Amidst the deceptive rhetoric of the government, it is the duty of citizens to preserve their humanity and sanity if freedom and democracy in this country has to survive.
Soter D’Souza
Amidst the deceptive rhetoric of the government, it is the duty of citizens to preserve their humanity and sanity if freedom and democracy in this country has to survive.
A headline which reads “Muslims turn up in large numbers at Gujarat CM’s rally” if swallowed raw without a fact-check could make one believe that a large section of Muslims in Gujarat are supporting the saffron party. Little do we realise that the Muslim community is ridden by a Shia-Sunni divide but the news report conceals which sect among the Muslims was present at the saffron rally. So also, with increased media deception and event management tactics employed by the political forces, there is a possibility as in the 2014 rallies that party supporters are provided with burkhas and skull caps to give the impression of a large Muslim presence.
The same holds good even when it comes to Hindus or Christians. While the Hindutva brigade may attempt to psyche the minorities and liberals in the country by claiming to speak for 80 per cent of Hindus, the fact is that only certain dominant castes among Hindus subscribe to the right-wing idea of Hindutva and tom-toms the achievements of the saffron government. In fact, arguments which point out how the ‘State’s classification of Hindus has cleverly been stretched to include Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists and adivasis and create an illusion of a Hindu majority’ are brushed under the carpet. Hindutva needs to create a Hindu majority to snatch the reins of power similar to how communism taps the majority of the toiling masses to snatch power from the minority, the capitalists.
The film actor Kamal Hassan has stirred up a hornets’ nest with his recent opinion that Hindu terrorism is a reality. The call for a violent response to Kamal Hassan’s comment from some radical Hindutva outfits only lends veracity to his view. It was the former Home Minister P C Chidambaram in the UPA government who rattled the Hindutva fraternity with the use of the term ‘saffron terror’.
Coincidently, this remark also comes at a time when a Christian minister in Goa’s government, who even went out of his way to put his ‘Hindu’ identity before his Christian faith to defend against his party’s communal image, now feels that he is not liked and discriminated by some within his party because of his religion. While violence under the banner of Hindutva has been parading naked on the streets for decades, there is a well-planned tactic to resist the ‘terror’ label for as much time as possible.
The fanatic Hindutva forces cannot be expected to accept the tag of ‘saffron terrorism’ or ‘Hindu terrorism’ just as fanatic Muslims would deny the Islamic terror angle and claim it to be a design to defame them by some nations with geopolitical and economic interests. Practically all militancy glorifies its violence under the noble excuse of self-defence and wears the garb of victimhood resulting from injustice by a perceived enemy, a community or the State. It’s like violence being acceptable from the proletariat against the bourgeoisie class. No militant group is ever known to voluntarily admit the ‘terror’ tag as that would attract various local and global sanctions which would hinder the organisation’s activities. The Maoists portray their violence as self-defence to protect the tribal rights to their common natural resources.
The terrorists in Kashmir justify their violence under the garb of liberating the Kashmiri people from oppression by the Indian State. But ultimately, violence in any form terrorises the victim and cannot be accepted as a civilised solution to addressing any form of injustice. The systematic targeting or denying of rights to minority institutions by the State in proxy, by deploying the State machinery to pick out some legal excuses to disrupt the social activities and generate insecurity among minorities, is also a form of State sponsored terrorism.
With the tactics like rewriting history books, blanking out references to tall secular leaders in India’s freedom struggle and substituting them with Hindutva’s manufactured heroes, disrupting funding of secular NGOs, preventing minority institutions from expanding their education outreach, the silencing of journalists and capturing the media houses, the struggle against the divisive forces will not succeed without forging a unity among secular forces and helping the public see beyond the smoke screen erected by saffron forces. Minorities in this country have to realise that they are politically worth only as decoration till such time as the Hindutva vote consolidates itself to independently snatch the reigns of power. The right wing Hindutva politics is more like what Winston Churchill had said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Review/Voice-Of-Opinion/Deciphering-truth-amidst-the-saffron-smog/122473.html
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