Response to NYT article: Relax, Modi is not a Nazi

In normal circumstances, an op-ed expressing concern about attacks on writers and liberals by religious zealots should earn nothing but our complete support. Unfortunately, when the op-ed (Sonia Faleiro’s “India’s Attack on Free Speech”) invokes the brutal murders of three activists in India over the past few years in a way that misrepresents reality so egregiously, a longer response becomes necessary. Here, briefly, are the main claims of this article:

1) In the past, there were “episodic attacks” on liberals in India but now, “it feels different”.

2) The government is refusing to comment though the harassment is being widely reported as front page news in India.

3) Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being seen by many as tacitly approving of such attacks because he has not said anything about it.

4) These attacks have “gained momentum” since his election.

5) These attacks are “linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares”.

6) One such Hindutva group, Sri Ram Sene, has a “history of violence” such as harassing women and men in pubs.

7) The “ultimate goal” of such groups is a “Hindu nation”, and once again, Modi has not said anything.

8) India is “hiding” behind a “patina of legitimacy” instead of realising the murders in India share “striking similarities” with the murder of four Bangladeshi bloggers.

9) The victims were similar too. One of the victims in India was no threat to anyone but had only “publicly expressed skepticism toward idol worship in Hinduism”.

10) The authorities are not viewing this as an “overarching attack on free speech” and are only opting for a case-by-case investigation.

11) There is an atmosphere of “self-censorship and fear” in India now.

12) Hindu extremists have threatened another activist for holding views “critical of the Hindu caste system”.

13) The motivation for these murders is the transformation of India from a “secular state to a Hindu nation”.

14) This motivation informs not only the murders, and the silence of politicians around them, but also the “Hindu nationalist policies” of the government such as changing the director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), renaming it, and using it to highlight the achievements of Modi. This would be like recasting the “Washington Monument” as an Obama museum.

15) BJP leaders are erasing the contribution of liberals and promoting violent Hindu nationalists instead.

16) These violent Hindu nationalists include Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, who was a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an “armed Hindu group”.

17) The BJP is rejecting secularism under the guise of rejecting Western culture. A BJP minister recently spoke about “cleansing” Western influences, and he is known for choosing his words carefully.

18) These attacks should be of concern to “everyone who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved, rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots”.

There are several omissions and distortions in this account. Here, briefly, are some reality checks:

In the past, there were “episodic attacks” on liberals in India but now, “it feels different”:

There have been several vicious and very public assaults on liberal values, and writers and academics in India long before the Modi government assumed office. These include riots and banning of The Satanic Verses by the Congress government in the 1980s in order to soothe Muslim feelings, and more recently, the chopping off of a professor’s hand by Muslim students in Kerala, and vandalism over the movie The Da Vinci Code. But things like this were just “episodic” according to the author, and presumably had nothing to do with a growing, global, and systematic assault of fundamentalism on liberal artists, writers and cartoonists.

The government is refusing to comment though the harassment is being widely reported as front page news in India:

It is true that recent assaults - real, exaggerated, or concocted - on activists, writers, churches and dietary choices have all been “front page news” in India. But it is not true that the “government is refusing to comment”. One can find members of the ruling party commenting on these issues, even if what they say is not always eloquent, or presented sympathetically in these front pages.

Prime Minister Modi is being seen by many people as tacitly approving of such attacks because he has not said anything about it:

If it is the usual expectation from the prime minister that he or she should comment on individual law and order issues, one can say that a duty was not fulfilled. If “many people” misinterpret his merely doing his job and delegating concerns to the appropriate officials as his “tacit approval” for attacks then it might be a case of paranoia than a sane critique. There is also the real danger that the prime minister’s public response to such attacks might invite attention-seeking criminals to indulge in more such acts of terror (I use the definition of terror as violence and publicity here, and denying publicity is an essential part of the fight against terror).

These attacks have “gained momentum” since Modi's election as prime minister:

“Momentum” is a subjective and unsubstantiated claim here.

These attacks are “linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares":

It’s a quite bizarre, if not plainly libellous claim, to say that Modi’s ideology is the same as that of these criminal groups. I suspect that several “experts” simply don’t have a clue what Modi is talking about that gets ordinary Indians so inspired, and presume everything he says is a secret Hindutva code for Indian-style Nazism. Such is their understanding of India; it’s all “far-right” from the far-out left, maybe.

