BJP turning India into a 'Hindu Pakistan'. Shashi Tharoor is not that far off the mark
It is undeniable that India’s secular and pluralist ethos has been under a sustained attack for the past four years.
“Like all walls it was ambiguous, two faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side you were on.”
― Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
We sometimes forget in the daily tumult of political wrangling, the heated debates, exchanges of accusations and knee jerk rebuttals, that political borders are not only man-made but protean as well. In the words of the poet Marya Mannes, “Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.”
Saadat Hasan Manto captured the woes of Partition and the irony of borders perhaps like no other writer of this subcontinent in his short story The Dog of Titwal, in which a stray dog is caught between two outposts on either side of a border that was not there only a few days before.
Writers, poets, and artists of our two countries understand the commonalities that bind our respective peoples, especially the one of shared pain, and if much of what they say from time to time sounds familiar, it is because we have done nothing to alleviate it in our 70 year old history.
When Shashi Tharoor is criticised for his cautionary statement that a radicalised India could well become a mirror image of Pakistan, he is voicing the same concern made years ago by another writer and poet, Javed Akhtar. In fact, after the 2002 Gujarat riots, it was Javed Akhtar who made the point that India should not become Pakistan in the presence of Chandan Mitra, Vir Sanghvi and others.
“Soon after Pakistan was formed, the Ahmediyas were marginalised. The next was the turn of the Hindus and the Christians. The marginalisation process covered one community after another. It covered the Mohajirs (those Indians who had migrated during partition), the Bengalis, the Shias, the Sindhis and so on and so forth. A state or a nation that follows a policy of marginalisation will never remain united. Let us not make India into a Pakistan,” Akhtar had said.
What is the basis of the current outrage over Shashi Tharoor’s Twitter comment?
That India’s secular and pluralist ethos is under a sustained attack is undeniable. Airily dismissed as “fringe elements” by a newly elected BJP in 2014, the ragtag groups of organised lumpens, that are loosely cobbled under the tag “Sangh Parivar”, have been steadily empowered and emboldened in the past four years, carrying out physical assaults, lynchings, murders, and political assassinations in the name of Hindutva under the benign gaze, not to mention several winks and nods, of the ruling party.
Their online warriors have been spewing venom by way of rape and death threats openly with impunity, and a large number of them are followed by the PM himself. The list is exhaustive and individual tragedies have been reduced to statistics — something that only happens in losses of human life on a large scale associated with natural calamities and genocides.
There is no point in attempting to whitewash that fact by claiming defensively, as Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi did recently on July 2, that there has been “no big riot in the last four years.”
As a matter of fact, as many as 2,920 “communal incidents” were reported in India over four years ending 2017, in which 389 people were killed and 8,890 injured, according to the home ministry’s reply to the Lok Sabha on February 6, 2018 and February 7, 2017.
To view a gaurakshak lynching in isolation from absurd revivalist and obscurantist statements on social media by from sundry MPs and CMs, to a Union minister garlanding lynching accused, is being artfully naïve and disingenuous. There is a common purpose and agenda underlying all these incidents. Bereft of any achievement in terms of “vikas” and failing in all its promises, the BJP has fallen back on its tried and tested formula of communal divisiveness.
And what’s happening in Pakistan?
According to an Amnesty International report, The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 was used to intimidate, harass and arbitrarily detain human rights defenders for online comments. Enforced disappearances were widespread; impunity was prevalent. Blasphemy-related violence claimed the life of a student, triggering rare condemnation from the government. Large demonstrations took place in support of blasphemy laws, which were used to convict people expressing opinions online. Journalists were attacked by unidentified assailants. Minorities continued to face discrimination in the enjoyment of economic and social rights.
Bloggers, journalists, lawyers, activists and other human rights defenders regularly face harassment, intimidation, threats, violence and enforced disappearance. Activists are subjected to smear campaigns accusing them of being “blasphemers”, “anti-Pakistan”, “anti-Army” and “anti-Islam”. Human rights defenders are criticised on television and are sent death threats on social media.
