The following three snapshots illustrate how everyday political interactions in New India are steadily reshaping democracy along the twin axes of feudal entitlement and authoritarian intolerance.

The first comes from Debu Sarai in Bihar.

Asked by Union textiles minister Giriraj Singh of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) whether he was receiving government benefits, a Muslim cleric said he was.

Asked then if he voted for the BJP, the cleric said no he did not.

This was cause enough for the minister – who has sworn an oath on the Constitution to deal with citizens without favour or discrimination – to lambast him and Muslims in general as namak haram (betrayers).

The ideological assumptions that drive this form of citizen-bashing are two-fold:

First, that citizens must cast their vote in return for a "favour" done to them by the rulers, even if the favours amount to returning a pittance of the people's own money to them at election times;

Second, that Muslims betray this feudal trust by never ever voting for the right-wing ruling party, thus declaring themselves ineligible for any sort of favour.

Clearly, it would be too much to expect the right honourable member of parliament to answer the following two questions in return:

Why is it that Muslims did vote in droves for his party when the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee was at the helm, but are reluctant to vote for an RSS/Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party?

And, what may be said of the nearly 50% of Hindus who also do not vote for the BJP, which takes upon itself the mantle of being a Hindu/Sanatan torch-bearer?

May these more than half of all Hindus also be called namak haram?

Vignette 2

This one is authored by Shri Ram Bhadracharya ji – a venerated spokesman-saint of the Sanatan.

Bemoaning that Hindus are in great jeopardy in India (although they constitute more than 80% of the population), Ram ji went on to characterise all of Western Uttar Pradesh as "Pakistan".

Someone should have told the venerated saint that the Muslims in western Uttar Pradesh have actually been serving the electoral purposes of the Sanatan rather well – by serving as a foil for the sort of polarisation which brought a rich harvest of seats to the BJP in the last elections to the state Assembly.

Indeed, the ideologues of the communal right-wing might do well to ponder the irony that the less Muslims there are in any given area of contest, the more uncertain their prospects of winning at the hustings tend to be; to a point where one may truly now speculate that had all Muslims indeed migrated to Pakistan, leaving only non-Muslims in India, the BJP may rarely have found itself in a position to obtain governmental majorities, since non-Muslims would have voted either on issues of economic and social livelihood, or on interests pertaining to various social/ cultural groups within the Hindu mass rather than from any demographic fright.

This constitutes a telling dilemma for the sectarian right-wing: much as they wish to see all Muslims shunted out of Bharat, their political prospects hang almost exclusively on the Muslim presence within the country, since corporate wealth and support can hardly alone see them through.

Vignette 3

This one comes from the numero uno himself.

Fulminating against "infiltrators' (ghuspethias) in a public speech in Purnea, in election-bound Bihar, Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the opposition of batting for the infiltrators, by whom are meant, make no mistake, Muslims chiefly from Bangladesh.

True to the selective xenophobic play-book worldwide, this invocation of the culturally alien and dangerous outsider begs the following questions in the context cited here:

First, does the government of the day have reliable data on the number of such ‘infiltrators’ in the republic? If it does, would it not help its own cause to make these numbers public? Curiously, the Election Commission of India which set out to weed out such infiltrators has thus far failed to give us any numbers of such infiltrators either.

Second, given that it is the remit of the all-powerful and no-nonsense ministry of home affairs led by the still more no-nonsense nemesis of infiltrators of that variety which the prime minister has in mind, how is it that such infiltrators have been allowed inside the country in the 10 years Modi has been in power?

Third, parliamentary records show that some 28,131 or more ‘infiltrators’ were evicted from India between 2004 and March 2014, when the allegedly complicit Opposition was in power at the centre, while over the years 2014 to 2025 the number of such deportations effected under the Modi/Shah regime is much less, at least going by answers given to parliamentary questions and MHA reports. (2015-2017; 2017-2019; 2021; 2023-24)

Given those facts, how may the citizen respond to the disingenuous diatribe launched by the prime minister in Purnea?

Will the flourishes of demagoguery defeat the facts or have times changed, at least in Bihar?

Alas, the conundrum that so debilitates the social unity and cultural magnificence of Bharat is the following: the divisive right-wing can neither live with nor without Muslims.

If on the one hand it must constantly propagate that all Muslims are at bottom unpatriotic, its political mobilisation and attainment of state power are inconceivable without its anti-Muslim hobby horse ride.

Had not the much-maligned Jawahar Lal Nehru so sentiently anticipated this phenomenon when he said that if the politics of communalism prevails, the day will come when Muslims become grist to the idea that Hindusim alone is Nationalism.

That day is here, and how.

Badri Raina taught English at Delhi University.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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