Nissim Mannathukkaren

Is Canada the Most Unsafe Country for Indians and Hindus?

The current officially-sanctioned Indian portrayal of a besieged Hindu minority seeking protection against Khalistani violence in Canada is closely tied to Hindu nationalist myth-making.

On September 20, the Indian government, in the context of the rising diplomatic tension with Canada, put out an advisory warning about “growing anti-India activities and politically-condoned hate crimes” and the “deteriorating security environment in Canada”.

The advisory seemed to refer to a conflict-ridden and lawless country, and not to Canada, ranked the third safest country in the world. Soon, panic calls and messages came from families and prospective immigrants to Canada.

A similar kind of advisory was issued a year ago, with similar kinds of responses. This had led a Hindu right-wing affiliated website then to declare that “Canada is officially unsafe for Indians in general and Hindus in particular” because of Khalistani attacks.

Now, even some Indo-Canadian politicians, like the Hindu MP from Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party, Chanda Arya, raised this fear among Hindu-Canadians after a condemnable video from a Khalistani extremist was posted, asking them to go back to India.

He was scathing in the criticism of his own government for allowing the “glorification of terrorism or a hate crime targeting a religious group … in the name of freedom of speech and expression.”

This is a narrative that is quite solidified in large sections of the Indian media/social media, which uncritically amplify government messages and propagate fake news or one-sided narratives. Therefore, people in India believe that there are marauding mobs of Khalistani extremists threatening the life and limb of Hindus and Indians in Canada.

What is the reality, then?

Also Read: Worried Over India-Canada Situation, Punjabis in Both Countries Decry Fake News

The past year saw some dozen Hindu temples defaced with anti-India and pro-Khalistani graffiti by alleged separatists, a separatist rally which featured a float celebrating the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and posters which named Indian diplomats as killers.

These are indeed causes for alarm. Yet, unlike the narrative in India, perpetrators have been arrested wherever they are identifiable (here and here), hate incidents were condemned by the highest government functionaries (here and here), the police and the political leadership, and reassurances given on diplomatic protection under the Vienna Convention.

Nevertheless, Canadian critics themselves had rightly called for, without compromising freedom of speech, the need for Canadian authorities to crack down more proactively on threatening hate speech, as was done recently by taking down posters.

A tableau that celebrates the assassination of Indira Gandhi was part of a parade in Brampton, a city in Canada, on June 2, 2023. Photo: Screengrab via Twitter

Other critics, who have been victims of Khalistani extremism themselves, even while arguing against the notion that “Canada is soft on violent Khalistani activities”, have – again, rightly – called on the Trudeau government to denounce Khalistani extremism categorically, and also, not to pander to what is a small minority amongst the Canadian Sikhs with acts like softening the language on Khalistani extremism in the government report on terrorism.

There may well be additional measures the Canadian government should take so that its soil is not used to hatch terrorism elsewhere, like the horrific 1985 Air India bombing.

The Canadian incidents also have to be read in the context of the vandalism of temples in Australia, actual physical attacks (unlike in Canada) on the Indian high commission in the UK (which led Times Now to ask if Rishi Sunak’s Britain is “the new haven for Khalistanis”) and two attacks on the Indian consulate in America (whose perpetrators are yet to be arrested).

What do Canadian government statistics tell us about the safety of Indians and Hindus? The police-reported hate crimes do not have a separate victim/perpetrator category for Indians, Hindus or Sikhs, who are instead subsumed under the ‘South Asian’ ethnicity and “other religion” (not Jewish, Muslim or Catholic) categories.

These statistics (which are available only until 2021) will give some, if not a definitive, indication of the threats that Indians/Hindus face. After the COVID-19 pandemic, like in many other countries, there has been a substantial increase in hate crimes in terms of ethnicity.

Also Read: Hate Speech: What It Is and Why It Matters

But this has been mainly accounted for by the nearly five-time increase in crimes faced by East/Southeast Asians. Hate crimes against South Asians (not just Indians) doubled in 2021 compared to 2019, but still constituted only 9.5% of all ethnicity-motivated hate crimes in Canada, representing an increase from 7.6% in 2017 (South Asians make up 7% of Canada’s population).

Blacks faced the highest percentage of ethnicity-motivated hate crimes at 37%, when their population share is only 4%.

Under religion, there has been no real increase in total hate crimes during 2017-2021. The “other religion” (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, etc.) category saw around 7% of the religious hate crimes in 2021, roughly the same percent as their population. Here, Jews faced a staggering 55% of hate crimes, despite being only 1% of Canada’s population (in 2017, Muslims faced 41% of the crimes with a population of only 4%).

Similar kinds of statistics emerge elsewhere. In the US, anti-African American hate was the highest and of which there were 200 times more incidents than of anti-Hindu hate. Even Sikhs were “128 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than Hindus.” Anti-Hindu hate, with 10 cases, was at the bottom, coming in at 34th out of 35 communities.

In England, 40% of religious hate crimes targeted Muslims, despite their being only 6.5% of the population (in England and Wales), while Jews, at 0.5% of the population, were the second-most commonly targeted! And in Australia, Jews were the most targeted despite again being a minuscule population.

In Canada, hate crimes constituted 0.1% of two million police-reported crimes in 2020, and 56% of the hate crimes in 2021 were non-violent crimes like general mischief, mischief in relation to a place of worship, and public incitement of hatred.

Amongst South Asian victims (2011-2020), 1% faced a major physical injury. Because of the difficulty of identifying a perpetrator, non-violent hate crimes are cleared at a much lower rate than violent hate crimes.

Also Read: Canada-India Tensions Complicate Western Efforts to Rein in China

While Indians and Hindus can legitimately ask the Canadian state for the better enforcement of its laws when it comes to hate incidents, what has obfuscated reality since the rapid rise of Hindu nationalism is the drastically inflated, propagandist-media-driven sense of victimhood amongst Hindus, including in the West.

Thus, “Hinduphobia” becomes virulently pushed by diaspora Hindu nationalist groups to not just describe acts of genuine hate against Hindus, but to deflect attempts of caste critique (betraying their Brahminical/upper-caste nature) or the criticism of Hindutva political ideology – representing the fusing of Hindu supremacism with the state (which has seen hate speech by the highest government functionaries and produced grievous violence against minorities in India).

This manifests in the organised castigation of the recognition of caste-based discrimination in schools and state laws in North America. Bizarrely, the argument is that officially acknowledging caste discrimination “demonises” Hinduism.

A stark example of how the legitimate Hindu demand for protection against hate is conflated with an imagined Hinduphobia is seen in the case of the response to Toronto-based Indian filmmaker Leena Manimekalai, who had depicted Goddess Kali as smoking and holding an LGBT flag in her film Kaali.

She was subjected to a torrent of hate messages and death/rape threats. FIRs were filed in multiple Indian states until the Supreme Court of India protected her from arrests. Ironically, Manimekalai was celebrating Kali by drawing upon folk imaginations of an inclusive goddess who drinks, eats and smokes with the most marginalized people.

Crucially, Canadian institutions/universities hosting the film distanced from it and issued apologies, thus failing to safeguard the freedom of expression enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Arya, Trudeau’s Hindu MP, who is now rightly seeking action against Khalistani hate speech, had then termed Manimekalai’s work as “Hinduphobic”, “anti-Hindu” and “anti-India.” As Manimekalai put it, “people like Chandra Arya in powerful positions validated and even encouraged the organised hate crime of unleashing thousands of tweets with death/rape threats, filthy abuse, and slander in the name of religious sentiments.”

The same organised hate campaign, on a much larger scale, was seen in the targeting by Hindu nationalist groups of an online academic conference criticising the Hindutva political ideology in which scholars from 50 American and Canadian universities participated.

Faced with death and other threats, many participants withdrew. The most popular (and pro-government) news channel in India dangerously called the conference as an “intellectual cover for the Taliban”. One million emails were sent to university officials to prevent academics from participating or to seek their dismissal.

This was an unprecedented attack on academic freedoms, which are vigorously protected in Canadian and Western universities. Otherwise, too, academics researching Hindutva face severe harassment in Canada and elsewhere.

Thus, the current officially-sanctioned Indian portrayal of a besieged Hindu minority seeking protection against Khalistani violence in Canada is closely tied to Hindu nationalist myth-making.

This nationalism curbs even nonviolent freedoms of expression in India and outside, and demonises movements like the overwhelmingly peaceful Sikh farmer protests as Khalistani, evoking the pain of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. It is oblivious to the fact that democratic referendums are legal in Canada, whether it is that of Khalistan or Quebec, and that even the burning of the national flag or the Bible is not illegal in Canada.

Also Read: How Hindu Nationalism Enables India’s Slide Into Inequality

Despite these freedoms, the Canadian government itself, unlike the Indian media narrative, has not recognised or supported the Khalistan referendum.

Canadian activists/scholars themselves seek to expose the colonial legacy of white supremacy in citizenship, or the “systematic biases” of Canadian criminal law, which, for example, stigmatises Islamist-inspired extremism far more than white far-right extremism.

