So the Chandigarh administration sent out a notice saying that all schools will remain closed on September 11, 2015, because the Prime Minister is visiting, and that the exam scheduled for that day should be held on “some other date”. You could almost hear “The PM is coming, the PM is coming, whee!” hanging in the air.
When I read that on September 10, I wondered whether better sense might prevail by the 11th — a bunch of stupid decisions have been U-turned lately — but apparently they stuck to it all for the sake of the kids, because of road blocks and traffic. At any rate it seems like a good metaphor: wherever this government goes, education finds itself in retreat. Who needs education when you can have power?
It makes perfect sense. Education is meant to foster social progress through reason, critique, innovation, and self-governance, and while the BJP keeps promising development — we’re keeping our eyes peeled — it is not in the least interested in progress. How can it be? It is dying to replace India’s pluralistic democracy with a Hindu rashtra. It yearns for a return to older socio-religious traditions, which are famously not crazy about questions and critique and autonomy.
Think of the stupidities of the past many months. Turning Christmas into Good Governance Day. Banning meat in Mumbai because of a Jain festival. Having regular histrionics over cows. Sexually policing India by dragging couples out of hotel rooms, or humiliating them for necking in the park. Censoring movies and books. Rewriting school textbooks. Encouraging social vigilantism. Shutting down social media and text messaging in Gujarat. Renaming roads. Trying to turn the Nehru Museum into a Governance Museum. Slapping sedition charges on anyone who criticises politicians and government representatives. Cutting the education and health budgets.
(Even an off-the-cuff list is so long that it needs a new paragraph.) Illegally barring an NGO worker from leaving the country. Harassing NGOs and activists. Appointing disastrously unqualified people to institutions like the Indian Council of Historical Research and the Film and Television Institution of India. Banning jeans and mobiles for women. Pushing Hindi as the national language. Suggesting that ancient India came up with genetic technology and space flight. Obediently reporting to the RSS, which the country did not elect. Closing all schools in Chandigarh because the PM is visiting — oh, and hold on to your corpses, because the crematorium will serve as a parking lot.
This list of idiocies, by no means complete, points to the inherent contradiction that will eventually bring the BJP to grief: you cannot move towards modernity when everything in your core agenda is trying to go back to the good old days. The good old days were not about empowerment, equality, and self-realisation. They were about strict religious and social guidelines and hierarchies, with rich upper-caste Hindu men firmly in the driver’s seat. They were about maintaining a neurotic societal hygiene based on caste and fear of pollution.
When caste is the core structure of the society you’re determined to build and uphold, how likely are you to care about airy-fairy stuff like justice — social, economic and political; liberty, of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality, of status and opportunity; and fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation? That’s just claptrap from the preamble to the Constitution.
Mr Modi’s Hindutva BJP is no longer coy about its happy synergy with the RSS. So when the Union Minister for Culture says that the government intends to “cleanse” India of “cultural pollution” from the West, he’s merely making official a long-standing non-state actor’s agenda. What constitutes Western pollution, though — the internet? movies? jeans? old-age homes? I suspect it’s more the justice, liberty, equality and fraternity stuff. No wonder this administration so despises Nehru; no wonder that its version of patriotism is typified by social terrorism, in which disagreement gets you trolled, or beaten up or killed. No wonder it downplays rationality and freedom of thought, and stokes sentiments of fear, intolerance, and violence. The Modi government’s most cherished goal is not economic development; it is to establish a Hindu supremacist socio-cultural order. No wonder it is toiling so keenly to turn this democracy into a joke.
But here’s the thing: a large number of Indians believe that the claptrap in the constitution is their due. A large number of them love freedom, and resent having their rights curtailed. The BJP’s good-old-days instincts are dated. You can’t go back to imposing power with impunity, when your electorate is used to granting it with accountability. There will be a reckoning. On that day, when voters line up, the BJP may discover that, promises aside, you cannot steer the country into the future when your instincts drag you relentlessly in the opposite direction.
mitali.saran@gmail.com
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
