“Is this the dawn we were looking for?” Faiz Ahmed Faiz

As an entertainment sport, the mayhem of war is infinitely more captivating than the unspectacular misery of economic deprivation and hunger, which explains the media’s unwavering focus on the war in Ukraine and the grudging attention to the suffering of the people of Sri Lanka. But what’s tragic is that countries are giving relief and aid to Ukraine as they should, though not enough, but are largely impervious to the travails of the Sri Lankans. While self-interest determines the actions of nations, once again the United Nations is quiescent in a humanitarian crisis, when it should actually be urging the members and the international financial organisations to provide pro tem relief by way of deferred loans to the beleaguered nation. What my late father said about homeopathy applies to the UN – it’s great when you are healthy and well!

At this dreadful time for Sri Lanka, the faint glimmer of hope for a better future has been provided by the ordinary citizens who have come out into the streets to protest a corrupt, inept and dangerous Government that fattens on the racial divide. The Easter bombings of three years ago had plunged the country into a deep abyss of religious and ethno-nationalist tensions that were further inflamed by reactionary elements in the major religious denominations and stoked by the present regime. To make matters worse, the 20th (20A) Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution, the ultimate gospel of cronyism, has enabled the President to induct some of the most disreputable elements into the government.

Not too often does tribulation bring out the best in people but the Sri Lankans have done the near impossible by reacting to this life-threatening crisis by addressing the gravest fault-line in that society -- the ethnic and religious divide. Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim citizens are chanting a slogan that was unthinkable yesterday: “We are not divided by class; we are not divided by race.” The parliamentarian of Tamil origin, M A Sumanthiran, spoke for all who object to selective humanism when he politely declined M K Stalin’s offer to send food and essential supplies for the Tamils of Sri Lanka. While appreciating the Tamil Nādu CM’s offer, he was clear that “assistance should be for all Sri Lankans and not just Tamils.”   

What a stark contrast to the inhuman response of a section of citizens in our country during the second wave of the pandemic when death and suffering had full dominion, killing without consideration for caste or creed. The bhakts, however, used this god-forsaken time to launch a vicious campaign of calumny against the Muslim community. Their patron – the government – performed the hatchet job of fixing the Tablighi Jamaat for spreading the Corona virus. In a country that is now bereft of a social conscience, scores of the Tablighi Jamaat members from several nations were incarcerated in detention centres and jails across India for allegedly flouting coronavirus guidelines – absurd charges that were later quashed by various high courts, and yet, not a single individual has been held accountable for this diabolical miscarriage of justice. It is unthinkable that, as a nation, we will ever again speak for all Indians like the Sri Lankans have done. The brutal fact is that we have gone too far down the road of schismatic division to ever be able to pull back!

The Hindu Rashtra is already here for all to see and feel. I cannot subscribe to the widely held view that the recent cowardly mob machismo in front of mosques, the attacks on the Muslims’ way of life, the demolitions are a deliberate tactic to divert attention from the economic meltdown unravelling before us, the “economic chaos theory”. The merciless oppression of the Muslims that is happening with sickening regularity is nothing short of a State-sponsored assertion of Hindu identity and the cancelling out of the Muslim! But to describe the menacing capture of the collective Hindu consciousness as an overnight phenomenon or the ripening of an eight-year-old campaign of directed hate or even the culmination of a twenty-year-old mission inaugurated over the embers of the horrific Godhra killings in 2002 is to underestimate a premeditated, calculated crusade that was conceived and germinated over a century ago, the denouement of which we witness today.

Deliberate, organised and hate-filled othering of the Muslim began as early as 1909, with the establishment of the Punjab Hindu Mahasabha, eventually expanding into the All India Hindu Mahasabha in 1921, that stated at its very inception that Hindus need a separate nation and Muslims denied any rights in that nation. It was a fraught period of competitive communalism and riots, with incidents of cow slaughter and music before mosques the recurrent trigger. The call for Hindu solidarity was twinned with preservation of the Hindu dharma and the settling of scores with Muslims. The ball was set rolling!

This fuzzy, abstract notion of Hindu nationalism was formulated into an exclusivist and homogenising doctrine grounded in an obsessive, visceral hatred of Muslims by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the progenitor and ideologue of political Hindutva. The conflict with the Yavanas – the outsiders – was, in his view, the ultimate marker of Hindu identity, both as individual and nation, which explains why social scientists conclude that Savarkar’s commitment to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra trumped the goal of political independence for India.  The arch enemy was the Muslim, not the British.

