Why India's future terrifies me under BJP government
That "all political parties are the same" is a popular refrain in many urban, middle-class homes. It's important to counter this narrative because the BJP — unlike any other political party and acceptance of the popular sentiment, which many cite as reason for their lack of interest in the political process — will allow the toxic status quo to persist.
It'll mean staying in the same rut that we've been in during the past few years, stumbling from one unseemly controversy to the next. From one act of majoritarian violence to the next, where the newest serves to divert attention from the one before.
Group after group, community after community will be targeted. The BJP-RSS standard operating procedure can be likened to General Zia-ul-Haq’s policy of bleeding India through a thousand cuts: open so many different fronts on so many sides that all our time is spent in plugging holes. Questions about real, on-ground development won’t be asked because we’ll be more focused on fending off attacks and defending freedoms.
The bigotry inherent in its ideology puts the BJP in a league of its own, where dangerous ideas of victimhood of Hindus are birthed and circulated on social media platforms. Manufactured histories, imagined insults, distorted facts… nothing is beyond the pale as long as it serves to further their exclusionary agenda.
The BJP-RSS and their supporters have precipitated what seems in moments of darkness to be an irreversible loss of decency. There's an unprecedented amount of viciousness and abuse out there, directed at BJP’s opponents and the minorities. While all of it hasn't suddenly emerged in the past four-five years, the BJP and its allies have allowed it easy expression and enabled acceptance of it by rewarding these vile acts and utterings. Then, there are Modi's own incendiary speeches and the dog-whistle politics, which many pretend not to notice.
Modi's term is littered with the detritus of his ineptitude: institutional ruin, demonetisation disaster, GST mess, foreign policy failures, the unconscionable push for Aadhaar. But, to question or criticise his failures invites the combined wrath of the right wing and its foot soldiers, whose monochromatic worldview anoints you anti-Hindu, anti-national, pro-Pakistan or, quite simply, as a Modi hater.
It’s disappointing to see the Congress and Rahul Gandhi flirt with religion. They may hint at this being part of a strategy, but it also allows the equivalence that so many point to with the BJP. After all, what separates one party that has eliminated Muslims from all its electoral strategies, as the BJP has done, from the other, which won’t mention them by name? Even so, to put the Congress, or any other political party, on a par with the BJP is a mistake. Undeniably, the blame for the poor socio-economic condition of the Muslims rests at the door of the Congress, which must also alone bear the cross for 1984 and the violence against Sikhs. But, it’s equally true that, under the Congress, Muslims didn’t live in fear of life and limb. But, today, that threat is very real and palpable. Be it the Dalits, farmers, students, women or (in many areas) Christians, no group or community has been badgered as much as they're being attacked now. The media, the Army, the EC, the judiciary, RBI — what has the BJP not politicised and/or damaged?
We were always a shamefully patriarchal society but what makes the horror of Kathua particularly chilling is that, as Nandita Rao wrote in The Indian Express, it is the first “publicised hate crime” in which a child was targeted, sexually violated, brutalised and killed in order to send out a message to her minority community. The crowd of people, including lawyers and BJP ministers, that marched in defence of the accused are the depraved end of the morality pool that divisive ideologies of hate can drag us down to.
The horror of Kathua is an exemplar of the hate-filled times the BJP and Hindutva have enabled, where, instead of unstinting condemnation, there have been public discussions about the hymen of an eight-year-old girl.
The BJP is not just Congress plus a cow. It is Congress plus cow plus the atmosphere it has enabled in which the national flag can be draped around the body of a man accused of murdering a Muslim for the food he was rumoured to have had.
It is all this plus the enabling of an atmosphere in which a civilian can be tied to the front of a vehicle and used as a human shield.
It is all this plus the impunity with which violence can be unleashed on Dalits for so much as the twirl of a mustache.
No, the BJP is not like any other political party. The party itself and its ideology of Hindutva are premised on beliefs that are at complete variance with the idea of India. Under the BJP, the values that define us as a nation are being corroded, new normals are being created and what is slowly emerging is an ugly, quarrelsome, monolithic ogre that brooks no questions or points of difference.
The only constant under it are attacks, virtual and real, on people, on ideas, and on dissent.
The BJP is not just Congress plus a cow. It is Congress plus a cow plus a future that should scare all of us.