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THE determination on the part of a cross-section of the Indian intelligentsia to rage against the dying of the light is both admirable and gratifying.
The flurry of Sahitya Akademi awards — and even the odd Padma Shri — flying back to whence they came ought to be profoundly embarrassing for a government whose wish to be perceived as the harbinger of a brighter future is being throttled by its inability to transcend its fundamentalist predilections.
This is not hugely surprising. After all, Narendra Modi’s triumph at the helm of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in last year’s elections was based in part on an appeal to the organisation’s vehemently retrogressive roots and branches, from its Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh progenitor to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Shiv Sena and a multiplicity of lesser known entities.
The assault on Kulkarni aims to decry interaction with Pakistan.
Given that Modi never completely succeeded in reinventing himself as a moderate following the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat during his early phase as the state’s chief minister, it was reasonably logical to assume that his elevation to the national helm would embolden the fundamentalist fringes that he cannot afford to alienate.
Hence the Indian prime minister’s laxity in responding to the lynching, not far from Delhi, of a man accused of cow slaughter. There is no evidence that Mohammad Akhlaq of Bisada village in Dadri district did any such thing, and the beef he was alleged to have stored in his fridge apparently turned out to be mutton. But in one key respect these facts are irrelevant.
Cow slaughter is prohibited in several Indian states, but it is not against the law to possess or consume beef. However, the point surely is that even if an individual is deemed to have violated the law, the consequence in any civilised country should be legal prosecution rather than mob violence.
A recent parallel across India’s western border can be discerned in the Pakistan Supreme Court’s hearing of an appeal against the death penalty awarded to former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s assassin. Much was made of Justice Asif Saeed Khosa’s pronouncement that questioning the blasphemy law was not tantamount to blasphemy.
He is no doubt correct, but it’s surely a shame that something so obvious needs to be spelt out, creating room for the impression that it is the victim who was on trial rather than the killer, and consequently the interpretation that had Taseer indeed blasphemed, Mumtaz Qadri’s guilt would somehow have been diminished.
Likewise the implication that if Akhlaq had in fact slaughtered a cow and/or stored its flesh, the reaction of the mob that assaulted him and his family would somehow have been justified.
Visiting Bisada shortly after the brutal murder, NDTV India’s senior executive editor Ravish Kumar was appalled to find an absolute lack of remorse in the village over the atrocity in which many of the villagers were inevitably complicit. That in turn bears comparison with the support that the abominable Qadri continues to elicit from substantial segments of society, not least large parts of the legal fraternity.
In India, meanwhile, the backlash against the Sahitya Akademi was prompted by the murder back in August of one of its stalwarts, M.M. Kalburgi, a rationalist scholar based in Karnataka who found fault with idol worship — and the academy’s refusal to formally and explicitly condemn the killing.
More recently, former BJP member Sudheendra Kulkarni was doused in ink for his role in helping to launch a memoir by Pakistan’s former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, and required medical treatment to remove the tint after attending the book launch function in a disfigured state.
The assault on Kulkarni constitutes part of a movement to decry, and where possible to deny, interaction with Pakistan of any sort, be it concert appearances by Ghulam Ali or a frustrated attempt to revive cricketing relations between the neighbouring rivals. What the votaries of such restrictions appear to ignore is the charge that they are helping to turn India into a ‘Hindu’ Pakistan. Or perhaps they simply don’t care.
Pakistan’s intolerance towards minorities in general as well as towards any manifestations of dissent against what has arbitrarily been decreed as the national ideology has long played a key role in thwarting the nation’s progress and its democratisation. Those who have helped to perpetrate — and perpetuate — this state of affairs will no doubt draw some succour from the fact that it is increasingly being reflected across the border, in the world’s largest democracy.
At the same time, one can only wonder whether the forces of Hindutva see authoritarian Chinese capitalism as a neoliberal model for uneven development. If so, they are likely to be disappointed. India boasts the potential for greatness as a nation on the global stage, but right now it appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Perhaps the current twilight will eventually make way for a brighter dawn, but it could just as easily lead to a darker tomorrow.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2015
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