One such Hindutva group, Sri Ram Sene, has a “history of violence” such as harassing women and men in pubs:

There are several such local vigilante groups now magnified in international media as somehow being representatives of Modi’s worldview. One wonders if these opportunistic groups pop up only because they know there is a media welcome waiting for them.

The “ultimate goal” of such groups is a “Hindu nation”, and once again, Modi has not said anything:

If the implication of this statement is that Modi is silently relying on groups of unprincipled, self-serving criminals to create a “Hindu nation” then it shows a complete lack of understanding of the millions of decent, intelligent and concerned citizens in India who subscribe to the inclusive, diverse, and civilisationally-rooted sense of Hinduism and India that they associate with Modi’s rise.

India is “hiding” behind a “patina of legitimacy” instead of realising that the murders in India share “striking similarities” with the murder of four Bangladeshi bloggers:

I am not sure if India is hiding behind anything nor if it is really escaping international outrage; just look at the onslaught of doom and gloom op-eds against India in The New York Times and other Western newspapers. I wonder if Faleiro’s belief that there has been more international outrage over the incidents in Bangladesh than India is even factually true (let’s just check the space given to each in The New York Times, as a case study). I agree though that a murder is a murder and must be condemned, whether its Hindu criminals or Muslim criminals, Indians or Bangladeshis. But this attempt to find equivalence between a global ideology of brutal violence that has claimed thousands of lives and local acts of violence with some arguable national implications is unsubstantiated.

The victims were similar too. One of the victims in India was no threat to anyone but he had only “publicly expressed skepticism toward idol worship in Hinduism”:

It would be disrespectful to the deceased and their families to argue about Faleiro’s claim here in the face of the terrible injustice done to them, by Hindus in one case, Muslims in another. I am not sure though that the anger in India was only about the victim having simply “expressed skepticism about Hindu idol worship.” There are thousands of people who express such skepticism freely and live undisturbed lives in India. More than skepticism, what might have been relevant here is the controversy surrounding his comments about urinating on sacred deities as a test of reason over faith. Still, not an excuse for murder.

The authorities are not viewing this as an “overarching attack on free speech” and are only opting for a case-by-case investigation:

The important thing is to ensure that justice is done. This idea that somehow a case-by-case approach denies justice is based on a poor understanding of the complexities of identity politics and power relations in India. A truly universal stand against those who attack free speech and liberal values would require an honest position against all such crimes and not just selective outrage.

There is an atmosphere of “self-censorship and fear” in India now:

One keeps hearing that there is an atmosphere of “self-censorship and fear” in India. However, if it were really true that the Modi government has led to such an atmosphere of self-censorship in India, would the author’s observation about outraged front-page stories (point two above) be true? The news and opinion sections of English media remain highly critical of the Modi government. New books by writers like Wendy Doniger supposedly disfavoured by the Modi government are heavily promoted in bookstores in India to this day and reviewed favourably in Indian publications.

Hindu extremists have threatened another activist for holding views “critical of the Hindu caste system”:

Faleiro does not mention anything about the castes of the assailants, or the fact that this violence is not about simply “upper castes” attacking “lower castes”. This vague evocation of the caste system merely feeds into Western mythologies that treat certain identities as “upper caste Hindus” when it suits their narrative, and as “lower castes being Hinduised” at other times. And, is it accurate to still call it the “Hindu caste system”? I thought other columnists at The New York Times had already established that there was never any such thing as “Hinduism".

The motivation for these murders is the transformation of India from a “secular state to a Hindu nation”:

Is a “Hindu nation” really the “motivation” for these murders? This has to be the biggest conspiracy theory that has gone around unchecked in academia and journalism for several decades now. It is hard to discount the very local, and often toxic material motivations that go into such crimes, and yet we are asked to imagine and fear some great invisible hand orchestrating the rise of the Hindu nation.

