BackTurning the idea of India upside down
The entire public discourse in the country has turned into an inferno of TV diatribes and reputation destruction
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One week they say is a long time in politics. By that standard two years is an age and that may well be a correct description of how we have fared since the Modi, Modi slogans resonated at Rashtrapati Bhawan in May 2014.
To many of us it seemed that India might not be the same again. The incumbent Prime Minister and his supporters, who had swelled as the election results rolled in, were talking about 15 straight years of unbroken rule. Two years on, no one is prepared to bet on that thought; it is more like “well, there is no going away for the next three years!"
Be that as it may the air is heavy, and the devastating fire that destroyed the National Museum of Natural History in Delhi and the fires that are reducing the pristine pine forests of Uttarakhand to cinders seem to be saying something Shakespearean: something rotten in Denmark! Those are fires that we can at least see but what of the fire that is burning slowly but viciously within society and the public institutions we cherish?
Even in the matter of ideological demolitions, the targeting of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the venerable institutions they have built over the decades stands out for its cynicism and disregard for legal niceties. Despite attempts to use instruments of law in a self-serving manner to damage the former PM and Congress president, the government has constraints of robust legal resistance. But the vicious media trials and public prejudging of persons who have inherited and earned immense public admiration and support over the decades—done at the highest level, both within and without the country—is a distressing sight.
But what is worse is that the entire public discourse in the country has turned into an inferno of TV diatribes and reputation destruction. It was said in the past that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me"; I am no longer certain about that because both weapons have been let loose to cause mayhem. What was symbolic in the past has become a macabre reality: the Dadri and similar other lynchings, the assassination of rationalists, the trolling of outspoken public figures and journalists with threats of “worse than the fate of Nirbhaya".
And this is but the beginning—weapons training being given to young cadres is becoming commonplace. In the land of peace, a terrible cult of violence is being born and the leader of the country says nothing.
We are often told not to exaggerate aberrations and certainly not use dramatic allusions from the dark history of other lands and continents. Promises are but jumlas and killings are accidents; any complaints about them is intolerance! In a country that prides itself for unity in diversity we now hear praise for uniformity and diversity is linked with deviance. We are at war with ourselves even as our neighbours begin to wonder what we expect of them.
The great fascination with “Congress mukt Bharat" may well be an excuse for getting rid of much more than the Congress party and its leaders. It may well be motivated by the fear of the return of the Congress but it is also about turning the idea of India upside down. That this will be artificially restricted to the domestic canvas seems very unlikely but it is just that the world is a little harder to manipulate than emotions at home.
Yet, the neighbourhood is beginning to feel the difference. The walls and fences that the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) leadership speaks about in Assam have an obvious connotation about its local problems, some genuine, others deliberately conjured, but they also have something to do with the BJP mind. One wonders what Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore would think of this.
The walls I speak of remind me of what are called “gated communities" in urban areas. Apartheid is not entirely unrelated to segregation that begins in the name of security (read insecurity). It is not complete by merely putting brick and mortar together without a philosophy and an ideology. For that the priority has to be to pull down bastions of free flow of ideas, the universities and other public institutions of ideas exchange. Rohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar are the first casualties of the onslaught.
Cultural institutions have started feeling the heat as well. Civil society has already been warned. The civil services and the media, first among the cheerleaders, are regrouping with nowhere to go—jobs remain illusive, production is tardy, household savings are low, inflation is straining at the leash. Even the statisticians are giving up.
With oil prices shoring up and the bonanza time over, the Emperor had better watch out for the little boy who will scream out the truth. It does not take very long for adulation to wither in this cruel world.
Salman Khurshid is a Congress leader and former external affairs minister.
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