And the Canadian government itself acknowledges that despite multiculturalism and social equality, “people living in Canada are not always treated equally” and that “Indigenous peoples and visible minorities generally report feeling less safe” than the white population.

What is needed is a relentless fight against all kinds of extremism and hate, irrespective of any race or religion. But this will be seriously hampered if groups who claim victimhood are themselves purveyors of hate/violence and do not subscribe to democracy.

Just a few hours after the Indian government advisory on the politically-condoned hate crimes in Canada, a BJP lawmaker stood up in the Indian parliament to call an opposition Muslim MP a pimp and a terrorist, to guffaws from the seniormost ruling party ministers. Soon after, he was “rewarded” with an important party responsibility.

This is the same ruling party that has, for the first time in India’s history, an elected parliamentary lawmaker who is undergoing trial on terrorism charges.

Could there be a more tragic irony?

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

Vishwaguru and the Crisis of Democracy

A political discourse centred around Vishwaguru is deeply scarring for democracy. Not only does it hide the democratic backsliding in the world’s largest democracy, but also deflects attention from the fundamental problems in the country.

In an August survey by the reputed Pew Research Center, 68% of Indians say, in recent years, India’s global influence has gotten stronger. In a 2023 Lokniti-CSDS Survey, 54% (and 71% of those with high media exposure) believed that India has emerged as the Vishwaguru under the leadership of Narendra Modi. According to Pew, 79% of Indians have a favourable view of Modi.

Opinion surveys do not tell us the complete reality, but are an important statistical tool to understand large social trends. Why are these facts, therefore, noteworthy? Because they do not match with foreign assessments about the world standing of India, or that of Modi.

Thus, according to Pew, only a 28% median (19 countries) said that India’s influence has grown stronger. While a 46% median (23 countries) had a favourable opinion of India (against 34% unfavourability rating), in many of these countries, especially in Europe, the favourability of India was substantially higher in earlier surveys in 2008/2013. And, unlike domestic opinion and the BJP’s relentless propagation of the idea that Modi is a popular global leader leading the world, only 37% median in 12 countries have confidence in him against 40% who have no confidence. In the US, where 51% people favour India, the confidence in Modi is 21%, while in Israel, where 71% favours India, the confidence in him is 41% demonstrating huge gaps. As much as 40% of Americans (and 59% in the 18-29 age category) have never heard of Modi (the lowest percentage amongst the leaders in the survey: Zelenskyy, Macron, Scholz, Netanyahu, Modi, Xi and Putin).

This staggering difference between domestic and foreign evaluation, and the substantial domestic acceptance, even across partisan lines, of the belief that India is already a Vishwaguru, are significant for two things: first, the success of the BJP and the government in making their version of nationalism almost ironclad, and second, the relevance of the concept of post-truth. Post-truth, as scholars describe it, is the “erosion of simple factual truths, truths that technically anyone could verify” and “the systematic use of blatant lies”. While lies always existed in history, under post-truth, truth itself becomes immaterial.

Also read: Will India’s ‘Development’ Move Past Bombast and Pretending?

Thus, while the official discourse is that India’s reputation has increased phenomenally under Modi, and the tagline for G20 is India is the “Mother of Democracy,” in Kafkaesque irony, India has suffered the greatest loss of global reputation since the Emergency of 1975 precisely because of severe democracy erosion and religious majoritarianism in the last nine years. This has been subject to widespread, global condemnation and criticism, as documented by the responses from foreign media and academia, human rights and democracy reports and rankings by organisations like the Varieties of Democracy Institute, Freedom House, Economist Intelligence Unit, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders, to name only a few, and even responses from governments and legislatures in the West, and Gulf countries, etc., who otherwise practice only realpolitik.

Yet, under post-truth, this “reality” of criticisms does not make any difference to the domestic self-assessment of India as a Vishwaguru, or ironically, even strengthens it. While the government and its supporters have, rightly, questioned the hypocrisy of the “colonialist” and “imperialist” Western governments in criticising the democracy record of other countries, they have also, wrongly, painted all foreign criticisms as a part of grand conspiracy against a rising India, and Hindu civilisation. Here, the domination of the idea of nationalism draws in even those who are not narrowly identified with Hindutva. Like many other majoritarian ethnic projects elsewhere, the populist, Hindu nationalist project of Narendra Modi and the BJP and have managed to build an immunity which disqualifies even domestic critics as anti-national.

Of course, foreign governments, especially in the West, have lent credence to the Vishwaguru narrative by increasing strategic and economic cooperation with India and with acts like their leaders appearing together with Modi in Indian diaspora rallies, duly marketed breathlessly by the mainstream media for a domestic audience. But the fundamental animator of the changed geopolitical scenario in which India becomes more important is China and the necessity for a bulwark against it (in contrast to India, in 2019, a median of 70% in 25 countries said China played a bigger role in the world compared to a decade before – Pew 2019). Besides, there are factors like the demographic size of India, its inevitable economic rise, its democratic legacy, and the power of a large diaspora, which make the world increasingly engage with India, irrespective of the ruling party (as early as 2010, President Obama had said that India is not emerging, but “has already risen” as a power). Yet, the Hindu nationalist project has successfully made these factors seem like Modi government achievements.

The country after India which has the most inflated opinion about its power is Russia, with a 30% difference between self-evaluation and foreign assessment (Pew 2018). And we have seen the kind of depredations its great power ambitions have wrought on its own people and the world.

Also read: ‘They Really Descend on Journalism They Don’t Like’: Press Freedom in India, on the Eve of the G20

Ultimately, a political discourse centred around Vishwaguru is deeply scarring for democracy. Not only does it hide the democratic backsliding in the world’s largest democracy, but also deflects attention from the fundamental problems in a country with a nominal per capita GDP of $2,388 (ranked 139 out of 192 countries) and the largest global population of poor (230 million people, almost equivalent to the fifth most populous country in the world). While 60% surveyed in 2023 believe that their incomes do not meet basic needs, 42% feel that nothing has changed and 22% feel that conditions have deteriorated, astonishingly, 47% of poor believe that India has emerged as a Vishwaguru (Lokniti-CSDS 2023) demonstrating how post-truth communications have penetrated even the most vulnerable.

Of course, propaganda, fake news and a near domination of the mainstream media have aided Hindu nationalism and its Vishwaguru claims (for example: the government assertions on COVID-19 vaccination and the Russo-Ukraine War). But post-truth in general, or specifically regarding Vishwaguru, which is also based on religious and civilisational supremacy, cannot be countered by facts alone. Facts cannot survive without socio-political structures supporting them. What has led to the domination of Hindu nationalism is the collapse of trust in “secularist” politics, making the former’s claims less about facts and the truth, and more about who is making the claim. While Hindutva has been defeated electorally at the state level, a political imagination that can challenge its nationalist project and propose a new, inclusive and modest nationalism is yet to be identified. Remember, the Modi government has used the shield of a muscular nationalism to easily weather crises like demonetisation, COVID-19 excess deaths, Chinese aggression at the border for three years, and alleged Adani stock manipulation.

But what can be attempted in the meantime is the delineation of the ill effects on democracy of a lower middle-income country, with a human development rank of 132, in the thralldom of being a Vishwaguru.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is Professor, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. He tweets @nmannathukkaren. Some of the arguments here and supporting data are elaborated in an article co-authored with Drew MacEachern recently in the Third World Quarterly).

BBC, Nationalism and a Nation in Denial

The propaganda and whataboutery being used to try and discredit the BBC documentary on Narendra Modi rest on shaky ground.

“It is this sanctimonious inability to see an issue from the other side—essential in dealing with independent news media—that hurts India’s image abroad more than anything else. Again and again officials dealing with the media seem to prefer parading their patriotism and power. . . As long as it is an open democratic society, India cannot effectively screen itself off from foreign reportage, some of which will not be to our liking.”

∼ From an article in Hindustan Times, August 28, 1970, on the banning of the BBC.

The BBC’s telecasting of the two-part documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ in the UK evoked completely expected responses from the Indian government, its media ecosystem and Hindu nationalists.

These can be divided into two themes: calling it propaganda and indulging in whataboutery. As we will see, both are on shaky factual grounds.

In both, the BBC, a public broadcaster, is seen as an arm of the British government which merely represents and parrots Britain’s foreign policy interests. So, the BBC propaganda on Narendra Modi comes now because the UK “is a pale shadow of its imperial past”, whereas India is a rising power which just overtook it as the fifth largest economy in the world (in nominal GDP). Besides, it is a “hit-job” against India when it assumed G20 presidency. An article in the RSS-affiliated Organiser argues that the motive is to undermine “the sovereignty and integrity of India” besides tarnishing the “image of Modi, whose stature is rising internationally”.

So, if the BBC is a mere wing of the British government, should it not be always acting in its interests? But factually, this is not true.