This motivation informs not only the murders, and the silence of politicians around them, but also the “Hindu nationalist policies” of the government such as changing the director of the NMML, renaming it, and using it to highlight the achievements of Modi. This would be like recasting the “Washington Monument” as an Obama museum:

I am not aware of any school of logic or reason that would see the connection between these crimes and the Nehru museum, but anyway, since Faleiro claims that they are connected, we might clarify a few things here. There is virtually no major “Hindu nationalist” issue on which the Modi government has imposed its will so far, and we are quite aware of the fact that virtually any old policy, even those of the Congress, that could be played up as a Hindu nationalist agenda is being magnified in the media these days (such as the Mumbai “meat ban”). If the Nehru museum is the worst case of “Hindu nationalism” from the BJP government that Faleiro could find, it should tell us something about how true or false this Hindu nationalism bogey is. And as long as it’s not changed to “Modi Museum”, which it has not been changed to, Faleiro’s “Obama museum” comparison is an especially dubious one.

BJP leaders are erasing the contribution of liberals and promoting violent Hindu nationalists instead:

As for the BJP leaders who are erasing the contribution of liberals and elevating violent Hindu nationalists, Faleiro has all of one example to offer; and not even someone from the higher echelons either.

These violent Hindu nationalists include Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, who was a former member of the RSS, an “armed Hindu group”:

And the violent Hindu nationalist who is supposedly being celebrated is not even someone from the present but the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that there is an element of revisionism about Gandhi’s place in history going on, from the Left and the Right in India, but to claim that Modi and today’s RSS blindly believe in the ideology of one of their former members from more than half-a-century ago is a stretch. Furthermore, what is a simple and obvious fact that several concerned observers of “Modi’s India” have not noticed is that the philosopher that Modi and his government most often invoke is not Gandhi’s assassin but the very Gandhian Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, whose work is as liberal as it gets in terms of its views on religious freedom. And as for Faleiro’s characterisation of the RSS as an “armed” group, maybe she means they have arms and legs that could be used to kick down secularism. I do not know.

The BJP is rejecting secularism under the guise of rejecting Western culture. A BJP minister recently spoke about “cleansing” Western influences, and he is known for choosing his words carefully:

Since the BJP government assumed office, movies like Fifty Shades of Grey have come and gone from India without a noise. Except for one brief attempt to stop access to some pornographic websites, the BJP government has stepped back to let Indians remain free to indulge their senses with whatever they want, from whatever corner of the world that this age of global gluttony and commerce will allow. One comment about “cleansing” the culture by a minister who, mysteriously, only Faleiro, in the whole world, seems to think “chooses his words carefully”, is enough for her to assume that the BJP is out to re-label secularism as “Westernisation” and squash it. The critique of secularism, in the form that the Congress and the Hinduphobic academia and media pushed it, is very much alive and in the open in India today; but not so much in the government as in what liberals like to celebrate as civil society.

These attacks should be of concern to “everyone who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved, rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots”:

“India as it was conceived and as it is beloved”. These plaintive and poetic words are at the core of the intellectual divide that exists in India and its diaspora today. There is an academic, in both senses of the word, conception of India as an idea of colonial and postcolonial reason, embodied most of all in its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In this view, a group of staunchly secular leaders got together and “imagined” modern India into being in 1947, crushing primordial forces of religious savagery along the way. Whatever its merits, then, the India that hundreds of millions live in today has witnessed mostly the aftermath of its spiritual, philosophical, and political corruption. Its secularism was not the millennia-old wisdom of its civilisation, but an artifice, a colonial civilising mission recast now singularly to chide one community and one community alone. Its spirit was not its own, but some elite, anglicised, borrowed fiction. Now, this intellectual monopoly has ended. Things are in change. What is rising, with Modi’s election as the democratic crux of it all, is not some cheap thuggery trying to make India a Hindu nation, but a fundamental reexamination of this whole “idea of India” as we were taught all these years itself. Our “idea of India” is not afflicted with postmodern affectation about its fictiveness, neither is it a dead doctrine of tradition. In our sense of India, we find ourselves uplifted, inspired, moved to love for the whole world and its lives, because we know India, by whatever name, to have been “conceived” and “beloved” for long before today’s canon-keepers say it existed. The contest today, at its core, is an intellectual one, between an empty 60-year-old theory about India uncritically borrowed from colonial thought, and a 5,000-year (or maybe more) bedrock of meaning, feeling and value still known to us, even with its bruises and all, as India.