18/07/2024
Hindutva’s Labour of Love or Religious Apartheid
The banner on his fruit ‘thela’ ( handcart ) along the Muzaffarnagar highway bore two very simple words in hindi – Nasir. Phal. Similarly, another thela had this banner pasted on it – Arif. Phal. The UP Police issued the diktat to ‘clear the confusion’ among Kanwar Yatris who they are buying fruits from. Understanding Hindi was simple. The message the UP administration wanted to send out to all the Muslim eatery owners and fruit sellers wasn’t lost on anyone either - You shall be a marked man.
A tea stall owner in Western UP told a media person that he changed the name of his tea stall from Chai Lovers Point to Wakil Sahab Tea Stall but the officials still told him this was ‘not clear enough’, so he again changed the name to Wakil Ahmed Tea Stall. You may find a dollop of comedy there but frankly it is the most nightmarish thing a citizen can imagine at the hand of his own government. A religious apartheid now being gradually normalized and institutionalized to impose majoritarianism.
Consider this – Goons climbed atop a mosque in Maharashtra, rained hammer on its minarets, damaging the place of worship after planting a saffron flag. Did you ever delineate violence from Hindutva?
A Muslim police constable was shot dead in Aligarh in a bizarre incident. Police claimed he died after a jammed pistol of a colleague accidently fired hitting him in the abdomen and ricocheting to hit Yaqoob on his head. Who would believe this bunkum? Apparently the two constables were out to nab a suspected smuggler of cow meat. Yaqoob’s father is certainly not the one to buy the theory. But would he press hard for the truth to come out considering his minority status and the consequences that might befall challenging the administration helmed by Yogi.
In UP’s Siddharth Nagar, a temple priest broke the idols of Lord Ganesha and pinned the blame on two local Muslim youths. Incidentally, the Police found out the truth. But what would have been the fate of the two youths had the temple priest mobilized Hindutva local lumpens in his defense more aggressively or the Police had chosen to blatantly take side?
In Chhattisgarh, two Muslim youths were lynched over suspicion of cow smuggling. Déjà vu?
Well, these are but five incidents of Hindutva violence past fortnight that has found a new momentum in Modi’s 3.0, eerily playing out the disturbing intent that so defined the PM’s brazen election speeches centering around the Muslim community.
If all of these is a throwback to Modi’s first term as PM pock-marked with cow vigilantism and reckless lynching and the second term that he rode at the back of seeking military revenge across the border and on the ricocheted glory of Yogi’s bulldozer drive, then the third term promises to give you more of the first time and more of the second term, making his illogical 2ab algebraic definition appear as close to the mathematical formula as possible. This is the extra 2ab he has been repeating ad nauseam past ten years. And yet the third term is not just squared for all its New India nasty Hindutva elements thrown in but multiplied to the power of 3.
A new narrative is being sought to circulate and take firm roots of marking the ‘other’ physically. They marked the houses of Jews in N**i Germany. Now, minorities have been marked as the ‘other’ who are identifiable with ‘certain kinds of dresses.’ It took them ten years to actually do this physical marking on the pretext of safeguarding the religious sentiments of the majority community. The dividing line becoming crystal clear – a majority
community who shall be armed with all the constitutional rights on the one hand and a section of citizenry subservient to those majoritarian impulses, reduced to playing second fiddle.
Therefore, the Arifs and the Nasirs and the Wakils – the bonafide citizens of this country just the same as those Kanwar Yatris who shall storm the highway, as if entitled, creating ruckus and noise and blocking the busy highway for almost a week, bringing the economy and usual life to a standstill, will have to display their name on their handcarts so that it doesn’t ‘cause confusion’ in the minds of Kanwars.
What the police did not say and what the UP administration wanted to tell all and sundry is this – You are the other and we shall mark you for that. What the police and the administration did not tell you in as many words is this – if Kanwar Yatris do not buy stuff from those vendors named Arif and Nasir then they certainly have only religious sentiments uppermost in their mind not to buy any consumable item from non-Hindus during such a piligrimage. No offence intended.
But, offence certainly taken Mr Yogi Adityanath for wearing your religious bias on your sleeves and displaying crude religious discrimination. Think of putting Hindus in that place and your nostrils shall get flared up. Seems you haven’t learnt any lesson from massive defeat in the recent Lok Sabha polls in which the voters squarely rejected your bulldozer justice. Bulldozers that rampantly mowed down houses and shops of minorities for offence that that were not even cognizable. For holding a kangaroo ( bulldozer ) court even before the matter reached the court of law.
But a constitutionally untenable diktat like the one by Muzaffarnagar administration could only mean two things - either Yogi wants to seek his revenge on the community that voted against his party handing him the worst election humiliation of his career and making him the prime suspect in the eyes of the non-biological supremo and his corpulent lieutenant, setting the grapevine abuzz with his impending replacement. Or this was a deliberate act of defiance against Modi that BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari gave words to in neighbouring West Bengal.
In a convention packed with party members, Suvendu Adhikari gave a roaring speech, thunderously rejecting Modi’s pet Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas slogan and replaced it with his own coinage – jo hamare sath, hum unke sath. In a way, Adhikari was clearly rejecting whatever pretense Modi has to perforce act out in order to keep the last vestiges of his sabka sath sabka vikas image intact. Adhikari then went on to suggest BJP convention members to close down party’s minority morcha before ending his speech with aggressive chants of Jai Shree Ram.
Consider also that Nagpur isn’t quite happy with its Delhi protégé and now the RSS Sarsanghchalak himself has taken the lead to show mirror to Modi ever since BJP’s lukewarm showing at the hustings. The election results punctured Modi’s hubris. He had to hold on to the crutches of two most unreliable partners to make him limp back to power. Mr Mohan Bhagwat is doing all he can to pick small, little holes into his still puffed up ego. He has been actively trolling the ‘non-biological’ PM precisely for pretending to be what he is not – superhuman claiming to have the divine qualities. In a sense, Mr Bhagwat is chiding Modi to stop playing God and focus on governance which is certainly Mr Modi’s proven Achilles heel.
The fact that Modi has to water down on blowing his own trumpet in what certainly is NDA regime is already hampering his working style. Now, he will have to work overtime to keep the murmurs of a possible dissent within the party under check. Thirdly, for keeping his allies in good humour he will have to continue pretending to live up to his old slogan of sabka sath, sabka vikas because despite all the give and take of power balance both big allies are visibly inclined well disposed toward safeguarding minority interests in their respective states. It is as much a test of this far and no further attitude of allies to check Modi’s zealotry urges.
This only adds to the burden of Modi still having to shoulder the responsibility of pulling his party out of the abyss of marked pessimism. The forthcoming elections to the Maharashtra and Haryana Vidhan Sabha might as well give him the chance to get back a sliver of his confidence. Because the nasty bit about the 2024 Lok Sabha elections was that Modi fell short of even managing his own electoral vikas, not just losing UP badly, miserably failing to keep up his own victory margin from Varanasi but also falling short of driving his party past the majority mark. As for now, UP mangoes to Nagpur oranges the fruits of his Hindutva labour of love have left a bad taste in the mouth.
