you dissent from majority opinion and behaviour, and challenge the state, you attract a risk for which you have only yourself to blame. You eat beef? You worship Mahishasura? You question our policy in Kashmir? We’re not saying it’s illegal; we just won’t protect you from your outraged compatriots. Sentiment and violence trump rationality and law.
When Delhi’s Commissioner of Police B S Bassi says that students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, currently facing flimsy charges of sedition, have to prove their innocence, he is overturning a basic principle of law. The principle is that you are innocent until proven guilty, and it’s designed that way to protect individuals from vendetta, vigilantism, harassment, and the tide of random opinion. It is outrageous for the chief enforcer of the law to know this principle, yet publicly trash it. Mr Bassi allowed his men to stand aside as lawyers attacked JNU students and faculty, and journalists, within court premises. He used a fake tweet as evidence of the students’ terrorist affiliation. He’s not following the law, so one assumes he’s following orders. Breaking bones is a good way of making a point when you don’t have a legal, or even coherent, argument on your side.
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When the Union home minister tweets that those deemed antinational “will not be tolerated or spared”, he is menacing citizens with terms that appeal to untempered emotion. It’s amazing that the Home Ministry would get involved in a peaceful campus matter, when it looks on its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, with an indulgent eye. In taking a cannon to a fly over JNU, the government looks insecure and unbalanced — and yet, in trying to monitor intellectual exploration and dissent, it is strategically furthering its cultural goals. The classroom is a warzone in the battle for and against Hindutva; and the BJP has already manoeuvred us to a place where calling a university a “den of left-liberals” makes sense to large numbers of people.
When news channels run hashtag campaigns like #StopAntiIndiaCampaign, air doctored footage, and call people anti-national on prime time television, they throw out every minimal standard of news journalism and debate. The media is also fuelling competitive nationalism by prefacing everything with their own patriotic credentials. This unnecessary rubbish is not new — every time a soldier dies, everyone from NDTV to Times Now trots out the words “martyr”, and makes a big show of patriotism, often accompanied with distastefully hawkish exhortations to go to war or forbid cricket with Pakistan — but it has reached an absurd pitch. Television news is playing dangerously divisive politics, helping to whip up prejudice and hatred between citizens, judging and defaming them with theatrical conviction for millions of hothead viewers, and encouraging witch hunts.
When the nationalist versus antinational fight is replicated in Parliament, with the government melodramatically invoking mothers and children, and daring people to worship Mahishasura in Kolkata, it’s because the BJP thus signals the privileging of sentiment and the legitimisation of street thuggery, gratifying both Hindutva voters and the much wider set of people who have a deep attachment to their country and pretty much no understanding of the law. That the government is outraged by pro-Afzal Guru slogans is just so much twaddle — the BJP is slavering to hold hands with the People’s Democratic Party in Jammu & Kashmir, which says the very same things. That it loves the flag is more twaddle — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh did not raise the Tricolour for 52 years. The government has no answer to those hypocrisies, but it really doesn’t care.
What’s going on? Fomenting a McCarthyist atmosphere, where anyone can cry “antinational” at anyone else, serves the BJP twofold: first, it’s a god-sent distraction from the long list of the government’s failures, from the sickly economy to national security screw-ups. Second, and more importantly, it furthers social polarisation in the cause of a culturally homogenous, intellectually docile Hindu India, defined by majority sentiment, maintained violently if need be.
To push Hindutva, you essentially have to kick the Indian Constitution in the face. There goes that last fig leaf of patriotism.