We will not abandon our heritage of inclusion

One does not have to look very hard to find a pattern in the events since Narendar Modi led the BJP to unprecedented victory in 2014 Lok Sabha elections and assumed power at the Centre. The pattern is clear: send a message to all the minorities, ‘psuedo seculars’, leftists, liberals, progressives and women that they have to fall in line with the thinking and or fall silent; otherwise, they will be moved out of the way.

For the first time since its inception in 1925, the RSS sees a possibility of realising its dream of establishing a Hindu Rashtra in India. The BJP’s victory with clear majority in Lok Sabha has made this dream of RSS, the ‘mata’ of BJP, a real possibility, and the RSS and its myriads avatars across India, lost no time in cashing in on this advantage.

Thus began the strategy of the RSS, ‘Death by 1,000 cuts’, a method of torture in ancient China called lingchi. This method of torture was reserved for the worst crimes, involved inflicting several cuts on the person till the person died from pain and loss of blood. An interpretation of this phrase is that while one small cut may not kill a person, a thousand small cuts will do the job.

Since the RSS considers not just Muslims and Christians as the enemy but all Hindu secularists, Hindu rationalists and declared Hindu atheists, they too are being targeted, one by one. The goal is to terrorise into submission and eliminate if possible, all those opposed to Hindutva.

The agenda of RSS is to intimidate the minorities and the anti-Hindutva forces to either fall in line or fall silent, and like the lone wolf attacks, target and eliminate one person at a time to spread fear and insecurity among the people - as in the instance of Dadri murder of Mohammed Akhlaq.

As in the instance of the murder of M M Kalburgi, as in the instance of the public humiliation and beating up of a Muslim man in Karnataka for being in the company of a Hindu girl, as in the defacement of the statue of Mary in Delhi, as in the rape of a nun, as in the filing of cases over comments on Facebook in Kerala recently and in Mumbai, as in the killing of journalists, as in the serving of legal notices to media houses.

The list is long. RSS has to prove the ‘machismo’ of the Hindus, who they believe are seen, especially by the Muslims as weak, whose meek nature is interpreted as incapable of being aggressive and whose espousal of ahimsa hides the incapacity of the Hindu to defend both the faith and fellow Hindus.

The RSS propagates that such ‘weaknesses’ were the reasons for the defeat of Hindu rulers at the hands of the Muslim invaders and the reasons for the Muslim rule for several generations.

The Hindus proved such perceptions as wrong in 2002 in Gujarat (as Congress proved it in 1984). But 2002 proved very costly since the mass scale massacre of Muslims brought international disrepute to Modi and BJP and proved to be tough stain to be washed away. Therefore, it now brings its new strategy of ‘death bya 1000 cuts’.

Strategy successful

The strategy clearly is working. Today a blanket of fear shrouds the minorities, especially the Muslims and the Christians. Some are willing to go the extra length to ‘prove’ their loyalty to Hinduism by claiming it as their ancestry, and claiming the cow as their ‘mother’ too as did Ehsan Ilahi Ansari, the head of the Muslim-dominated Jarcha village Panchayat, near Dadri, following the lynching of Akhlaq so that their lives and those of their children would be spared.

Yet other Muslim groups urged fellow Muslims to stop eating beef out of respect for Hindus’ sentiments. Some want to migrate out of India, especially the middle class, those who can afford to while others are happy that their children are working in ‘safer’ countries and are urging them not to return to India. Those settled abroad are happy that their decision has been proved right and that they got out of the country before too late.

The strategy is working in another way too. The poison of hatred is spreading as can be seen in the attack in Dadri. Not only were those who killed Mohammed Akhlaq his neighbours but among those who grievously hurt his younger son Danish, was a youngster who was a favourite student of Danish who took home tuitions for him.

Another manifestation of this spreading poison of hatred was the killing of a Muslim fellow worker by his colleagues in Toyota servicing centre by pumping pressurised air through his anus, for apparently no reason other than hatred.

The terror has spread not just to the minorities but to the Hindus too whose idea of India as an inclusive, generous, expansive, tolerant is being threatened forcing them to wonder if some of their fellow Hindus were wrong in electing Narendar Modi and BJP with unbeatable majority who turned out to be anti-thesis of all that they believed India to represent.

They now realise that it is this strength precisely that brought out the neo-Nazis of the RSS out of the woodwork. This confidence of unshakeable majority in the Lok Sabha for the next four years has emboldened the Hindu fundamentalists of the RSS and its several offshoots across India, to take up their long-nursed agenda of ‘purifying’ India, of restoring the voice of the Hindus that was ‘stolen’ by ‘pseudo secularists’ and handed over to the minorities to ‘appease’ them.

According to them, India had been mortgaged to the minorities ever since Independence by Congress in return for their votes. The Hindus were given the short shrift and hence, they who are in majority, are the aggrieved ones.

Therefore, the time has come to do ‘justice’ to Hindus by restoring their rightful position to them, restore their ‘glorious’ history to them, and importantly, restore to them their pride that had taken a beating not only by several generations of Muslim rule but also by Congress in post-independence times.

An integral part of the RSS/BJP agenda is to purge the country of all ‘foreign’ influences and culture either by force (as in demonising jeans and beating up of young girls in pubs) or enforcing submission through violence, threats, and other insidious ways of exclusion of the ‘other’.

Right thinking

Thankfully, this brazen trampling of not only our heritage but our Constitution has exposed the RSS and its offspring BJP. The common Indian citizen is waking up to the danger facing this country’s social fabric that was woven over hundreds of years of harmonious, pluralistic co-existence with people of different faiths, languages and races.

One example of this awakening is the protests by writers, authors, literary figures who have raised their voices in protest by returning the honours bestowed on them in recognition of their contribution to society.

The soft voices of protest by litterateurs Uday Prakash and Nayantara Sahgal have turned into a roar of anger and indignation against the destruction of values held dear by India for several millennia as more and more join this chorus of protest by returning their awards.

The common Indian, represented by our writers and authors and thinkers, is saying that India will not allow the looming disaster represented by the consolidation of the Hindutva ideology to happen.

She will defeat all designs of the Hindutvawadis to create a cleavage between us Indians, belonging to different regions, religions and speaking dozens of different languages; she will not allow the natural differences between us to be turned into unbridgeable chasms.

She will fight the enemy that has been set loose in our country. (The writer is a journalist and an academic and can be reached at [email protected])

By Dr Akhileshwari Ramagoud