For example, in the 1982 Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, British PM Margaret Thatcher was outraged at the BBC’s coverage which she thought was “treacherous”. Her government even contemplated taking over the BBC. The question of “taking over” arises only because the BBC was not toeing the government line. The BBC instructed its staff then that the British troops should not be referred to as “our troops” in the coverage because: “We are not Britain. We are the BBC.”

In another example, in 2003, during the Iraq War (occasioned by the American-led coalition’s invasion supported by the UK), BBC reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair “had deliberately misled the Parliament” about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. An incensed government asked for BBC’s apology, which it refused to give. Later, a government report indicted the BBC while exonerating the government.

Also read: BBC Documentary on Narendra Modi Tries Too Hard to Balance ‘Both Sides’

According to Modi supporters, any criticism of him is a blanket critique of India, and that, in this case, is motivated by the interests of the UK. But what kind of a “colonialist” and “propagandist” government wing is the BBC, which is not even willing to support its own government during wars, which are usually the time when the entire nation unites behind its government (this was also seen during the 1956 Suez Crisis when the government sought to discipline the BBC for giving voice to those who did not support British military action)? And it must be noted that if there was the Conservative Party in power during the Falklands War, there was the Labour Party in power during the Iraq War.

The propaganda thesis takes a different turn when it is not a conspiracy by the British government against India but a conspiracy by the British establishment against its own prime minister, the Indian-origin Rishi Sunak; so now, it is a racial angle. But how is it possible when the documentary went into production much before Sunak fortuitously became the PM?

And the propaganda thesis takes an even more bizarre turn when it is not the UK that is conspiring against India, but China, which is acting through the BBC, as asserted by the BJP MP Mahesh Jethmalani and reaffirmed by the article in the Organiser! (The latter goes on to speculate that it could also be Pakistan which has used the BBC.)

So, when the West-China relationship has deteriorated to a low, the UK has joined security alliances like AUKUS, primarily targeting China, and when Sunak has himself echoed the NATO term “systemic challenge” to describe China, we are asked to believe that China is using the BBC to target India. Again, how are we to reconcile this claim, for instance, with the BBC’s documentary on Xi Jinping’s China which also focused on the regime’s “monstrous crimes against humanity” or the one on China’s ‘thought transformation” camps for Uighurs?

If there is alleged BBC propaganda, on the behest of various actors, on one side, on the other side is whataboutery. This goes on the lines of whether the BBC has the courage to show the truth about Winston Churchill, about the monarchy, racism, Kohinoor diamond, etc. Basically, the insinuation is that the BBC does not show anything critical about its own nation, and therefore, it has no moral right to point fingers. Such whataboutery is disseminated by the most influential voices: political leaders, celebrities and media personnel. And it enjoys widespread popularity among lay people.

But this, too, is unmoored in facts. The BBC has done reports on all these topics. Churchill has been counted as the “Greatest Briton” of all time, yet the BBC has done reports like “Churchill’s legacy still painful for Indians” and “Winston Churchill: Hero or Villain?” among others. Ironically, some British historians even accused the BBC of “tarnishing Winston Churchill” by alleging that he was responsible for the millions of 1943 Bengal famine deaths.

Similarly, BBC has done stories on racism like “The black British history you may not know about,” “Racism and statues: How the toxic legacy of empire still affects us” and “How Britain’s role in slavery and empire shaped modern America”; on Kohinoor and its colonial history (here and here) and on the demands for the abolition of the monarchy (here and here).

The cloak of nationalism has not been worn for the first time against critical foreign reporting, as shown by the authoritarian tendencies of Indira Gandhi who banned the BBC in 1970, and along with other foreign broadcasters in 1975 during the Emergency. Yet, scholarship argues why it is not easy to dismiss the BBC as merely being the “the voice of a colonial empire” in South Asia.

BBC became “the world’s most popular international radio broadcaster” because it also fought for “its own editorial control and independence from government priorities”.

During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War, both Pakistani and Indian listeners accused the BBC of being partial to the other nation, while in the 1971 War, its coverage reaffirmed the BBC’s credibility amongst the Indian listenership. A credibility that, ironically, Modi himself referred to in a speech before as superior in people’s minds to India’s own public broadcaster. As Major Gen (retired) Ian Cardozo, an Indian war hero of 1971, said paying tributes to the BBC: “They were the only reliable broadcasting station at that time, giving news as it happened.” It must be noted that Britain at the time was formally a part of an alliance with Pakistan.

Yet even the BBC has not managed to always hold onto its impartiality. And a mechanical impartiality can also mean a false equivalence. Research has shown that despite the Blair government’s relentless targeting of the BBC for its “anti-war bias,” of the four primetime TV news shows studied, BBC’s was the most sympathetic to the government’s pro-war position. As Roger Hardy, who worked as Middle East analyst for the BBC wrote about American and British media during the Iraq War: “We did not do enough to speak truth to power.” But research also shows, in contrast, BBC’s online coverage, despite relying more on official sources, “was not supportive of the war and sometimes seemed anti-[US]coalition in nature”. Besides it showed the “dark side of war” focused on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

Also read: An Unmanaged Foreign Media Has Got the Modi Government Fuming

These contradictions show that the BBC, despite being among the most widely used public media source in the world, has to travel further to become a fully independent media in the service of truth and impartiality. We do not have to endorse the BBC uncritically, and should ask genuine questions; whether, for instance, its coverage of race, colonialism, has gone far enough, etc. But those questions must come from those in Britain India, and elsewhere who are striving to deepen democracy and justice, and not from those, as in the present case, who use majoritarian nationalism, and colonialism as a ruse to cover up the worst atrocities. For the latter, even a documentary which gives substantial space to Hindu nationalist voices and does not cover a fraction of what independent Indian documentary makers and reports have already covered, is deeply threatening making it resort to the most absurd and unfounded theories of grand conspiracy against India.

A BBC becomes trustworthy when compared to the pathetic state of our own mainstream media: a public broadcaster, which has always been the mouthpiece of the ruling party, and private broadcasters which have been reduced to lapdogs under the present government: building personality cults, fomenting hate and purveying fake news.

Can we envisage our public broadcaster ever criticising the government? Or can we envisage the legion of our “nationalist” private media behemoths ever going against the government during a military conflict/war, especially in these ultra-nationalistic times?

Finally, the entire BBC censorship episode can be summed up with one story: soon after the first Narendra Modi government came to power, its information and broadcasting minister promised to completely revamp India’s public broadcaster Prasar Bharati and give it autonomy, editorial freedom and institute parliamentary accountability on the lines of another public broadcaster: the British Broadcasting Corporation!

Do we need to say more?

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada, and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

Foreign Criticism of India’s Hate Crimes Can’t be Countered by Pointing Fingers at Other Countries

In today’s globalised world, every nation’s human rights record is open to scrutiny.

The naked passion of the self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and howling verses of vengeance.

The hungry self of the Nation shall burst in a violence of fury from its shameless feeding.

– Rabindranath Tagore

The dominant leitmotif of the Indian response to global criticism of its worsening religious freedom and human rights record is whataboutery and hyper-nationalism, which believes that the nation is the ultimate moral authority, and there is nothing beyond the nation.

The official response to the United States’ statement on India’s religious record and the societal response to the widespread condemnation of hate speech in India by Muslim-majority nations are only recent examples of a dominant phenomenon. If the first one counters criticism by pointing out America’s human rights record, the second one asserts that no other nation can criticise India, the least of all, non-democratic Muslim-majority nations.

While people, especially urban middle classes, cheered on the government for “sticking it to the Americans” by pointing out their gun violence, consider the absurdity of the false equivalence.

India has been subject to global condemnation in the last eight years not because of just hate crimes and speeches in society but majoritarian hate crimes and speeches, which have taken place under the aegis of, and inspired by, the political ideology of India’s ruling party, and state complicity in them.

On the contrary, mass gun shootings are not inspired by the ideology of the present party in power, the Democratic Party, or is perpetrated or justified by its supporters. And President Joe Biden responded to the latest horrific school tragedy with the words, “Enough, enough”(!) and made an emotional plea for stronger gun control. And if white supremacism, indeed, the overwhelming force behind domestic terrorism and hate crimes, found the most official patronage, under Donald Trump, the President that Hindu nationalism ironically and ebulliently championed.

That India resorted to the whataboutery of gun violence in the USA something that China — an authoritarian regime with one of the worst human rights records in the world — also used to shield itself shows how much the largest democracy in the world has travelled in the recent years.

Consider further the pattern of response from the Indian government to majoritarian hate speeches and violence in the last eight years: complete and deathly silence – and why should there be an expectation that it would be otherwise considering that top ministers and leaders of the ruling party, including the Prime Minister, have been involved in dog whistles and hate speeches?

Representative photo. A protest against BJP leader Nupur Sharma over her allegedly offensive remarks on Prophet Muhammad. Photo: PTI.

