“Is this the dawn we were looking for?” – Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Call it, if you will, the glumness of dotage, but as one who is almost as old as our nation’s Independence, the end of another year is, willy-nilly, no longer a period for merry-making and new resolutions but an occasion for critical reminiscence and sombre reflection. As the curtain comes down on a tumultuous year of reckoning for democracy, it is time to take stock of how we have fared in relation to the three values that matter most in a truly egalitarian society viz. justice, freedom and fraternity.
The country is saddled with a political dispensation that has, over a decade, waged war against our secular polity and even the rule of law. Our democracy is disfigured beyond recognition, our freedoms circumscribed and secularism – the animating credo of our Republic – swamped by the majoritarian Hindutva canon and its cultish kingpin.
I hark back to a time that seems aeons ago when there was a comforting sense of affinity and fellowship among people that cut across religion, caste and language; when festivities, national triumphs and sorrows brought people together in solidarity, when we celebrated our common humanity. Inspired by the Mahatma’s rousing message of truth, brotherhood and non-violence, we willed ourselves into believing the myth that our blood-soaked land was a haven of spirituality, non-violence and tolerance.
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But the mask has slipped. Our resolve to be a just, humane society has crumbled under the weight of hatred, violence and chicanery. The happenings in the last decade have laid bare our spiritual bankruptcy, intolerance and bigotry. Never have we been so disengaged from one another. We seem to have lost the capacity for compassion, for brotherly love, for ordinary humanity. Exploiting our deathless caste, communal and regional cleavages, the bigots have transformed the largest democracy into a schizophrenic nation besieged by hate. Presiding over the psychic wreckage is the most menacingly powerful socio-political conglomerate ever – the Sangh Parivar – that has fattened on the politics of hate and division.
The exclusivist and homogenising creed – Hindutva – that is grounded in an obsessive, visceral hatred of Muslims, is now front and centre of our conflicted world. Nationalism and patriotism have been usurped, distorted into Hindu nationalism and weaponised against the Muslim. No longer an upper caste preserve, Hindutva has captured the Hindu imagination, cutting across castes, aided by the Congress and socialists’ smugness, upper caste fixation and pandering through the years. Hartosh Bal has laid it out, unadulterated, in a recent piece in The Caravan.
Hardwired Hindutva has permeated the vitals of the nation. The gentrification of the RSS has received official imprimatur with the GOI circular permitting government babus to double up as swayam sevaks. The widely publicised aarti tango of the PM and the then Chief Justice of India announced to the world that the political executive and the higher judiciary sing from the same hymn book.
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The saffron-tainted judge’s mischievous “observation” regarding survey of disputed sites has let loose the dogs of war. The fork-tongued Mohan Bhagwat expressed dismay at the ‘digging’ under mosques, but his acolytes quickly repealed his fake conciliatory gesture by stating that surveys were important for “civilisational justice.”
Justice S.K, Yadav of the Allahabad high court was more upfront in his speech at a recent VHP event, observing that India would function in accordance with the dictates of the majority community. He used the foulest term “katmullah” to describe Muslims, who, he said, were “fatal” for the nation. Having publicly demonstrated his fealty to the creed, he can look forward to a plum post-retirement job as a member of the Rajya Sabha or the Human Rights Commission.
There are other disturbing markers that the votaries of Hindutva have wrested complete control of the polity. In a morally crippled society that routinely targets Muslims, lynchings and bulldozer “justice” are an everyday reality. So extreme is the intolerance that even singing of a bhajan (Gandhiji’s favourite) with the words “Ishwar Allah tera naam” led to protests and disruption of a cultural programme in Patna. And there is no outrage!
The sentinels of Hindutva have been planted everywhere. The saffronisation of educational institutions is proceeding apace as is the pernicious cooking of school and college texts to align with the ruling party’s ideology.
Most dismaying is the co-optation of the armed forces in the majoritarian project, abetted by the willingness of the military leadership to pander to the nefarious designs of Modi and gang. From being totally apolitical and secular, our military top brass is now flirting with religion and politics in the public square. Just the other day, social media was awash with a picture of the defence minister and the Army Chief, in full religious regalia – saffron clothing, tilaks and all – offering prayers at a temple in Dehradun.
This government has taken corruption to an altogether new stratosphere. It is not only about individual financial malfeasance on a humongous scale but about systemic, structured and organised plunder, with the entire force of government and the judiciary nurturing it.
The dubious Rafale deal, the electoral bonds scandal, the Adani coal import outrage and the Adani group’s all-encompassing hold on the Indian economy tell the world that we are a kleptocracy. There are legitimate allegations that the tender and contract system is fiddled to favour the chosen few.
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Like the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s macabre novel 1984, this regime has waged war on truth, doctoring statistics and other indices of performance; even going to the extent of lobbying international agencies to bump up India’s position in the global rankings of performance. According to a recent analysis by The Reporters’ Collective, Union ministries and Indian missions abroad have been enlisted to manipulate and fudge figures to show India, actually Modi, in better light. But despite the demeaning soliciting, India’s ranking has continued to slip in the last decade. So corrupted are our indicators of performance that nobody trusts them anymore.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s dire warning about the imperative of justice has haunted me for the last few years as being prescient about our plight: “When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath future generations.”
In today’s Bharat, the guardians of the law are the perpetrators of injustice. High crime is not only unpunished but actively abetted and protected by the governing class and the key institutions. Arguably the most heinous jurisprudential crime in history – the Ayodhya verdict of 2019 – was, by its author’s own admission, a judgement made in consultation with his God. Statutes that are downright unjust, like the one on selection of election commissioners or the most recent amendments to the methodology on EVMs, are clear manifestations of a criminally unjust order.
Right before my tired, rheumy eyes, a terrible new country has been born. Savarkar and not the Mahatma, is calling the shots today! For me, the most moving and meaningful image of the year and of an awful decade was that of Dushyant Dave – legal luminary, public intellectual and humanitarian – breaking down and sobbing bitterly during a recent Karan Thapar interview, lamenting the criminal indifference to the plight of our minorities and the fact that “nobody wants to stand up and fight this nonsense”.
He said what we all feel in our bones – we are lynchers by our silence!
The new year’s message of warning is obvious: a just and equal society cannot be built unless the complacent majority steps forward to combat the monster that is degrading and diminishing us. But that seems a forlorn hope!
Mathew John is a former civil servant. The views are personal.