The other side of the border is our mirror image, with radicalised Islam replacing Hindutva. (They should find a catchy word for radicalised Islam like the Sanghis did for radicalised Hinduism.)
If Deepika S Rajawat, the Kathua victim’s lawyer, is given death threats here, then Asma Jahangir (who passed away in February) was treated similarly there. For every Sabin Mehmud there, there is a Gauri Lankesh, a Pansare, Dabholkar and a Kalburgi here.
In a country where mob inciters and demagogues have high-level access to the current Indian leadership and are treated as state advisors and guests, where some BJP leaders are openly welcoming attacks on minorities, (a random case in point being BJP parliamentarian Raja Singh who openly thanked gaurakshaks via his Facebook post in 2016 for “punishing” beef eaters and Dalits), why would anyone have a problem with Shashi Tharoor’s comment?
Government inaction is designed to tacitly encourage Hindu fanatics to feel emboldened, to organise themselves, and to act with increasing viciousness in a macabre recreation of what is happening across the border.
As mentioned earlier, it is writers, artists and poets who spot the connects that many of us miss or refuse to see, entrenched firmly in our political corners. It may be recalled that not too long ago, echoing both Javed Akhtar and Shashi Tharoor’s words, the Pakistani activist and poet Fahmida Riaz recited a poem in front of an Indian audience on March 8, 2014 at a seminar titled “Hum Gunahgaar Auratein”.
The poem, Tum Bilkul Hum Jaise Nikle, was written by her in 1996 when the BJP first emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha. She said, “Pakistan has committed a huge mistake by becoming semantic with religion and it is in such a mess. We have been living under a communal sky for a half a century now. It’s sad that India is almost there.”
Breaking down while speaking about what had happened in Muzaffarnagar and Dadri, she said, “Please change the situation, don’t become another Pakistan, don’t live in a hell-hole”.
Here is the poem: Tum Bilkul Hum Jaise Nikle (translated by Shabana Mir)
Turned out you were just like us.
So it turned out you were just like us!
Where were you hiding all this time, buddy?
That stupidity, that ignorance
we wallowed in for a century –
look, it arrived at your shores too!
Many congratulations to you!
Raising the flag of religion,
I guess now you’ll be setting up Hindu Raj?
You too will commence to muddle everything up
You, too, will ravage your beautiful garden.
You, too, will sit and ponder –
I can tell preparations are afoot –
who is [truly] Hindu, who is not.
I guess you’ll be passing fatwas soon!
Here, too, it will become hard to survive.
Here, too, you will sweat and bleed.
You’ll barely make do joylessly.
You will gasp for air like us.
I used to wonder with such deep sorrow.
And now, I laugh at the idea:
it turned out you were just like us!
We weren’t two nations after all!
To hell with education and learning.
Let’s sing the praises of ignorance.
Don’t look at the potholes in your path:
bring back instead the times of yore!
Practice harder till you master
the skill of always walking backwards.
Let not a single thought of the present
break your focus upon the past!
Repeat the same thing over and over –
over and over, say only this:
How glorious was India in the past!
How sublime was India in days gone by!
Then, dear friends, you will arrive
and get to heaven after all.
Yep. We’ve been there for a while now.
Once you are there,
once you’re in the same hell-hole,
keep in touch and tell us how it goes!
Even as Congress distances itself from Shashi Tharoor’s comment, knowing that the BJP is likely to make political capital out of any equivalence with our designated enemy, let it be said that Shashi Tharoor the writer tried where Tharoor the politician had his hands tied.
Both countries in their pursuit for a monolithic dispensation have subverted their common legacy. We have both reduced multidimensional narratives, nuanced thoughts, complex historical characters to digestible unilinear simplistic soundbytes and icons either to be worshipped or condemned.
We have demonised each other constantly in these last 70 years since being cast asunder. It is time to pause and reassess ourselves, and to acknowledge our relationship as equal shareholders in the common interests of our citizens, for even though we may not be able to come together again, we can be united as a people in spite of our borders, once drawn in blood.