Prime Minister Modi’s most recent anti-Muslim bombast is an ominous signal. That it may fuel violence worries many, and quite rightly. But it is also the ease with which Modi and his party raise anti-Muslim rhetoric which is equally troubling.
The troublesome normality of scapegoating Muslims for every small and big problem is slowly permeating everyday life. The very mention of the word ‘Muslim’ in a political or social context generates a certain frisson in many parts of India today. Yet –until the last five years – I never felt the same everyday aversion towards Muslims in other parts of India that I came across growing up in Ahmedabad, a city casually comfortable with its implicit apartheid and deep prejudice against Muslims since the 1970s.
In an interview to Tehelka in 2006, Ganesh Devy called the anti-Muslim hatred in many cities of Gujarat “not conscious or learnt. It is just somehow normal, as nature would have meant it to be.” For many who have closely observed Gujarat, the horrific violence of 2002, and Modi’s subsequent rise was a consequence of the normalised bigotry of a large section of Gujarati society.
What makes such normality worrying?
Political hate speech emboldens people who already hold prejudice towards certain groups, especially when such speech is tacitly condoned by other political leaders and intellectuals. In the US, this came to be called the “Trump Effect”– people with existing prejudice towards Mexicans and Muslims began to voice their prejudice explicitly and aggressively. Bigotry became casual under Trump.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The ‘ordinariness’ of hate
I recently saw the brilliant Oscar-winner The Zone of Interest. The sense of doom does not come from actual visuals of violence against the Jews – there aren’t any – but from the excellent depiction of the nonchalance of murder. For many “ordinary Germans”, gassing and shooting Jews was a nine-to-five job and it helped to live close to your ‘workplace’, the extermination camp.
While watching the movie, a similarly excellent Gujarati play came to my mind. Written by the noted playwright Saumya Joshi in the middle of the violence in 2002, it was called Dost, chokkas ahinya ek nagar vastun hatun (Friend, I’m certain a city stood here once). An archaeological dig reveals a once-thriving city – Ahmedabad – long lost and forgotten, largely because of the apathy of its citizens. One scene sticks with me: as one part of the city reels under sustained killing, the other, oblivious or uncaring, savours street food.
Comparing the Holocaust and other global genocides with anti-minority violence in India is unjustified – if the scale of killing is the only measure of consideration. If what also matters are the conditions that make violence easy and ordinary, then the analogy works well.
Also read: Backstory: The Virality of Hate in India’s New Media Landscape and The Forces Behind it
Hannah Arendt became part of our intellectual dictionary when she used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the notorious and “terrifyingly normal” Nazi officer, Adolf Eichhmann, who led some of the worst Jewish massacres under the Third Reich. There was nothing banal (normal) about what Eichhmann did, Arendt argued; the banality lay in the complete casualness in going about his deeds. Repulsion for Jews had been normalised to such an extent that they were “rendered superfluous”. The Kantian principle of ends – that being a human has value in itself – means nothing if you are no longer even seen as human.
So how does bigotry become normalised? Or what makes people to be rendered superfluous? Arendt reasoned that the concentration camp was worse than the extermination camp – the latter merely killed, but the concentration camp eradicated human individuality and human morality. Violence is easier if the victim is not human or – in the modern nation-state – a citizen of a country, Arendt had said.
While the universality of human rights is the ideal, nationalism has redefined human rights. The “right to have rights”, as she famously said, is, sadly, meaningful only if an individual belongs to a political community; human rights are no longer enough. As someone who remained stateless for 18 years of her life, fleeing the antisemitism of the 1930s and finding no refuge elsewhere, Arendt would doubtless have smirked at the purported virtue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” she wrote about the apathy towards stateless human beings, including herself.
India, of course, has no Russian gulags or Jewish concentration camps but the normalisation of hate has taken root, behaviourally and institutionally. In terms of behaviour, while Arendt may have dissociated Eichhmann from ideology, anthropologists find a close connection between the two. An ideology that redefines what it means to be human defines, in essence, what it means to be subhuman or non-human. Images of dehumanisation played a significant role in Nazi ideology and helped to normalise the Holocaust.
Dehumanising a group of people has historically often been a precursor to ‘morally righteous’ war and genocide. One of the themes covered by the Third Reich during the winter of 1943 was ‘The Jew as universal parasite’; the Rwandan state termed Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ to morally legitimise the genocide and, now, Hindu nationalists speak of ‘infiltrators’ – code for Muslms – as ‘termites’ – each group of people a biological danger that deserves exclusion and, at its worst, elimination.
In her analysis of the anti-Sikh violence in 1984, anthropologist Veena Das observes how an all-encompassing “Sikh character” was attributed to the entire community – that a Sikh does not believe in loyalty; is like a snake that will bite the hand that feeds him; is naturally aggressive and attracted to violence, etc. The subject of the “character” changes depending on who is targeted as the aggressor at a given time.
Once prejudice is codified into law, individual bigotry gains legal legitimacy; repression gains sanctity. Under the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, the degradation of black citizens and the restoration of white honour went together. Systemic bias permeates the judiciary, the media, the education system, housing, employment, the criminal justice system etc. But it is subtle and, therefore, more treacherous— rewritten history textbooks or redefined citizenship principles get internalized over time and are not as palpable as hate speech. In India, whether the Citizenship Amendment Act is implemented or not, a message has been sent: the Muslim is oppressive, and an outsider.
Whether Modi gets re-elected for a third term, the language of bigotry normalised during his rule is likely to linger.
Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist. She is the author of the book, Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