A silence – and worse, total support – from the Hindutva ecosystem, which was seen again in the aftermath of the Nupur Sharma hate speech until the rich West Asian states reacted. If condemnation, and timely legal action was taken against Sharma, India would not have seen the global outcry and the descent into a potentially dangerous communal situation.

Also read: The Full List of 20 Countries and Bodies That Have Condemned the BJP Leaders’ Remarks

The hyper-nationalist argument that India cannot be subject to criticism from the outside and that its problems have to be solved by Indians only – even applauded by some liberal writers – is even more absurd. In a world which has reached the apogee of globalisation our identities are intertwined and contradictory than ever before. To argue at this moment that justice and ethics are determined only by national boundaries is to indulge in cultural relativism and provincialism of the worst kind.

But this so-called nationalist morality, which does not brook any outside interference, is not even consistent. Because it is quick to jump to the condemnation of the treatment of Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh. We are a nation that passed the Citizenship Amendment Act that will give citizenship to Hindus and other non-Muslims fleeing religious persecution from neighbouring Muslim-majority nations. So, we can consider Hindu minorities who are Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens as “our own” but the Gulf States cannot condemn derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad even though Islam is not just an Indian religion but a global one?

Inward-looking majoritarian nationalism

Indians are the largest diaspora in the world with 18 million people. They have become one of the most important pillars of politics of the Narendra Modi government in the last eight years, with diaspora rallies held by the Prime Minister in foreign countries. Indian-origin American citizens are even exhorted to vote for a particular American presidential candidate, which can be considered an intervention in the internal affairs of a foreign country.

File photo. Indian PM Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump at the ‘Howdy Modi’ event, Sunday, September 22, 2019. Photo: PTI/PIB.

Thus, while Indian Muslims are constantly under the nationalist scanner for harbouring perceived extra-territorial loyalties, the extra-territorial loyalties of Indians in America and Europe are mobilised unabashedly for domestic politics in India.

Beyond this instrumental use of the complicated nature of citizenship and identity in the modern world, recent events in India show the pernicious aspects of an increasingly aggressive and inward-looking majoritarian nationalism. If religion was posited as an opiate of the masses, nationalism in conjunction with religion can acquire even deadlier connotations.

Also read: As India Hurtles Towards a Terrifying Endgame, Foreign Policy Community Cannot Remain Silent

This is what figures like Tagore, the composer of our National Anthem, had warned against powerfully such a long time ago: “The Nation, with all its paraphernalia of power and prosperity, its flags and pious hymns, its blasphemous prayers in the churches, and the literary mock thunders of its patriotic bragging, cannot hide the fact that the Nation is the greatest evil for the Nation.”

The nation devouring itself is the scene that we are witnessing today.

The nation, after 75 years of independence, should have been at its strongest internally, binding together and healing the wounds of the Partition. Instead, it is showing signs of extreme weakness because of the turning against a section of its own citizens. That is why we see the brittleness and prickliness towards global condemnation, and the unleashing of nationalist social media hoards to counter this “deep conspiracy” against India by virtually everybody in the world; it does not matter whether it is the comments of an international celebrity like Rihanna, an official American statement, or a Gulf State summoning the Indian envoy.

The way out of the morass of cultural relativism can only be through a more confident nationalism that is tolerant and respectful of national and global diversity and plurality, and accommodative of internal dissent. It is through the willingness to see that we do not have answers to all human problems and that other cultures too have various things to teach us.

It should tell us something that in most of the authoritarian, formally non-secular Gulf States, with an abysmal political freedoms record, hate speech by high ranking political functionaries against minority religions cannot be countenanced in the way it is in India now, and that there are strict laws against the abuse of any religion.

Here, nevertheless, every citizen has the moral obligation to speak out against all kinds of oppressions and atrocities, without drawing false equivalences, and beyond national confines. What is needed is a far superior global compact and moral order in which all nations equally participate and are equally open to global scrutiny. Rather than simplistic cultural binaries, this is what Tagore envisaged as a “world festival” in which “people of the West and the East march in a common crusade against all that robs the human spirit of its significance.”

Ultimately, the greatest irony is that while India curls inwards with its majoritarian religious nationalism, in its founding moments, India had played a stellar role in the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 which sought precisely for such a universality. And commendably, India had successfully challenged the sovereignty clause of the United Nations to censure South Africa’s apartheid in 1946 and continued to champion the cause of ending racial inequality there for decades after that.

It should make us pause that the same India in the present resorts to the sovereignty argument to ward off outside criticism.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada, and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

The Slow Poison of Hate Speech Harms in Obvious and Insidious Ways

While countries around the world have criminalised hate speech, in India it is being spewed by elected officials.

It is now possible for a Hindutva leader, who had attracted international attention with his call for genocide against Muslims only three months ago, to make another call, in a public gathering, for taking up arms against Muslims.

This has happened while he was out on bail, not in some hinterland, but in the capital city of India, the largest (and, dare we say, secular) democracy in the world. That such calls for violence and genocide are becoming regular events show how much the Republic has travelled in the last few years.

Hate speech in India has become endemic now, aided to a large extent by state as well as societal silence. But often hate speech is considered to be harmful only if it is directly linked to violence, and hate speech is tolerated if the intention was to only “win the election” as in a recent high court observation, or when it is claimed that it does not lead to actual social discrimination.

Thus, there are serious confusions about what hate speech does to our body politic. The contribution of hate speech or its subset known as dangerous speech (especially circulating like whirlwind through social media) to anti-minority violence is very obvious in the recent times, whether it is the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka, anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh, or the Delhi violence of 2020. This is easily discernible.

But there is non-physical violence, the violence that hate speech does to our understanding and psyche. This is not as easily and so obviously visible.

Also read: Yati Narsinghanand and the Mysterious Case of the Missing UAPA Charge

And this violence has long-term manifold effects, including setting the stage for actual physical violence as well as actual social discrimination (think laws which have serious implications for religious minorities like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act-National Register of Citizens/love jihad, ban on Muslim traders in temple fairs, the BJP being the only ruling party in India’s history which has no Muslim Lok Sabha MP, and hate on daily primetime TV news shows, etc.). That is why philosopher Jeremy Waldron calls hate speech “an environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word”.

The verbal violence on vulnerable or powerless minorities, as scholars on hate speech point out, injures the victims’ dignity, causes fear and emotional distress, and affects psychological wellbeing besides rendering them even more silent and as second-class citizens. This verbal violence, even without leading to direct violence, is itself discriminatory.

But there is another fundamental sense in which, I would argue, that hate speech, regarding religious majoritarianism in India, for example, is harmful. This is in subverting our basic categories of understanding of politics. Hate speech is not just venom verbally terrorising the minority, it is also instituting and reaffirming, daily, that the central economic, social and political conflict is between the religious minority and majority, when it is not so in reality.

Here, Hindus, Muslims and other minorities are reduced to their religious identity only, shorn of their deep divisions in terms of class, caste and gender. People are not called to act as slum dwellers, domestic workers, factory hands, small peasants or agricultural labour, but merely as religious subjects. Thus, as research shows, in coastal Karnataka, which is in the news recently, the rise of militant Hindutva and everyday vigilantism against minorities has seen responses in terms of radical Islamist mobilisation, tapping into the anxiety of Muslims.

Thus, hate speech subverts attention from the most pressing societal issues and keeps real public debates about them in a state of suspended animation. Instead, we are in the thrall of the hijab, temples and Muslim traders, meat ban during Navratri, azaan and so on, one after the other as an endless cycle. This is the real catastrophe of hate speech.

Also read: Is India Lurching Into a Genocide?

Thus, when Yogi Adityanath asserts (before and during the recent election campaign) that “before 2017, those who called their father abba jaan would monopolise [food rations],” that the electoral contest will be between “80% vs 20%,” or that “lndia will be governed according to the Constitution and not the Shariat,” the dog whistles or coded hate speech can not only produce hatred against Muslims, but also build a sense of (false) victimhood amongst Hindus. His speech implies that Muslims collectively take away resources that are legitimately meant for Hindus, that they are being “appeased” or that there is indeed a possibility that India will be one day ruled by Islamic law.

A distinction must be always made between hate speech made by ordinary people and that made by people in positions – especially elected constitutional positions – of authority. The latter has an extremely serious impact on many, including the supposedly educated classes, who reproduce the beliefs inherent in these hate messages uncritically. Thus, what is problematic is not only that hate speech can cause violence but that hate speech by top elected officials (which is really high in India) has the power to alter public discourse.

The issue is not just that, as scholars argue, hate speech subverts democratic debates because it forces victims to respond in highly emotional, rather than rational, tones, but unpunished hate messaging is constantly expanding the limits of what can be said in the public sphere, thus normalising hate speech.

That is why one sees even the (supposedly secular) opposition acquiescing to hate speeches, because the terms of discourse have been substantially altered by religious majoritarianism aided by state power. Thus, it becomes weak-kneed in mounting a robust ideological defence of secularism or democracy.

