I looked to these elections as a bellwether of the soul of India’s majority Hindu people. I am anguished by the results.
After a long, harrowing drought, you wait with aching, desperate hope for the monsoon rains. You expect it will quench your parched arid fields, it will heal your land, feed your starving cattle, your skinny children, and restore them all to life. But when its time comes, you stare at the sky and find that there are no rain clouds, only a pitiless burning sun. You slowly realise with foreboding that there will be no life-giving rain, that you need to brace and fortify yourself, to endure an even longer, more savage summer, and a merciless drought.
This is how I felt when in numb disbelief I watched the television screens as excited anchors announced the results of the general elections on May 23. My initial disbelief gave way to a sombre realisation that nothing is going to change for the better: it will instead get much worse. There will be no escape from the scorching sun, no oasis, no shade, no pools of cool water.
A much larger number of voters than even in the watershed 2014 elections have placed the country’s destiny in the hands of Narendra Modi. There could be many reasons that led voters to choose Modi, and the party which he so energetically led. The uninspiring opposition – fragmented, divided, and above all lacking in the courage of their convictions – may have pushed many voters into the arms of the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party, which by contrast displayed coherence, decisiveness, a clear and consistent ideology, and an appetite for power.
A massive and expensive public relations campaign, backed by big corporate money further helped pave the way for Modi’s stunning success. But the intensely shrill and divisive midsummer election campaign of the Bharatiya Janata Party should leave little doubt that the verdict of 2019 will be interpreted by the leadership of the BJP, and indeed its ideological lodestar, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, as an overwhelming mandate for the triumph of the politics of hate and fear. They will believe that the people of India have opted unambiguously for a political and social order which condemns the country’s religious minorities – Muslims and Christians – and disadvantaged castes to a life of settled second-class citizenship; and one which regards progressive thought and resistance as treason.
I therefore write this open letter to my Indian Muslim brothers and sisters, to my Christian and Dalit brothers and sisters; to my left and liberal comrades – human rights and peace workers, thinkers, writers, artists. And also to those Modi voters who do not endorse ideologies of hate, and only sought a “strong” and cohesive “nationalist” government.
I am anguished by those among us who indeed voted for hate and fear, or those who are indifferent to what hate speech, lynching and majoritarian rhetoric have done to pulverise so many of our countrywomen and men. I regret that all efforts in civil society to resist and fight the rise and rise of majoritarian politics, and to build a kind and just society, have not prevailed.
These profound breakdowns are the outcome both of clamorous majoritarian aggression and the fanning of prejudice of the BJP-RSS combine, and of the abject failure of the entire range of opposition parties to come together, to stand tall and firm against the divisive and dangerous politics of hate. I am in horror and dread about what future lies ahead for us in the next five years, and beyond. But I assure you that we will not let hope die. We will only redouble our resolve to resist, with solidarity and struggle.
Bitter divide
India clearly has travelled a very long way from the country of Mahatma Gandhi at the time of India’s freedom. Despite the bloody creation of a Muslim Pakistan and the death of a million people in Hindu-Muslim riots, we the people of India opted in our Constitution for a secular, inclusive and humane democracy, in which religion and caste were irrelevant to one’s equal citizenship. It would be a country that belonged as much to its Muslim, Christian and Dalit citizens as it did to its upper-caste Hindu people.
Today upper-caste Hindus continue to dominate politics, the economy, the media, the judiciary, academia, and yet they have been persuaded by the BJP and the RSS that they are discriminated against and short-changed, making growing numbers among them resentful, angry and perennially aggrieved. As a result, the country stands bitterly divided down the middle. Muslims and Christians are now firmly on the other side – the underclass, the outsider, the other, the lesser citizen.
Until 2014, I held fast to my belief that India would never become a majoritarian Hindu state, because the majority of Indians, Hindu as much as Muslim, would pursue their own faith but never support a politics of hate against each other. My belief was badly shaken in 2014, but I was still prepared to believe that many of Modi’s supporters were simply aspirational, and harboured no ill-will against Muslims.
However, as the years of Modi’s first term as India’s prime minister unfolded, my foreboding mounted. Most of all I was troubled by the India that I saw in our travels of the Karwan e Mohabbat. We have made 28 wrenching journeys to 14 states, visiting families in distant villages and towns who have lost loved ones to lynch mobs and hate violence. I saw everywhere that we travelled, evidence of extreme and normalised communal hate.
This article was originally published on scroll.in
