Ramachandra Guha: Fraying pluralism
In 2008, the political
scientist, Steven Wilkinson, published an essay titled “Muslims in
Post-Independence India”. This was its conclusion: “The good news for
India, and for India’s 130 million Muslims, is that there are several factors
likely to restrain any Hindu nationalist attempts to establish a Hindu Rashtra
that will permanently turn Muslims into second-class citizens. First, opinion
polls consistently show that over two-thirds of Indians reject this option, and
that Indians are committed to religious pluralism. Second, India’s strong legal
institutions and civil society impose real restraints on politicians’ ability
to target minorities in order to stay in power. Third, a broad increase in
electoral volatility and competitiveness since the early 1980s is working in
Muslims’ favour, because a higher level of party competition leads to more
competition for Muslims’ votes.”
If a week is a long
time in politics, a decade is an eternity in the life of a nation. Professor
Wilkinson, writing in 2008, was optimistic about the survival and flourishing
of India’s pluralistic ethos. Writing in 2019, it is impossible to be at all
sanguine in this regard. The first reason to be
pessimistic about Indian pluralism is that history teaches us that once it
controls the levers of State power, a determined and focused minority can
always overcome a weak and vacillating majority. That was true in Russia after
1917, when Lenin and Stalin imposed Bolshevik brutality on a population that
did not want it. That was true in Germany after 1933 as well. In India, where
the Bharatiya Janata Party had the added legitimacy of winning a parliamentary
election (albeit with 31 per cent of the vote), it has since 2014 determinedly
pursued an agenda of Hindu pride and Hindu supremacy.
The past few years
have witnessed an awful coarsening of public discourse in India.
The editor,
Siddharth Varadarajan, has written feelingly of how Hindu communalists have
pumped “raw sewage into the veins” of the nation; by vilifying, threatening,
and attacking those Indians who do not subscribe to their views. The reporter,
M.N. Parth, travelling through rural North India in the run-up to the general
elections, found an unreasoning Islamophobia among many Hindus. “The BJP’s
insanely effective and penetrative social media machinery,” wrote Parth, “has
successfully sold the persecution complex to the majority and made them
insecure and paranoid.” As he further observed: “My most disquieting
observation from the ground is how okay the overwhelming majority of Hindus are
with the persecution of Muslims, including some of the ghastliest cases of
lynchings. Not everybody wants a Muslim lynched, but not many are bothered
about it either.”
The second reason to
be pessimistic about Indian pluralism is that our legal institutions are not as
robust as one may wish them to be (or as Professor Wilkinson, back in 2008,
thought them to be). The police in several states of northern India are utterly
compromised; that is to say, thoroughly communalized. When MLAs, MPs, and even
Union ministers openly felicitate alleged lynchers, it is hard for the police
or even the lower courts to act quickly and impartially in the interest of
justice. In this climate, few, too few, killers of innocent Muslims have been
brought to trial and punished for their crimes... read more:
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