JOIN USThe other day I passed a piece of Delhi graffiti which said, “Write, or die trying”. Some member of the educated unemployed was summing up the Law of Writing, which is, “The more effortless the writing, the more effort it took”. It’s the same with giant messes. If a government regularly and effortlessly gets into giant messes, just because they make it look easy doesn’t mean that they didn’t have to work very hard at it.
A thing like Nupurgate doesn’t just happen, it takes years of perfecting three things: Dishing out hateful divisive crap publicly from a position of power or authority; throwing your own under the bus without blinking to avoid responsibility; and relentlessly pushing the minority-baiting envelope. Having diligently tested these three prongs of the Hindutva project against public tolerance and memory, the BJP has come to the happy realisation that it can totally be hate-mongering and incompetent, without paying too much of a political cost. In other words, it can create a giant mess and get through it just fine.
When the government finally responded, it was not out of sympathy for Muslim outrage over Nupur Sharma’s ugly Islamophobic rant—ugly Islamophobic rants are this regime’s jam—but to the threat of economic boycott by the Arab world. Its response has, per usual, been a straight up lie. All religions respected equally? If that were the case, the BJP would have no unique selling proposition and would be merely incompetent. Its very essence is a Hindu chauvinist India in which non-Hindus had better keep their heads down, or else.
It is therefore at least a little bit satisfying to watch this government, relentlessly boastful about its Hindu self-confidence, having to backpedal awkwardly, make noises about reining in its people, and improbably talk up the magnificent plurality of India. But it would be so much better to have a government that just did its job without baring its teeth at its own citizens and making an international spectacle of itself every three minutes.
The truth is that the BJP grabbed the tiger of hate by the tail, and as Nupurgate unfolds, it is becoming apparent that for a lot of Indians, the party of red-eyed Hinduism is just another left liberal sissy. Mohan Bhagwat can say what he likes about not wanting to get involved with every Shivling discovered in a Muslim building, but the free-floating hate that the RSS-BJP has created is no longer in its control.
For the last eight years, the world has been so venally into the Indian market that Indian Muslims and other minorities have been left to suck up the humiliation and intimidation being visited upon them by an increasingly radicalised majority. If they are now emboldened to protest, it might be because they finally have an international ear. I personally have no sympathy for religious hypersensitivity of any stripe—I say lock the hypersensitive of both kinds into a large room and let them sort it out, we might even clean up the gene pool a little—but in an India that has deliberately subverted constitutional values to justify everything on grounds of religious sentiment, Muslim sentiment should also count.
Believe me when I say that it gives me no pleasure to stick up for religious sensitivities, especially since Muslim protests, however peaceful and understandable, are exactly what the Hindu majority will pounce upon and denounce as radical and violent, resetting to told-you-so demonisation. But there is a law about religious sensitivities—one that I don’t believe should exist, but while it remains on the books, these protests are legit. If there’s anything as bad as a minority almost silenced, it’s a minority roused to anger with little left to lose. We’re simply plunging into an irrecoverable death spiral of peace-free polarisation. You might call it “Right, or die trying.”