State institutional apathy is equally critical in the spread of hate speech. Even though hate speech is a crime under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), and that it is specifically a corrupt electoral practice, the Election Commission of India, under the onslaught of executive power, has been selective in its application of the laws, sparing the prime minister, and often, senior ministers and chief ministers, while taking (ineffective) action against some MLAs and MPs for hate speech. This has invited question marks from the Supreme Court, which wondered if it was admitting that it was “toothless and powerless against hate speeches”. The courts have also been inconsistent as dealing with hate speech, expecting other institutions, especially the Parliament, to step up.

An eternal dilemma for free speech activists, especially since free speech and expression are the fulcrums of a democracy, is to ban any kind of speech. This is especially so when wrongly applied hate speech bans or censorship can target legitimate political speeches which articulate the grievances of communities that are discriminated against (or speeches which legitimately critique religion, etc.) So, there cannot be simple context-less equivalence between victims asking for justice, and oppressors seeking to exert domination when it comes to analysing messages and speeches for hate content. Besides, there is the huge downside of relying on the state, especially a majoritarian state, to arbitrate on what constitutes hate speech.

Despite these real dilemmas, almost all liberal democracies across the world criminalise hate speech because its harms outweigh the free speech argument. The only exception is the United States of America, where free speech is protected by the First Amendment. Yet, it must be remembered that Twitter, headquartered in the US, had to take the stunning and unprecedented decision to ban from its platform the most powerful person in the world, the sitting US President Donald Trump, highlighting the perils of unbridled hate speech, especially by those occupying the highest constitutional positions, under the umbrella of free speech.

Also read: Hate Speech: What It Is and Why It Matters

That is why hate speech cannot be simply tolerated as harmless, and legal bans on hate speech become an inevitability. Besides, there is the question of power relations. What does free speech mean when hate speech dominates public discourse? And when it is amplified, like in the Indian case, by an army of social media users tied to the ruling dispensation, with unmatchable monetary resources, and when social media behemoths like Facebook, as whistleblowers show, become active accomplices in the spread of majoritarian hate and fake information in India, with grievous consequences?

Thus, legal bans offer the only protection, even with the pitfalls noted. The Law Commission, in its 267th Report, makes a welcome recommendation to create new sections in the IPC to specifically criminalise hate speech instead of relying on existing laws. But the legal and judicial methods to deal with hate speech, while extremely critical, are simply not enough.

Unless there is sensitisation and education on hate speech, and a larger political and cultural mobilisation against hate speech, it is going to continue to wreak havoc. Of course, this is easier to call for than bring to reality. But the first steps in countering the normalisation of hate speech would be to bring the discussion around hate speech to the centre stage in public discourse.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada, and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

How Hindu Nationalism Enables India’s Slide Into Inequality

The World Inequality Report 2022 has shed light on starkly growing inequalities in India. But, under the present regime, there has been a subversion of discourse required to address these yawning material and social chasms.

The nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

– Benedict Anderson

“From Kashi to Coimbatore, Lord Shiva is everywhere.”

– Narendra Modi, February 24, 2017

“India is now among the most unequal countries in the world.”

– World Inequality Report, 2022

If the scholar Benedict Anderson had famously argued that nations are, with the emergence of European linguistic nationalisms, a new secular, political community supplanting religious communities, the nation in India of the present is posited irrevocably as a religious community.

But what is ironic is that this imagined religious community is riven by drastic inequalities which show no sign of relenting. In fact, the so-called spiritual communion is not only indifferent to the lot of the most marginalised and vulnerable, but it also becomes a mask to hide the temporal and material hierarchy.

The bottom 50% earns only an average annual income of Rs 53,610, whereas the top 10% earns 22 times more than that (one of the highest gaps in the world), according to the recently released World Inequality Report 2022. In the least unequal nations, the gap is merely in the range of six to eight times.

Migrant workers walk with their children to their villages after India announced a nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. Photo: Reuters

India has never seen such a frontal assault on its secularity. It is perfectly routine for the Prime Minister to preside over daylong religious ceremonies and appear in religious garb, duly telecast by national television. There is nothing odd about the head of a temple being the head of a government and also writing op-eds on the revival of temples and providing spiritual succour to citizens. Add to this the relentless demonisation of the minority religion by the highest political functionaries, and its total exclusion from political representation, fusing the state with (the majority) religion entirely.

Also read: COVID-19 Exacerbated Inequalities – and Even More So in Poor Countries: Report

Here, nation and religion are interchangeable. Akin to exclusivist and fundamentalist religiosity, the most visible emotions mobilised towards this nationalism are anger and resentment. Nationalism becomes a state of frenzy and delirium constantly looking for external and internal enemies, which affronts national honour and policing dissent.

The period of the mourning for General Bipin Rawat, which saw an extraordinary outpouring of nationalist sentiments, became also one in which people faced arrests for allegedly making derogatory remarks, or newspapers faced wrath for naming the General without his honorifics in headlines. But this is in a climate where Hindu nationalist MPs have repeatedly called Nathuram Godse a patriot, without facing any legal consequences.

This is not surprising since militarism and a valourisation of the military are critical components of majoritarian hyper-nationalism. But ironically, this does not spare “its own”. Thus, the grieving daughter of an army officer killed in the chopper crash faced severe online bullying for having political views contrary to that of the ruling majority. Love, dialogue and compassion are alien. It is nationalism by diktat, not unlike the North Korean State’s injunction banning laughter to mark the death anniversary of its former leader.

In a political sphere saturated with religion, people are expected to show bhakti, and become devotees, in the thrall of the deity. Ambedkar had averred a long time ago, bhakti in religion may offer salvation, bhakti in politics is “a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”. But now, it is not just a personality cult supposedly in the service of building a great nation but the lines between the spiritual deity and temporal deity have blurred, and the nation-state is also offering a religious utopia.

Toxic Hindu nationalism and rising inequality

Crucially, the fusing of religion, politics and nationalism, and the resultant thraldom believing in one’s nation as Vishwa Guru consistently obfuscate the most consequential divides in society.

The World Inequality Report, for example, tells us that women’s labour income share in India is an abysmal 18%, just above the region with the lowest share in the world, the Middle East and North Africa (where many countries are governed by religious authoritarian regimes). This indicator is one of the most important determinants of women’s empowerment and status in society.

The “nationalist” is not shocked that the income share of the top 10% during the British colonial rule was around 50%, while it is 57% now, 75 years after the departure of the British! And the top 1% wealth share in India has only gone up during the present Hindu nationalist regime. Its average wealth is Rs 3.24 crore while the bottom 50% owns a mere Rs. 66, 000.

Also read: Why Do the ‘Nationalist’ Poor Speak in Defence of Price Rise?

The religious-nationalist who sees anti-national offence in every act of democratic dissent is not also shocked by millions of excess COVID-19 deaths (beyond the official numbers), caused almost entirely by state failure in ensuring basic health, or India’s worrying ranking in the Global Hunger Index: 101 out 116 (and behind Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan). He is not shocked by the fact that India’s billionaires increased their wealth by 35% and the richest Indian earned Rs 90 crore an hour while 24% of the country’s population earned Rs 3,000 per month during the COVID-19 lockdown.

A volunteer distributes food to migrant workers travelling home at a Kanyakumari railway station. Photo: PTI

Estimates put the increase in poverty following the pandemic to be in the region of 15-20 crores rendering about half of the country poor. This followed the worst economic collapse since independence, the stage for which was set by the disastrous demonetisation — an economic policy which is a direct outcome of the politics of bhakti in which decisions emanate uncontested from one supreme leader/deity and even the President of India was not informed of them.

But there is radio silence on the part of the “laity” regarding these issues. The reason is that the political vocabulary has fundamentally changed from democracy, rights, equality, deliberation, etc., to duty, sacrifice (seen especially during demonetisation), respect (for authority), obedience, etc.

A Hindu nationalism with the idea of samajik samrasta (social harmony) cannot talk about the annihilation of caste, and, in fact, is now linked to the return of upper-caste domination following a period of lower-caste political assertion which challenged even the equality claims of the previous “secular” nationalism. This is especially critical because class inequalities are inherently shaped by caste. Dalits, Most Backward Castes, and Adivasis face staggering levels of dispossession and the brunt of economic downturns. In another study (between 2015-17), 22% Hindu upper castes owned 41% of total assets, while 24% of Hindu Dalits and Adivasis owned only 11%.

Inequality is not a peculiar Indian problem, but a global one. And there are countries (e.g., Chile, Brazil, South Africa) which have worse inequalities than India. Inequality also did not originate under the present government. India, after achieving the lowest inequality in income share around 1980, began to see galloping inequality after the opening of markets in 1991 along with rising growth rates, as the Report notes.

But what is radically different under a toxic Hindu nationalism, especially when it fuses with the deification of its leader, is a debilitating subversion of the language needed to counter the yawning material and social chasms. The only economic language it is capable of is a benevolent king dispensing gifts, of the barest minimum kind, to his grateful subjects, without touching a highly inegalitarian economic structure.

