Tavleen Singh: Surreal India
The sickening attack
by Karni Sena hoodlums on a school bus last week had a surreal quality when
seen from Davos. Our Prime Minister had just left after giving a speech whose
gist was that from ancient times India has believed that the world was one
single family. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. In a conference whose theme was building
bridges in a fractured world, these words of ancient wisdom had real resonance.
Then came those images of small children screaming in terror as their teachers
urged them to hide under the seats of their bus to escape the stones and glass
from broken windows. If the teachers had not been speaking in Hindi, I would
have found it hard to believe that the attack was in India and not in some
war-ravaged African country.
It was an attack so
reminiscent of the kind of thing Boko Haram does that Farhan Akhtar could not
have said it better than he did in this tweet. ‘Attacking a school bus is not
an agitation. It is terrorism. The people who did this are terrorists. Please
refer to them as such.’ The truth is that the Karni Sena is a terrorist organisation.
But it appears to function under the fond gaze of BJP chief ministers. If the
Chief Ministers of Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat and UP had not been indulgent patrons, these hoodlums would have been jailed a year
ago when the first attack happened in Jaipur.
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The maintenance of law
and order is the primary duty of chief ministers. This is usually done by being
on the side of those who suffer when it breaks down. Not on the side of those
who break the law. When they assumed high office, these chief ministers swore
by the Constitution of India to do this without fear or favour. And yet they
have shown more than once that they favour these Karni Sena terrorists. This is
very much in keeping with their implicit support for the cow vigilantes who
have lynched Muslims and Dalits working in the leather and meat industries and
in the cattle trade. Not very different to the implicit support given to the
violent goons who wander about attacking lovers and married couples in the name
of ‘love jihad’.
Every time some new
horror happens, the BJP’s apologists on Twitter, and there is a small army of
them, blame it on a political conspiracy by the Congress party. Since this army
of apologists is motivated by religious fervour and not political realities, it
is hard to explain to them that a party that has been reduced to 44 seats in
the Lok Sabha is simply incapable of organising violence on such a scale. I
have sometimes tried to say this and been deluged by tweets that question not
just my loyalty to India but my character. Since many of these belligerent
tweeters proudly declare that they are followed by the Prime Minister, it is
hard to believe that they are just freelance fanatics.
In any case, they make
their loyalties plain by always defending groups like the Karni Sena and always
spitting venom against anyone they believe may nurture sympathies for lynched
Dalits or Muslims. I was recently in a Twitter row with a filmmaker who
demanded to know if I had statistics to prove that Muslims and Dalits have been
more brutally attacked in the past three years than in earlier times. There was
no point explaining that it is not about numbers but about the atmosphere of
brutality that these hate crimes have created.
It is an atmosphere so
infused with latent menace and terror that it is hard to believe that the Prime
Minister actually came to Davos last week to tell foreign investors that they
were welcome to India. He probably meant what he said when he told some of the
richest investors in the world that instead of the red tape of the past they
would find a red carpet. But, did he not notice that the red carpet barely
conceals violent thugs capable of attacking a bus taking small children home
from school? Did he not notice that it would be hard to explain to a foreign
audience that these violent thugs were burning public property and threatening
to behead actors on the basis of a film they had not seen?
It is not just
foreigners who would find it hard to understand what is going on. Many
patriotic Indians (including this one) find it hard to understand. It feels a
little like we are in the middle of a surreal horror film in which nothing is
what it seems to be. So, the Prime Minister goes back from Davos to welcome the
leaders of ASEAN to
India in the middle of this horror movie. How surreal is that?
India's ruling party is sponsoring an
assault on the Indian state / Tavleen Singh - Is this Hindutva
