27 June 19
A purely political pickle would have ingredients that would be slow poison curing the dross to a finesse. No one quite saw the current grasp the RSS has on India’s polity even as late as 1992, even as later as 2002, and even as latest as 2014. Still, the only way to understand what we just witnessed in Parliament when a first time MP of Trinamool Ms Mahua Moitra admonished the polity by using the template of Fascism as inscribed in the Memorial Wall commemorating the Jewish Holocaust in Israel, is to break it down into each individual part, to understand how we have altered the way we look at ourselves, our neighbourhood and our national project.
Indians today are obligated to not negate their ‘Hindu’ identity. Most common experience you have at streets and parks is some one or other accosting you with a ‘Jai Shri Ram’ ‘Jai Bajrang Bali’, ‘Om Namah Shivaya’, ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Vande Mataram’! It is not as if the whole throng is shouting these slogans, it is always just the odd guy, it is always a man, always a slightly elderly kind. Then you can spot some folk in now familiar ‘Khakhi shorts’ and now a days in trousers, who herd around and do some exercises with bamboo sticks and their physical routines. You can find lots of people discussing in small groups how India is transforming, and more and more you are bound to hear- “sarkar akele kya kar lega”! What can the government do alone by itself!
Most Indians erroneously believe that Hinduism is a scripted religion, that the Vedas are inviolable like the Quran or Bible, that despite their Kshatriya traditions and bards singing so many songs of battle, of valour and mourning, Hindus are tolerant and peaceful, never invading another land or coveting any country away! Most Hindus are now very comfortable is placing Buddha at the end of the arc of Hindu evolution, denying the contribution of Buddhism and Jainism to the delineation of Hindu philosophy and priesthood. Even a thing like vegetarianism which our Puranas and Ithishasa do not subscribe to, and our puritanical view of daily life, which are response to the allure of the Jaina priestly class, are effectively indigenous, Hindu first. So deflection and denial are twin tools used in the garb of countering deracination!The Vedas themselves have no mention of temples and shrines. If Vedangas have mentions of cow meat amongst other meats, these portions are denied immediately, if pointed out that the first people to have a concept of temple are Tamils, then as late as the last few hundred years before Christ, encounters with Greeks ignited a curiosity with temples to Gods cast in stone with metal cast idols, the Aryavartas as they now call themselves are flummoxed. Yet even the connotation of Aryan with Nazism does not perturb them, rather they take it as a badge of honour. Surprise! Surprise? Mein Kampf is a best seller in India!
The second contributing factor is ‘physicality’. How Gandhi and Gandhian ideal of non violence has been effectively snuffed out. It is not how steadily the incidences of road rage or mob lynching have built up, or how very often the reaction is spurred to greater impetus if the victim turns out to be a Dalit or a Muslim, it is that as a larger trend, we feel comfortable with the sight of blood. We want to identify with violence, more perhaps as a sign of breaking free from the bondage of the Mahatma! It is a counter, a reactionary effort. So by proxy, military jingoism and body counts are de rigueur. In 1990s and even during Kargil, no one celebrated the deaths of Pakistani soldiers or militants. Now militant deaths are celebrated, it is as if scores are getting settled, the way the headlines are gung-ho about one set of militants being eliminated who were directly responsible for one act of extremist outrage! But don’t ask how we jumped into such conclusions. Our police investigation, our documentation of crime scene, our gathering of evidence all remain as superficial and non-judicial as ever. But we are now full of gusto and certitude, our assertions are ‘evidentiary’! So if you saw how a young MLA from BJP waved his cricket bat as if he were in the nets, against a corporation official in Indore, it is symptom of this obsession, this addiction to violent action!
The third contributory factor is Whataboutery. If you point out anything of the present, you will be presented with three or four examples of the past. Even if that is odious or incomparable. So it was funny to see a veteran officer on the annual Indian Emergency debate on a TV channel ask about ‘circumstances and context’ for imposition of Emergency, which was spoken by him in a loud voice and in good language, but which was scrambled by the TV studio and ciphered into incoherence and it got lost in translation or transmission or both altogether!
Fourth Factor is hankering for achievement. Just think how an award by Kotler, or a little known British Herald survey or the routine selection of India as a Non Permanent member of UNSC makes headlines, and how alternately lack of progress on NSG, on ASEAN, on strategic partnership with USA are hidden under mounds of detail.
Fifth factor is how high strung and selective we are about the past. How emergency of 1975 is most relevant, or 1962 defeat or the original Kashmir war when we went to the UN instead of keeping it bilateral. While today looking the other way at Chinese ingress into our lines of actual control, Indians do not ponder why in 1962 the Chinese unilaterally withdrew, or when scrutinising the Kennedy papers we look at letters written by Nehru in pleading and begging tone, even as we gloss over how the US was planning to go nuclear with China over us! We look at Freedom as having come to us due to mutiny of Naval ratings, due to INA action reaching upto Kohima and conquering Andamans, and certainly not because of the moral force of Ahimsa, Non Cooperation and Bapuji! We now are at such a point in our history where we are comfortably distanced from the events of our Independence and its immediate aftermath, and we can review the roles that have been portrayed so far. The RSS role or lack of it, is already being spoken in terms of ‘strategic restraint’ and necessary exclusion from engaging with the British, save the dialogue Savarkar had for clemency and SP Mukherjee had for thwarting the Quit India Movement of 1942! Guruji Golwalkar and Hegdewar as the torch bearers of Hindu awakening were uncontaminated by the British, or Western ideologies, never mind their own admitted admiration and espousal of Fascism and Nazism and their leaders Mussolini and Hitler.
What Indians must bear in mind is this- American theatrics and posturing cannot be relatable to India however tempting it may be, because, unlike (native) Indians in America on Reservations, Indians in India are about ‘reservations’. Quotas and vote banks are on caste, Dalits are not the minority of numbers, they are minority in social and public presence. Indians must not forget that the ₹ is not the same as $, nowhere close even in their wildest dreams. So Indian numbers are a cause for concern, whereas American quantitative easing or yawning fiscal deficit is not, for us or for them! The Americans can continue with a Trump style Presidency for another 20 years before waking up to a new reality, whereas, in five years of wishy washy economic performance, India’s position on the global arena has shown a significant downward trend. Unlike Americans who can continue to game themselves into believing that they are ‘Great’, Indians are confronted now with the inadequacies of their greatness. The bottomline is this, what works for American politics through this very same Whataboutery, selective history, rewriting, the gun culture, the racism and the ‘othering’ will place America in a spot of bother on occasion, but these very factors will squeeze India’s potential out. That is why deflection is a cause for concern to Indians. The luxury of entertaining ourselves with tricks and treats of optics and empty optimism is not with us Indians.
So remember the speech that should be a wakeup call is from Ms Moitrahttps://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/tmc-mahua-moitra-fascism-india-lok-sabha-speech-1556197-2019-06-26 and not Mr Surya. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FbfjpikmB0The speech that should jolt us from our stupor of the present mandate is one that simply seeks to hold a mirror to our soul!
indiarubberman.com 