Hatred is in the air

Will the pre-monsoon showers wash away the filth of hate speech strewn across the country over the past several weeks of electioneering? The rains may well bring relief from the summer of our discontent, especially now that the seemingly interminable poll process is over. However, they may not quite wash away the poison of prejudice that appears to have seeped into the hearts and minds of too many of our compatriots. What is particularly worrisome is the virulent indoctrination to which thousands of young Indians, in particular, have been and are being routinely subjected, both online and offline.

A recent, brief video report in The Wire was a deeply disturbing eye-opener. The words of a catchy song to which young men and boys dance with joyous abandon during an ostensibly religious procession in Ayodhya are not just horrifying, but terrifying. Not only are the lyrics drenched in hatred and contempt for fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim, but they explicitly threaten violence against them.

A recent analysis of 60,000 messages shared over three months in WhatsApp groups run by the BJP’s social media volunteers, published in The Diplomat, found that nearly a quarter of them were Islamophobic and anti-Muslim.

According to investigative journalist Soma Basu, who “took a deep dive” into 140 groups for a period of four months, 23.84% of the messages she analysed were “deeply inflammatory, with a clear intent to create disharmony and arouse feelings of enmity, hatred, or ill-will between Hindus and Muslims.”

She found that “a large number of these messages are conspiratorial in nature and provoke the Hindu majority in India to not just deny or deprive Muslims of their rights as citizens of India, but also cause loss of their life and property. Some of the messages called for outright war, witch-hunting of Muslims and “teaching them lessons” by violent means.

This is particularly alarming since the WhatsApp groups she studied were clearly more “official” than those widely accessible through searchable links. Joining these groups involved messaging numbers advertised by district or state-level political leaders, among their members were several BJP office-bearers and allies, and a little over 36% of the messages comprised political propaganda from the BJP and its allies.

The widely reported, periodic, public utterances of even senior leaders of the party – “green virus” and “termites” are among the latest additions to the communal dictionary —clearly serve to legitimise and reinforce the othering, dehumanisation and demonising of members of certain communities, particularly Muslims.

It is telling that, according to Factchecker’s Hate Crime Watch, the victims of 58% of all hate crimes committed in India over the past decade were Muslim; 51% of the cases pertained to predictable issues such as cow protection/vigilantism (28%), interfaith relationship (14%) and communal clashes (9%). In the 127 incidents of cow-related violence recorded from 2012 onwards, 56% of the victims were Muslims; 97% of the reported attacks took place after 2014.

“Hatred is in the air,” M K Gandhi observed in his 1946 book, My Non-Violence. Unfortunately, it is in the air again in 2019. In a chapter titled, “How to canalise hatred,” he observed that in 1920 he had suggested “the use of non­violence and its inevitable twin companion, truth, for canalising hatred into the proper channel.” Is there a way to do this almost 100 years later?

Hate crimes are rising in the US, too, as is support for political violence. A November 2018 article in a University of California, Berkeley, magazine pointed out that when it comes to such violence, leadership matters. Many studies have established that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others when an authority figure tells them to. When leaders engage in violent rhetoric, so do their followers.

A Princeton University scholar writing in Time magazine about hate crimes around the same time called attention to the role played by Donald Trump in arousing and exploiting the deepest fears of white people. According to him, the belief that white people matter more than others “has distorted democratic principles and disfigured the souls of many Americans.” In his view, “appeals to the tone of our politics will do little.” As he put it, “These are dark times. And more than ever, we must be the light.”

Even though white supremacists have evidently been emboldened by Trump’s electoral triumph, an article in Mother Jones points out that even “as the movement’s visibility has increased, so has the number of extremists trying to escape it.”

Efforts to understand the minds of violent racists have obviously “gained newfound urgency as the country struggles to defeat the next generation of extremists.” Leading the fascinating de-radicalisation movement is a loosely affiliated group of scholars and activists, some of them former white supremacists themselves.

The insights, experiences and strategies of organisations like the Norwegian Exit (and groups modelled on it in other parts of Europe) and Life After Hate in the US may hold lessons for efforts in India to wean people, especially youngsters, away from hatred and violence based on religious, caste, ethnic and other manufactured and manipulated divides. The country is in dire need of an antidote to hatred.