The contrast with iniquitous nations like Chile and Brazil, where sustained political contestation of the socio-economic hierarchy is taking place, could not be starker. The Inequality Report shows various examples of where economic growth is possible without reducing large sections of the nation to a deplorable precarity.

India in the last eight years demonstrates the hollowness of the moral claims of Hindu nationalism, and its supposed superiority over other nationalisms. The Report exposes another peculiar problem that emerges out of elevating politics from a worldly affair to a divine enterprise: the gods cannot be seen to fail.

Thus, as with the wide swathes of socio-economic life about which the regime has declared that there is “no data”: from dead farmers, household consumption expenditure, to COVID-19 deaths from lack of oxygen, the Report points out that “Over the past three years, the quality of inequality data released by the government has seriously deteriorated, making it particularly difficult to assess recent inequality changes.”

The present conjuncture presents an urgent imperative, of the need to reimagine the nation. It presents deep moral and political questions: about the dangers of yoking religion to a nation-state and about the inability of religious nationalism to conceive of equal citizenship and democracy.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

‘Narcotic Jihad’ and the Delusions of the Catholic Church

The Christian community’s support of allegations of “love jihad” and “narcotics jihad” demonstrate two things: a willingness to participate in Hindutva discourses and the impact of global Islamophobic narratives.

In the last few days, the public sphere in Kerala has been convulsed by intense – and sometimes acrimonious – debates on the claim made during a sermon by the Syro-Malabar Catholic Bishop of Pala Mar, Joseph Kallarangatt, that there are rising cases of “narcotic jihad” (as well as “love jihad”) in the state with an explicit attempt to destroy the lives of non-Muslims.

The unsubstantiated statement is potentially explosive, for in the famed secularism model of the most religiously diverse state in India, this is arguably the first hate speech by a high-ranking religious figure across religions.

The claim and the underlying support for it among not-too-small sections of the Christian laity demonstrate two crucial aspects: the increasing ideological willingness to participate in the fascist discourses of Hindutva and the impact of global narratives of Islamophobia, fuelled also by developments like the rise of the Taliban.

The lack of any moral quibbles on the part of the Christian electorate, a minority, in voting for majoritarian projects was already evident two decades ago. Soon after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, a Catholic Lok Sabha candidate was elected as a part of the National Democratic Alliance, the first time and the only time the BJP-led front secured an MP from Kerala.

Of course, the Christian community would argue that the roots of Islamophobia are real, pointing to the incident of Islamist extremists chopping off the hands of a Christian professor in 2010 and the conversion to Islam of a couple of Christian women whose husbands had connections to the Islamic State (IS) in 2016. But the fundamental angst behind the recent incendiary speech lies elsewhere.

Also read: How the Imaginary Threat of ‘Narcotics Jihad’ Reflects a Real Threat of Widening Divisions

It stems from a narrative of victimhood, in turn stemming from demographic fears of declining fertility and population numbers of Christians vis-à-vis Muslims and the projection that the population of the Muslim community would be double that of Christians by 2051.

The political implications of this, in terms of an increased number of seats in Muslim-majority areas and for the Indian Union Muslim League, is a major bone of contention.

The other perceived fears are regarding the rise of a business elite from the Muslim community following Gulf migration-led mobility and entrepreneurship and the challenge to the economic power of the Christians. This also leads to concerns that the Muslim minority is cornering most of the resources allocated to minorities.

As with all other kinds of imagined victimhood, these fears are unfounded. The political representation of Christians in the assembly and cabinets has shown little variation, despite the falling population, whereas Muslims are only in the recent decades moving towards proportional representation. And as demographers point out, fertility rates are going to stabilise and become even across religious communities in two decades as Kerala Muslims catch up with other communities in demographic transition.

In terms of allocation of state resources, it is specious to compare the Muslim community with the Christians as the former are way behind the latter in terms of poverty, unemployment, landlessness, education and so on. In fact, the Christians of the Syrian rite are the most advanced community, socio-economically, in the state.

The charges of love jihad in Kerala have remained unsubstantiated, despite investigations by the central agencies and the Modi government does not have data regarding love jihad for any state in India. This is what puts the bishop’s speech in the legally-prosecutable, “hate speech” territory.

Also read: For India’s Sake, Stop Destroying Communal Harmony With the Bogey of Love Jihad

Ironically, in terms of legal conversions last year, the largest number of conversions from the Christian community were to Hinduism (209) while only 33 converted to Islam; numbers which are miniscule in any case.

The imagined fear of the Muslim rise is what has driven the Christian clergy to the bosom of the Sangh Parivar discourse, even seeking the mediation of Narendra Modi in the resolution of sectarian disputes.

In a more fundamental sense, there is an affinity with Hindutva’s “ghar wapsi” worldview that, after all, even Christians are originally Hindus. This stems from the highly casteist and endogamous nature of the Syrian Christian churches in Kerala, with claims to purity and which revel in family histories of supposed conversion to Christianity from the Brahmin Namboodiris.

The Christianity of these churches is one which has no place for the Dalit or lower-caste Christian converts.

By seeking to portray a Christian-versus-Muslim divide, the bishop’s statement completely obscures the most fundamental and consequential divides in society: caste, class and gender. Hindutva is only happy to play along; to see society as riven by homogenous religious blocs.

When the Love Jihad discourse is rooted in the patriarchal control of women’s lives, it is not surprising that the church narrative – which focuses on Christian women being “lured” by Muslim men – does not talk about the ironic fact that, among the 21 people from Kerala who had travelled to IS territory, were two Christian men who had married a Christian and a Hindu woman respectively and then converted to Islam.

In the age of globalisation, as the scholar Arjun Appadurai has contended, deterritorialisation or the “exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state” of the diaspora is a major driving force of global religious fundamentalisms.

Here, there is also a reversal. The Christian laity in Kerala is reacting to global developments and feeling anguished by the attacks on Christianity elsewhere, whether it be the killing of Christians in Sri Lanka by Islamist terrorists, the conversion of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to a mosque or the Palestinian retaliation to Israeli military strikes.

When the Church participates in the global Islamophobic discourse of narcotic jihad, and Islam as the evil “other,” it also glosses over certain fundamental facts.

While some Islamist terrorist groups and drug lords have indeed used the ostensible religious principle of waging war on the West using drugs, – and around 90% of the world opium comes from Afghanistan (which itself is a product of complex set of factors including Western imperial intervention) – in reality, the global narcotics trade is one of most sophisticated networks of criminality in the world. It involves an estimated one million traffickers of many nationalities, ethnicities and religions. In the early 2010s, the world’s biggest drug cartels were located in Mexico, Japan, Russia, Italy and Israel.

More importantly, it ignores that some of the worst sufferers of narcotics addiction are Muslim nations themselves. Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan individually consume more opium than India. As a 2010 UN Report on drugs showed, 42% of the world’s opium consumption took place in Iran alone. Nearly 10% of Afghan children under the age of 14 tested positive for drugs, while 700 people die from addiction daily in Pakistan.

What is most ironic is that the bishop’s sermon came at the same time as Pope Francis’s visit to Hungary where, in an open critique of right-wing nationalist Viktor Orbán’s anti-immigrant (especially anti-Muslim) rhetoric, he said, “The cross, planted in the ground, not only invites us to be well-rooted, it also raises and extends its arms towards everyone.”

Pope Francis shakes hands with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Romanesque Hall in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary, September 12, 2021. Photo: Vatican Media/ Handout via Reuters.

The Syro-Malabar Catholic Church in Kerala, which is roused by the supposed global affronts to Christianity, is apparently unmoved by the extraordinary steps taken by its own Pope in the last few years to reach out to the Muslims, including the papal visit to the Arabian Peninsula for the first time in history.

The words of the bishop are indeed a historic dark moment in Kerala’s secular polity. And the weak-kneed response of the CPIM government, with an eye on the Christian vote, shows that a de-radicalised communist movement will struggle to ideologically counter an ascendant Hindutva language.

Yet, there are silver linings in the gathering clouds. Many denominations of the Christian church, including various Syrian ones, have condemned the bishop’s statement; Catholic nuns, who had earlier mounted a strong resistance against sexual abuse in the church, now protested against Islamophobic speeches; one diocese of the Syrian Catholic diocese itself withdrew an Islamophobic booklet and some of the most important religious leaders of the Muslim community presented a voice of toleration and love instead of being provoked.

The tectonic shift in India in the last seven years has been the normalisation of the language of Hindutva in the public sphere and the reflection of that is seen in social media discussions, even in Kerala, which is among the last frontiers against Hindutva in India.

The crucial difference is that Hindutva is yet to make any electoral inroads, including amongst the Christian voters. The shock and anger at the statement of the bishop and the robust response from civil society may yet carry the day for Keralan exceptionalism when it comes to religious amity and co-existence.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada and is the author of the recent book Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge). He tweets at @nmannathukkaren.

