Bharat Bhushan: Now, govt's Kashmir rhetoric is directed at international audience
Having turned life
upside down for the people of the Kashmir Valley, under siege for more than six
weeks, what exactly did Prime Minister Narendra
Modi mean when he said we will have to hug every Kashmiri? It rings
even hollower than his “goli se nahin gale se” speech on Independence Day in
2017 when he first enunciated a policy of embracing Kashmiris rather than
subduing them with bullets. This time Modi’s
public rhetoric may not be directed at Kashmir or even the rest of India. The
public relations exercise could be to counter the accusations against Modi of
being a Hindu supremacist. There may be some urgency to refurbish his
international image before his address to the UN General Assembly.
The New York
Times has carried an article by Imran
Khan which refers to Modi as Hitler. It follows a series of tweets and
speeches where Khan recalled the condition of the Jewish community in Nazi
Germany and accused Modi’s government of emulating the Fascists in Jammu
and Kashmir (J&K).
The Indian Ambassador
to the US who was fielded to rebut Khan in the NYT claimed
that Kashmir was on the road to progress and prosperity, and rather lamely
pointed to “the irony of seeing Islamabad refusing to recognize the legitimacy
of Israel and tolerating anti-Semitic sentiment, but now invoking images of
European fascism.” Clearly the Fascism
barb has hit where it hurts.
It has taken more than
15 years for Prime Minister Modi to live down his uninspiring role as Chief
Minister during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. It has taken innumerable
photo ops hugging world leaders to position himself as a statesman strutting
the world stage. It is to conserve those gains that he is forced to declare
that Kashmiris need a hug. There are other clues
that international diplomacy has been mobilised to counter the charge of
Fascism.
The Express Tribune of Pakistan reported that Islamabad had
been approached on September 3 by diplomatic emissaries of two Arab states,
Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, to facilitate back channel diplomacy
with Delhi. The condition for dialogue, however, was that Imran
Khan should stop comparing his Indian counterpart to Hitler! The Express
Tribune also claimed that
the Indian prime minister in conversation with US President Donald
Trump had “complained” about PM Khan’s verbal attacks. Indian media
also reported the conversation with Trump conveying that Khan’s “extreme
rhetoric” was not conducive to peace in the region. It is not the prime
minister alone who is accused of Fascism. Imran
Khan accused the ideological fountainhead of the BJP: “One only has to
Google to understand the link between the Nazi ideology and ethnic cleansing
and genocidal ideology of the RSS-BJP founding
fathers (sic).” He also shared an article from Haaretz, an Israeli
newspaper, headlined “Hitler’s Hindus: The rise and rise of India’s Nazi-loving
nationalists.”
RSS chief
Mohan Bhagwat it seems hopes to “set the record straight” by addressing almost
70 foreign correspondents in Delhi on September 24. An Indian news report
quotes an RSS insider, “There is a lot of stereo-typing of
the RSS as
a Hindu militia organisation, which it is not….A section of foreign
publications presented the RSS as ‘Nazi outfit’. It was decided that the RSS
will meet foreign journalists to counter this narrative.” Bhagwat has apparently
held such discussions with Indian journalists in the past but this would be the
first time he will address foreign media. A wag remarked that that he will have
to explain why Fascism in India fails the Duck test –i.e. even if it looks like
a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it still is not a duck.
Public controversy
over the RSS started when German Ambassador Walter Linder visited the RSS
Headquarters at Nagpur in July this year. It has however picked up speed after
revocation of the special status of J&K on August 5. It is not difficult to
see how J&K developments fit the template of Hindu supremacism. J&K was
a Muslim majority province which enjoyed special status – entitling it in
principle to far greater autonomy from the central government than other Indian
states, even allowing it to have a separate flag and constitution.
A strong
separatist movement since 1988 in the Muslim-majority state bordering Pakistan
has led many to suspect the loyalty of its majority population. The exodus of
the Hindu Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, further reinforced the threat that a
regional religious majority could pose to the country’s Hindu majority and to
the RSS idea of a culturally defined nationalism. In the RSS’s narrative,
J&K was not just a security threat but a cancerous growth on the body
politic.
RSS ideology is
obsessed with the decline of Hindus, their historic humiliation by invaders
from outsiders (read, Muslims) and of Hindu victimhood. It seeks to compensate
for the historically imagined misery of the Hindus through an agenda of
cultural uniformity, hatred of those responsible for Hindu ‘humiliation’ and
redemptive violence. Prime Minister Modi himself is deeply steeped in this
narrative having been a full-time functionary or pracharak (proselytiser) of
the RSS for the better part of his life. Given their
ideological narrative, it is not surprising that Pakistan has been able to
fashion an effective campaign in the Western media against PM Modi and the RSS.
They have been accused of promoting ethnic nationalism, being anti-Muslim,
running a “Hindu-nationalist government” and pursuing the “Modi Project” of
fashioning India as a Hindu nation.
Pakistan and the
western media in this way is able to recall the horrors of European Fascism to
establish a moral platform from where it can justify the resistance in Kashmir
to Hindu majoritarian rule. Already attempts in Assam to make thousands of
Muslim residents “stateless” has drawn international criticism. It would seem that
epithets of Hindu majoritarianism and fascism have found their intended target.
They will hurt for a long time.
