After Covid-19, pandemic of positivity is infecting India

The Sangh parivar sees the goal of a Hindu Rashtra within reach

There is a steady echo of voices asking for the Prime Minister to step aside, many demanding that he should take responsibility for leading us straight into the mouth of the pandemic to be devoured. The demand has grown against the backdrop of a strong rebuff from the electorate in West Bengal and expectedly in Kerala, a poor showing in the panchayat polls in Uttar Pradesh and the continued toll extracted by the second wave of the pandemic that we have seen in funeral pyres burning round the clock, bodies found floating in the Ganga, and the continued mess on the vaccines. Even the BJP’s ideological parent, the RSS, could no longer ignore the havoc caused by SARS-Cov-2; it launched a series styled “positivity unlimited”, actually an act of insensitivity on its part that still had to make a token acknowledgement of the misery all around us.

The BJP has stepped up, too; the negative equity the PM has earned is being met with a “positivity” propaganda brigade that has taken its role rather seriously. As a result, a new pandemic called “positivity” is being unleashed to fight the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. This is why a whole new set of “positivity” videos, stories designed to evoke nationalistic sentiments, and videos of how a “hard-working” Prime Minister is being unfairly targeted have hit the market as WhatsApp forwards in the last fortnight or thereabouts.

All this transpires amidst a total collapse, an underlining of the nation’s firm membership in the group of third world nations, left quite clueless and only receiving assorted help from across the world, and even that has not been transparently accounted for or deployed with any sense of purpose.

Yet, the Prime Minister is unlikely to go. He will have to be pushed out of office, and this is unlikely to happen as long as his party of ‘Yes’ ministers and the BJP’s ideological parent, the RSS, think they can ride out the storm. They are equally unlikely to ask a different set of questions, demand accountability and become uncomfortable with the reducing of the party to a person. All reins are in the hands of the Prime Minister, a complete capture of the party and its machinery, which must bend to his whims, which of course the BJP has done with a readiness that makes it quite common to call this a one-man show. The 15 arrests and 17 FIRs in mid-May for posters put up in New Delhi critical of Modi by tying him to the export of vaccines when Indians don’t have enough, and the questioning of Youth Congress president B V Srinivas in another instance, are only the latest cases that make the point.

Not only is criticism stamped out, Modi has a penchant to use his position for personal glorification crossing all boundaries, as has been seen repeatedly – from the suit he wore that had his name woven in, the renaming of a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, as the Narendra Modi stadium, done at the hands of the President of India, and his pictures on all vaccination certificates. As the historian Ramchandra Guha has helpfully pointed out, by naming a stadium for himself while in power, Modi sits in the company of leaders like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and Kim Il-sung.

Not since Indira Gandhi and her total domination and control over the Congress in the 1970s has any single political leader held such power and authority at the national level and shown the willingness to use it to narrow ends. Indira Gandhi had a declared “Emergency”; India today lives through an undeclared “Emergency”, which is in many ways worse because constitutional limits are stretched, twisted and tested routinely, not under the umbrella of any extraordinary national exigency, but under a new normal that takes hold to terrorise citizens into silence. All of this will have long-term implications for the future of India’s democratic traditions.

The plain fact is, the BJP has succeeded and grown well beyond its own imagination, helped of course by a free ride offered by the Congress that was steeped in corruption scandals and an opposition that has been in disarray and unable to capture the imagination of the people in the face of sharp, powerful and divisive campaigns by the BJP. Now, the parivar sees the goal of a Hindu Rashtra within reach; 2024 is not too far away and this third time will open the road to a very different India. The Ram temple is being built, and the gaming shows that one more election will be in the bag. The script is written. The timelines are set. Only the picture has to play out. But the pandemic and the response has come in the way. When your loved ones are snatched away, when the economy is in the doldrums and when raising a voice can land you in jail, then this isn’t a pretty picture of Hindutva.

The handling of the pandemic has exposed the party for what it is – insensitive not only to one segment or religion but to all of humanity in the relentless pursuit of an agenda that has nothing to do with people and everything to do with power and control and domination. The ugliest of forces have conspired to tear down the magnanimity, the values and the openness that are at the heart of India’s spiritual traditions and religious practices that are said to be promoted while in actuality, everything is being torn down. This much should be plain for anyone to see.

(The writer is a journalist and a faculty member at Bhavan’s SPJIMR. Views are personal) (Syndicate: The Billion Press)