A ‘Corner-Waale Chacha’ on Bollywood’s Vanishing Villain

The lines between good and bad have blurred. As a viewer, now it is my responsibility to judge good from bad.

I grew up on the Bollywood of the 80s, completely filmy and full of cliché melodrama.

Watching heroes kick open doors, mothers making maa-ke-haath-ki-kheer, wives selling khandani zevar, and happy endings where everyone stands in a neat line to say, “Babuji, humein maaf kardo!”… Those were the good old days.

Oh, the hero! Maa-ki-aankhon-ka-taara, chief executor of babuji-ke-khoon-ka-badla, fearless even if sometimes penniless, he stood for all that is clean and white.

And the heroine? With no agency or original thought, the sweet little bird had khandaan-ki-izzat in her hands, and tan-ko-dhakna was her kartavya. (Good old days?)

It was also easy to identify the villain. Scary laugh, scarred face, permanent scowl, eyes that are either twinkling with mischief or letching at the cabaret dancer whose moves he is enjoying in the middle of a jungle! Talk about resourcefulness.

And then, one fine day, without us realising, the world of Bollywood changed. Slick and stylish, the hero became the anti-hero and form became more important than content. While the heroine did not actually undergo a massive change (and that crib is for another day), it is the vanishing villain that I miss.

Also read: Close Encounters of the Bollywood Kind

The villain justified the hero. Visible, identifiable evil brought out the importance of being good. The values were clear, no confusion.

As I sat thinking of everything and nothing last night, it suddenly came to me. The tragedy of the vanishing villain has had consequences – the hero has also vanished.

While the weak villain became humane, our perfect hero didn’t have to be perfect anymore; he became blemished, imperfect and flawed.

The lines between good and bad have blurred. As a viewer, now it is my responsibility to judge good from bad.

I couldn’t help but think, that’s what has happened in real life, hasn’t it? You are not the villain, so why should I be the hero? And I can’t see the villain, I have no one to be angry with, so instead of a hero, let me be the corner-waale chacha, who only whines “yeh kya ho raha hai?”

This corner-waale chacha that we have become sits confused. Many times, he does not even realise ke hamare saath kya ho gaya.

Chacha sits with no point of view, no noble desire, but is somehow angry. He feels like he’s lost something, except he doesn’t know what it is. He looks for heroes around him, desperate to feel heroic by affiliation and submits to those who make him feel larger than he is – even if it is for a fleeting moment.

Owner of the loudest laugh in the room and a development sector professional by day, Naghma is a by-mistake CA, who writes what she feels and feels what she writes.

Featured image credit: Meena Kadri/Flickr

A Communal Virus and Our Collective Irrationality

In our current discourse of religious nationalism, the entire Muslim community has to be demonised for every malady that afflicts India, including COVID-19.

The whole world is battling the novel coronavirus. But it seems India is fighting Muslims in the time of coronavirus, if we were to go by the loudest and most popular television channels and social media discourse. “Corona Jihad” was trending on April 1; on April 2, “Muslim means terrorist” was a top trend.

There is an explosion of fake news about Muslims “deliberately” spreading the virus.

Add to this the daily official pronouncements which have reinforced the narrative that if not for the Tablighi Jamaat, India’s COVID-19 curve was doing fine.

And on April 6, #SanghiTwitter was trending with people posting pictures of being a proud Hindu.

At the outset, it is absolutely condemnable that any group, religious or otherwise, violates any public/legal health advisory or more importantly, the moral responsibility in one’s individual capacity during a dangerous global pandemic.

To that extent, it was the moral and legal responsibility of the Tablighi to ensure that no large gatherings took place, or to report people with symptoms. It is especially very serious in this case considering the large numbers, more than 1,500 – almost all from their congregation – who have been infected and also the numbers that have died.

The problem is not in affixing Tablighi’s responsibility but converting this culpability into a very dangerous communal campaign against the entire Muslim community in otherwise scary times.

Also read: Men Who Went to Tabhlighi Jamaat Meet Attacked: Minorities Commission to Delhi Police

This campaign, ironically, misses that as a society India has produced one of the most bizarre and irrational responses in the world to the disease wallowing in religious symbolisms which are commanded by the prime minister himself.

We have celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan telling his millions of followers that clapping can kill coronavirus, that it is potentially spread by flies, and that homeopathy can be a cure.

The Tablighi is definitely not alone.

It is one thing to offer solidarity to all the frontline workers as well as build a sense of calm among citizens through symbolisms, but completely another to convert that as events to be “managed” by diktats to schools and government officers.

Consider this: when leaders across the world are not batting an eyelid over COVID-19, in 24 hours between April 4 and 5, the prime minister of India tweeted around 45 times and 40 of them were about lighting candles at 9 pm.

And unsurprisingly, the whole solemn moment (considering the number of people who have died from COVID-19 as well the migrant labourers who died trying getting home) culminated in a bizarre spectacle of people coming out on the streets, celebrating by burning effigies, bursting crackers, even thereby causing fires in a few places.

Before that, soon after the prime minister’s announcement of the April 5 “lights off” occasion, the educated middle and elite classes, among them top physicians, went into a tizzy speculating about the significance of number 9.

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If we were to go back and examine what the rest of society was doing when the Tablighi Jamaat was congregating in Delhi in the second week of March, and after, it will offer a peek into our collective delusions.

In Punjab, a Sikh preacher, Baldev Singh, did not follow self-quarantine after returning from Italy and attended the large Sikh festival of Hola Mohalla from March 11-13. This was attended by tens of thousands of people. He later died from coronavirus and infected 19 of his relatives. Because of him, 40,000 people had to be quarantined.

We did not hear any news anchors shrieking about the Sikh community deliberately trying to spread COVID-19 to the rest of India, and small mercies for that.

Hindu pilgrims were visiting the various temples which were open, including the most important ones, which attracts lakhs of numbers.

Shirdi Saibaba Temple was open till March 17. Vaishno Devi Yatra was suspended on March 18. But 400 pilgrims are still stuck at the shrine, and the Jammu and Kashmir high court directed on March 30 that they should not have to vacate their hotels.

Kashi Vishwanath Temple was open till March 20. Delhi’s Kalkaji Temple was open till March 21, despite the Delhi government notification of March 16 prohibiting more than 50 people.

And Tirupati Tirumala Temple closed on March 20 only after the detection of a suspected COVID case.

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If the Tablighi Jamaat was grossly irresponsible, what were our “responsible” leaders and governments doing?

On March 10, the BJP chief of West Bengal addressed a puja in a temple. What did he say there? “The entire world is scared of the coronavirus and millions are staying at home… And look what is happening here… Thousands of people have come out to offer puja. They are drinking water and using the same hands to have the prasad… Nothing will happen, they have the blessings of the almighty.”

On March 15, BJP chief minister of Karnataka, B.S. Yediyurappa, despite his own government advising that gatherings over 100 people should be avoided, attended a wedding with over 3,000 guests!

On March 18, the president of India hosted a breakfast for MPs with no physical distancing followed, and later even had to undergo testing for COVID-19.

Until March 19, the Ram Navami celebrations in Ayodhya were going ahead as planned before. I quote a report from Republic TV (the most trusted news source for the “nationalists”):

“Even as coronavirus cases in the country has risen up to 169, the district administration in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya is gearing up to hold mega Ram Navami mela (fair). The mela, draws lakhs of pilgrims from across the country, will be held from 25 March to 2 April. This comes amid concerns expressed by many including the chief medical officer of Ayodhya about the health risk posed by a large congregation of 10 lakh devotees.”

Reacting to the concerns of the chief medical officer, Ayodhya MLA Ved Gupta, said, “We can’t stop the devotees. They would be advised to wear masks and maintain a distance while conducting rituals.”

What were people doing on March 22, the day of Janata Curfew? They gathered in large numbers across hundreds of locations to celebrate “Corona Day” by dancing, beating drums and plates, bursting crackers, etc. including those which were led by a state governor, and a district magistrate of a BJP-governed state, completely breaking the physical distancing rules demanded by the curfew.

Despite the looming threat of COVID-19, what was the Indian parliament doing? It was in session until March 23, putting at risk many people. More bizarrely, Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in as late as March 23 with thousands of people in attendance.

Also read: Why Flinging the Term ‘Corona Jihad’ at the Tablighi Jamaat Makes No Sense

Even after a national lockdown was imposed, Yogi Adityanath brazenly participated in a puja with many other people to shift the idol of Ram Lalla.

On April 2, with already 2,000 COVID-19 cases in India, and under a lockdown, Telangana ministers attended Ram Navami celebrations. And in West Bengal, on the same day, “amid chants of ‘Jai Sri Ram’, thousands of devotees assembled in temples” in various parts of the state.

This is not to argue that Tablighi Jamaat’s grievous actions are therefore excusable.

