India is Now Ready to Move Towards a Post-Hindutva Polity

Except for a very small minority of dimagi bhakts, there is a new national realisation that the Narendra Modi-led Hindutva project has run out of steam. The Gen Z protest, with its epicentre at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, has now transmuted itself into a nation-wide resistance; and, the young have made their elders see through the structured bogusness of the entire Modi spectacle. More importantly, there is a natural authenticity to the young protesters’ resistance because Modi’s prime ministerial enterprise has sown the seeds of its own dismantling. The resistance we see all around us is only the organic manifestation of an inescapable denouement that has been in the works for some time.

There was a certain inevitability about the Jantar Mantar eruption. Though the spark and immediate anger had to do with a very corrupt examination system operated by very corrupt Hindutva examination warriors, the Jantar Mantar resistance found purchase in the national imagination because Modi has, over the past 12 years, lent his name and his popular mandate to an extreme distortion of national purpose.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Twelve years is too long a time in this age of communication and internet and social media for any regime to cover up the gap between rhetoric and reality. Citizens are no longer willing to give Modi the benefit of doubt when he seeks to attribute his own inefficiency and inadequacies to presumed deficiencies and infirmities introduced in our collective affairs by previous regimes. Get cracking, man.

The slogans of Vikas and Viksit Bharat do not stir any excitement because this agenda has only produced a debilitating tycoon-thekedar-thanedar nexus. This is, in fact, nepotism institutionalised. Most senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functionaries are either – as perhaps Modi would put it – the labarthis (beneficiaries) of this nexus or are reconciled to it as the small price that has to be paid to ensure Hindutva rules.

Except for a very privileged elite, it was dawned upon the vast majority of Indian citizens and consumers – including those who vote and support the BJP – that the greed and avarice of this tycoon-thekedar-thanedar nexus have clogged the central arteries of our national existence. Never before has the collective well-being been so openly mortgaged to cronies among the corporates, the entire contractor class and the criminals. The Indian mind is no longer allowed to think or question the officially approved dogmas and slogans. Our once vibrant collective imagination has been reduced to shabby docility. Life has become precarious for all those sections of middle and lower middle classes who think they had escaped the trap of poverty.

What the Jantar Mantar protest managed to do was to force each one of us to connect our individual pain, dissatisfaction and frustration with similar pangs of deprivation felt by others. All authoritarian regimes try to isolate their citizens and turn them into atomised subjects, preventing them from coming together to tell their individual experiences and tales of suffering. Once dissatisfied individual voices converge, a new torrent of energy gets released. That is every authoritarian’s nightmare. And, that is precisely what was achieved at Jantar Mantar. Suddenly the Modi regime’s carefully built walls of intimidation and coercion began crumbling.

Not only has the “vikas ” mantra turned into a curse, even the Hindutva coating has brought no spiritual solace nor an ease of living for the Hindu majority. The original seduction of Hindutva was the promise, first, of driving Muslims out of political space, then, forcing them out of a few positions they had in the formal employment sector. Many Hindus take satisfaction from the fact that the Modi regime has put the Muslims in “their place.” Fine.

But the marginalisation of the Muslims has not – and cannot – produce ‘acche din’ for the Hindu masses. Because the Hindus are in an overwhelming majority, it is only natural that they would be the principal victims of the tycoon-thekedar-thandedar nexus. It is the Hindu majority youth who crowd the unemployment queue. The Modi model of governance has degenerated into an extractive arrangement by the cronies as far as the majority of the Hindus are concerned.

The Hindu majority would be the largest victim of the Modi regime

And, since Hindutva politics has also been organised as an authoritarian arrangement, it is only logical that the Hindu majority would be the largest victim of the regime’s insatiable demand for conformity and submission. It is the Hindu majority – and especially its affluent segments – that receive threatening calls and visits from the income-tax inspector or the Enforcement Directorate officials. It is the Hindu small and medium businessman who is being driven out of the market square. And, it is the Hindu vehicle owner who is being made to buy petrol ‘adulterated’ with Ethanol, even if he can recite all the stanzas of Vande Mataram. Perpetrators of economic crimes are religion-neutral.

After twelve years, our Hindutva polity is defined by a rigged economy, an increasingly violent society and a thoroughly corrupt politics. The Hindus are no longer willing to put up with these organised delinquencies. And, they have been ready for any one who will talk a different language.

That is precisely what fascinated the majority of the Hindus about the youth who congregated at Jantar Mantar. These young men and women refused to grant the Hindutva establishment a monopoly of patriotism or deshbhakti. Suddenly the Modi regime, with its Hindutva signature tune, stood defrocked of all moral authority. Its iqbaal has evaporated in to thin air. The majority of Hindus are ready to move beyond the Hindutva polity.

This Jantar Mantar “movement” can only have a future if it remains a coherent enough force, demanding a return to constitutional values and democratic virtues. The bigoted demagogue has to be dislodged from the pulpit. As a nation ,we will need to find a new common purpose for our collective existence, beyond electoral victories and defeats. The Republic has to be reanimated with a spirit of fairness and openness. The road to a post-Hindutva polity is steep but not too difficult.

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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