THE rights of ordinary people mean nothing to a person who holds fascist beliefs. To a fascist, democracy only subverts and derange things. Above all, fascism always seeks out the ‘other’ so that they can easily shift the whole blame for anything and everything that goes wrong. Meanwhile, the fascists will be busy proclaiming ‘we would be at the top of success if these people were not here. It is their presence that impedes our elevation’.

In India today, it is the hardest thing to be a person from the minority community. Day and day out, we witness Muslims being killed on trivial excuses like carrying beef. For several years far-right Hindu groups have launched repeated campaigns to forcibly convert Muslims and Christians to Hinduism, calling for a nationwide ban on beef and destroying mosques and churches for imagined slights.

I shudder at the thought of what kind of a country India has become under the Bharatiya Janata Party’s leadership. It was once known as the largest democracy of the world; not anymore.

A democracy demands that in a situation like that which currently prevails in India, its citizens, particularly those of the majority community, stand up and put a stop to the overt violation of the principles of secularism that the country has always boasted of. The onus thus falls on civil society to stop India from becoming a Hindutva fascist state.

The BJP by continuing to follow its ideology of hate will only end up making the largest democracy a sorry spectacle like Yugoslavia. The only way ‘secular’ India can beat fascism is not to get influenced by propaganda that is disguised in the clothes of religion with the slogan that Hindutva has to be established.

Shafi Ahmed Khowaja

Jati Sujawal

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2020