But to argue that grave irresponsibility and brazen disregard for public safety are characteristics not just of the Tablighi Jamaat but equally of other conservative religious groups, and more dangerously of our political leadership. Yet, in our current discourse of religious nationalism, the entire Muslim community has to be demonised for every malady that afflicts India, including COVID-19 (which in this case also ill informedly reduces the very diverse Muslim community in India to just the Tablighi Jamaat or the latter to a terrorist group).

And the legal and moral expectations from citizenry have to be selectively and communally applied.

Also, rather than some selective targeting of a “Hindu India,” Tablighi gatherings have led to COVID-19 spread in other Muslim-majority nations including Pakistan. Because that is precisely the nature of large human gatherings, religious or otherwise: they tend to spread pandemics, just like the gatherings of a fringe Christian cult in South Korea, or students partying in the United States breaking COVID-19 restrictions.

Finally, as with everything else in India these days, every failure of the state, whether it is the absolute misery of the migrant labour perpetrated by an unplanned lockdown, or the inability to screen, or quarantine the Tablighi attendees is immediately diverted by the communal bullet which pulverises every question that will be asked.

Thus, we will be led to believe that thousands of Muslims, including many from Islamic nations, meeting in a religious headquarters – situated right next to a police station in the capital city – is something that would have escaped the eyes of the security agencies of a nation governed by a Hindu nationalist party.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University and tweets @nmannathukkaren.

It’s Dangerous to Be Taken in by Propaganda in the Time of Corona

The projection that the cases of coronavirus in India is low because of the Modi government’s efforts is extraordinarily insensitive as well as smug.

As India prepares itself for one of the most devastating global pandemics in 100 years, the impending battle is not being helped by propaganda that Narendra Modi and his government’s leadership are the reasons for the very low number of COVID-19 infections in the country.

This projection is extraordinarily insensitive as well as smug. Insensitive because of the shocking stories of life and death from China, Italy and Iran and Spain; smug, because it is unrealistic to avoid a global pandemic, about which scientists have very little knowledge, in an inextricably interlinked world.

This is ironic, considering that Modi himself asked people to be not complacent and to remain “alert and cautious” in his address to the nation. Yet, his speech itself has become a propaganda tool just as his other speeches in the past. Celebrities and influential personalities called the idea of a “Janata curfew” a “bold” move and a “masterstroke.” BJP spokespersons referred to the idea of clapping and banging plates as brilliant thinking as it draws from the ringing of bells in the Hindu tradition which would lead to the killing of viruses and bacteria.

But the propaganda machinery had begun its job before, as soon as the second phase of COVID-19 began: how Modi was leading not just India, but also the entire South Asian region, and how the Australian prime minister had commended him for suggesting a G-20 meeting.

Then, as put out by the social media page “Nation with NaMo”(with 1.4 million followers, and the originator of many of the WhatsApp forwards that people are bombarded with daily), it was about how India sent an entire “makeshift lab” to Iran which will be donated to the Iranian government, or how countries like Iran and Israel are seeking India’s help, which is also a reflection of India’s “rising global stature.”

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After that, it was about how India has evacuated more citizens than any other country in the world, which is a “reflection of the Modi government’s commitment to protect every Indian.”

According to another widely-circulated forward, the primary reason for India’s low numbers is that the government was the first to start screening and impose travel restrictions from mid-January, when “most of the world had very little clue of the virus then.” Modi himself claimed at the SAARC meeting that the screening of inbound passengers from mid-January itself and increasing travel restrictions, “a step-by-step approach”, is what “has helped avoid panic.”

SAARC leaders take part in a videoconference on the Coronavirus pandemic on Sunday. Photo: Screenshot from MEA YouTube channel.

The reality, unfortunately, is far less fantastical than what is imagined through propaganda.

When India issued travel alerts to China on January 17 or the screening of passengers from China on January 21, it was not the first country to do so. Japan and the US had already issued travel advisories, and the WHO had issued notifications to hospitals. The US, Russia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong had all started screening passengers either before, or along with India. The list also includes developing nations like Bangladesh and Nigeria, and those like Italy and South Korea, which subsequently were to be some of the worst hit.

India imposing travel restrictions from China on February 4 (or from Iran later) was again not unique at all. On January 30 itself, the WHO had declared a Global Health Emergency which prompted a slew of travel restrictions announced by various countries like the US, Iraq, Singapore, Vietnam, Mongolia, Russia, Italy immediately, and before India. India’s further travel bans from March 13 came after the WHO declared the disease a pandemic on March 11, which had led to many other countries also imposing restrictions at the same time.

The same is the case with the evacuation of over a thousand citizens by India. Along with many developed countries, nations like Thailand, Turkey and our small neighbor, Sri Lanka, have all evacuated their citizens. Moreover, India has always in the past tried to bring its citizens back, and it is not a practice started by the Modi government. The most famous case, of course, is the flying out of 1,70,000 Indians, over 480 air trips – the largest evacuation exercise in the world, from war-torn Kuwait in 1990.

And as with everything else under the rule of Hindutva, even the act of evacuation is shockingly communalised, where Muslim pilgrims are supposed to express gratitude to Narendra Modi as if they are not citizens of India.

Propaganda suppresses facts at a vital juncture

More critically, propaganda completely suppresses facts at a vital juncture (not just about trivialities like India building a lab and donating it to Iran, which did not happen). Thus, while there are 6,000 Indians in Iran (till March 18), only 591 have been evacuated.

Very worryingly, the story of over 250 Indian pilgrims testing positive for COVID-19 in Iran appeared in the media before the government confirmed it. These pilgrims, as well as their healthy family members, are forced to stay dangerously together in hotels. The plight of these people (one of whom had died) who do not speak the local language and have run out of resources is nothing to take pride in. Unsurprisingly, the pilgrims feel that India has abandoned them.

The Central government policy of not bringing back those citizens who have tested positive as well as the healthy without a disease negative certificate (almost impossible in countries which are themselves overwhelmed, and which do not test without symptoms) is inhumane and needs serious discussion. Instead, it has been buried under an avalanche of propaganda about the Modi government’s commitment to protect every Indian.

The most vital question so far, which has also been buried in the complacency about the low numbers, is the need for more widespread testing. Yet the propaganda tells us about the “world’s most efficient and reliable testing systems” and the “insane level of efficiency” when it comes to setting up labs (even when there were only over 50 testing labs for India’s size). On March 13, India had only tested 5,900 people, and by March 17, 11,500 samples were collected. This is abysmally low and is only above Pakistan (from data for 28 countries).

While India cannot hope to test at the level of a South Korea, with 5,500 tests (per million people), or China with 2,820 tests (per million people), its 8.5 tests per million people is almost 12 times less than Vietnam, a country which is similar to India in terms of per capita income.

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The more troubling statistic is that a third of the total tests in India was conducted in Kerala alone, a state which is only 2.5% of India’s population. Serious question marks are thus raised by public health experts about the possibility of thousands of undetected cases, and whether India is testing enough amidst the exponential rate of growth of cases seen in many nations with stronger health systems.

After all, the director-general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus himself had said: “We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test.” And all the success stories so far have been built on enhanced testing.

Holding the government accountable

But propaganda never allows the most important questions to be raised in the midst of a crisis. As is the wont with this government, any questions asked of it are immediately termed anti-national. As BJP ideologue Swapan Dasgupta put it, the demand for more tests is “India bashing”. Never mind that the ICMR’s epidemiology chief virtually admitted that India is not testing more because that would mean more positive cases and the need for more isolation facilities. And never mind that tough questions about low testing have been directed at other governments too, most notably the US and Japan. In Japan’s case, there have been concerns that the low numbers are a result of low testing (still 15 times that of India) to hide the severity of the disease for the sake of not hampering the Tokyo Olympics.

If these questions can be raised about Japan – a nation which is arguably more prepared than any other in dealing with disasters – questions can be raised about the preparedness of India, which has one of the lowest public health expenditure percentages in the world and an acute shortage of physicians.

A visitor wearing protective face mask outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan, March 2, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Issei Kato

It is here that questions have to be posed. Like why people run away from quarantine facilities. Why there is an acute lack of transparency about the numbers of tests. Why the private sector was not allowed to test patients for the coronavirus. What the protocols are for testing community transmission. There are also wider questions, such as what Sugata Srinivasaraju asks – about the incongruity between the prime minister providing leadership to SAARC while his government changes the provisions of the State Disaster Response Fund to the detriment of the states. After all, the states are in the forefront of the fight against COVID-19.

A disease like this cannot be fought with dangerous delusions or callous propaganda. Neither can it be fought with another of our recent afflictions, the belief in the superiority of one’s culture and civilization. This was also in abundantly visible since the crisis broke out.

These are times that demand all governments be kept on their toes, even when their legitimate work is encouraged. These are times when even Chinese citizens rejected the propaganda of their nation’s authoritarian leader.

And these are times which require utmost humility and a cogent plan of action, something that was sadly missing in the prime minister’s address to the nation.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University and tweets @nmannathukkaren.