Could we please stop making Holocaust analogies?
Another day and there is another article about how we are walking down the path of Nazi Germany. I used to be annoyed at Indian illiteracy about the Holocaust, and what happened during Adolf Hitler’s rule. It used to distress me that hip, fashionable young men could walk around wearing a swastika – the Nazi one, not the original one that they stole from us – on their T-shirt or on a sticker on their car. We had a Mithun Chakraborty film called Hitler, a TV series named Hitler Didi, and Mein Kampf has been a bestseller in India since 2003.
All of these things are so different from how Europe or the US, or even Russia looks at the Nazis. And it isn’t as if we were uninvolved. Two million Indian soldiers served in World War II. The great split between Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru/Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi happened at least partially over support for the Allied or Axis cause. And yet, we forgot.
Maybe it is because we had our own horrors. As the “hero” of England, Winston Churchill, chomped down on his cigar, millions of Bengalis starved to death in the great Bengal famine of 1943. As has been shown by a number of people, the famine was the result of the British government’s failures, and in response, Churchill gave orders for air power to be used to suppress Indians.
While millions of our people died, while millions of others saved Europe from the Nazis, and Asia from imperial Germany, and received no real recognition except the monstrosity of Partition, botched and bloody, whose date was chosen by Louis Mountbatten to celebrate the date of victory against Japan.
It is not surprising then that our memories of blood and murder are closer to home, and the monsters of Europe for us blur, sometimes, and Churchill stands not that far from Hitler.
Certainly in my education I learned more about, and thought more of, the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima than the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor. What did it have to do with us
Today it seems everybody thinks it does. We look at the creeping authoritarianism in our public life – the onset of 24/7 surveillance, a public space of hyper-nationalism and militarisation, the industrialists fawning over – and being fawned over – by politicians, the hate and fear addressed at minority groups, and call them all manifestations of Nazi-ism. If we knew more, we would not make that comparison.
The industrialised slaughter of millions by the Nazi regime, primarily Jews, but also including other “undesirables” such as Communists, gays and others, is a crime of monstrous proportions, hard to encompass within our heads. It is also a crime that almost nobody tries to justify (neo-Nazis largely suggest that it was made up to “malign Hitler”). Unlike the 30 or so million that perished in China’s Great Leap Forward, the crimes of the Nazis are seen as crimes of a government so evil that it can have only one end – murder and dissolution. To suggest a political party is the same as the Nazis – as too many do – implies that we should eliminate it immediately for the good of all concerned. It is without redemption.
This should not indicate a blanket ban. Sometimes people use terms – such as Swapan Dasgupta’s recent usage of “rootless cosmopolitans” which has specific anti-Semitic roots (though it has to be said, deeper in the Soviet Union than Nazi Germany) – that need to be called out. In other contexts, people like MS Golwalkar, who specifically praised the vicious treatment of Jews by the Nazis, and considered it a model to follow in India vis-à-vis Muslims, also need to be highlighted. These are people specifically using Nazi terms, or promoting Nazi methods. There can be nothing, but condemnation for this.
At the same time when we compare the virulent hate passed around by WhatsApp groups as similar to the indoctrination of hatred before the Holocaust, this does not help.
Are all those people proto-Nazis, or sympathisers with a regime that will set up camps to herd people into, work them until they are skin and bones, and then execute them using poison gas?
Is the government stripping people of citizenship based on race and ethnicity, stealing their property, herding to transport to where they can be imprisoned and murdered?
Are marriages between people based on race forbidden?
Is the government controlled by one megalomaniac who has eliminated all forms of opposition, banned all political parties, destroyed all institutions of authority except his own?
Are we burning books and artwork in the street?
Are we a country that has lost a war, and a substantial population of its young men, is drowning in hyper-inflation, and paying reparations that are driving the country deeper into poverty?
Do we have foreign soldiers placed on our soil?
The differences between any instance that has a resemblance to what the Nazis did and the current Indian situation is so large as to be meaningless. More problematically, what we ignore are comparisons with horrors that we have witnessed in India, and thus could recur more easily. An uncle of mine, a close family friend who is Hindu and who was a journalist during the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, was telling me the other day that conversations he had recently relating to Muslims sounded very much like what he had heard before 1984, often among his colleagues.
“They are getting too uppity, they must be taught a lesson…” and the like.
For those that know of the tragedies that Kashmiri Hindus faced in the early 1990s, one of them was the use of cassette tapes blasting out threats from mosque loudspeakers. Today similar slogans are heard against Muslims, whether on cassette tapes, or from organisations that are considered “fringe”.
We have had the Jabalpur riots of 1961, the Nellie massacre of 1983, The Bhagalpur riots, the trail and death and devastation that was Advani’s Rath Yatra, the 1992 Bombay riots, the Hashimpura massacre… there are murders and mass murders, more than often with nobody held responsible. And as nobody has been punished what everybody has learned is the murder of Indian citizens is unlikely to cost an Indian politician any jail time, and might even get them a higher position.
It is this poison, already in our bloodstream, that we need to deal with. If you are infected by cholera, taking steps to save you from leukaemia (if there are any such) will not help you.
By focussing on an exotic, horrible crime we are overlooking the mundane mass murders that are closer to home, and which are much more dangerous, and more likely to kill Indians than the replay of a terrible crime that still scars history.
Also read: Life and times of Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and chronicler