Savarkar was not a one-man choir; there were other Hindutva icons who played the same tune. In 1925, K B Hedgewar formed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) purportedly as a cultural organization that eschewed politics. Although purely concerned with the welfare of the Hindu, it was named “Rashtriya” to assert, as Hedgewar explained, the Hindu’s “natural status as the nationals of the country.” In a ludicrous caricature of militarism, the RSS shakhas conduct a quaint version of martial exercises, including marching, Kabaddi, wielding the lathi, the last of which was clearly not a drill for confronting the Chinese or Pakistanis but the enemies at home. 

The second sarsanghchalak (chief) of the RSS, M S Golwalkar’s pathological aversion to Muslims and unmitigated commitment to the caste system are expounded in his book “Bunch of Thoughts”.  The last of the RSS ideologues was Deendayal Upadhyaya whose mishmashed world view is contained in a compilation of his lectures titled “Integral Humanism”, the main thrust of which is the primacy of Dharma in the realm of politics. His concept of Dharma is the obverse of secularism which, in his view, has been erroneously pitched as the guiding principle of the Constitution. Amidst highfalutin references to Bharatiya culture, he makes the formulaic accusation that Muslims are disloyal to the nation.

What’s apparent is that behind the benign façade of Bharatiya culture lurk the fountainhead and lifeblood of Hindutva – an implacable hatred of the Muslim who must pay for historical wrongs committed against Hindus. Toward achieving this end, nationalism and patriotism have been usurped, distorted into Hindu nationalism and weaponised against the Muslim. The inexorable hate-mongering of the RSS and its cohorts has seeped into the minds of an overwhelmingly large section of Hindus.

My personal experience is small but significant testament to this fact. We are a group of eight friends – six Hindus, a Muslim and a Christian – who have had the benefit of a liberal education, all in our early seventies, former bureaucrats who grew up in the first flush of Independence when the RSS was on the backfoot on account of Gandhiji’s assassination. And yet, of the six Hindu friends, three have been indoctrinated in RSS shakhas in their boyhood, two others are devout Modi bhakts, and the sixth is a hesitant liberal. Tragically, these good men seem to see no incongruity between having a Muslim friend and concomitantly endorsing an ideology founded on antipathy to the Muslim. At least three of them need to be reminded of that unforgettable line of a Jack Nicholson character: “Don’t use religion as a crutch to hate people…. just say you are an a—hole and I’ll understand.”   

The last eight years have seen myriad instances of the judiciary, the law enforcement machinery, the bureaucracy, the universities actively collaborate in propagating the majoritarian Hindutva project. There is another myth doing the rounds, that the institutions have been coerced into doing the government’s bidding, whereas the fact is that most are active collaborators. In fact, a couple of days back, the MCD officials of Delhi with impunity continued with demolitions despite a Supreme Court stay.  Even the pretence of impartiality and even-handedness has been jettisoned by this Government. If you think I exaggerate, please check out the antecedents of the newly appointed Chairperson of the UPSC, the premier selection board for recruitment of all Group ‘A’ officers under the Government of India. What this tells you is that the saffron footprint, like a contagion, has spread everywhere.

Is there any hope that this madness will be stemmed and India once again recover its secular essence? Sometime ago I wrote to a poet friend bemoaning the aberrant religiosity that stalks our land and how “unity in diversity” is now a taunt in a country that has embarked on a deadly mission of homogeneity through Muslim exclusion. But, typical of the poet – dreamy and unworldly – she felt that a peaceful, non-political civil resistance movement involving all sections of civil society, filled with dance, bhajans, mushairas, poetry reading, street plays will help us regain our lost humanity. Cynic that I am, I pointed out that in a fraught ecosystem where the disrupters of communal harmony have the full backing of the powers-that-be, there was not a hope in hell for such a Gandhian movement to succeed.

I did not tell my dear friend that there is nothing like a homogeneous group called civil society in our country today. We are a people riven by caste and religious divisions, the most lethal of which is the Hindu-Muslim divide that has got wider, thanks to a single-minded, unwavering zealotry that has infected the innards of the nation.

(The writer is a former civil servant. Views are personal)