A few days ago it was reported that at an inter-faith gathering, organised by an outfit called the All India Sufi Sajada Nasheen Council, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval had warned religious leaders against “some elements” who were out to create animosity, negativity, and conflict in the society, all in the name of religion and ideology. He was careful not to use the phrase “fringe elements”– an expression that was preferred by an Indian diplomat about the BJP’s infamous former spokesperson Nupur Sharma.
The bottom-line of the NSA’s message was that if “radicalism” was to be resisted, it would have to be a united effort among all religions. However, not unsurprisingly, most media reports suggested that the NSA had put the onus on the Muslims to weed out these undesirable “some elements.”
As India’s NSA, Ajit Doval is at the heart of the ruling establishment; as a life-long, highly respected professional intelligence operative, he surely knows that no religion provides absolute guarantee against treachery nor does any religion ensure ironclad patriotism; at the same, it must be presumed that he is not unfamiliar with the impulses and calculations of “a Hindu consolidation’ among ruling party’s strategists who have now become addicted to an easy anti-Muslimism.
In the good old days, the appearance of an NSA at an event organised by a minority group would have provoked L.K. Advani and his ilk to bemoan the “appeasement” culture. But, then, Doval’s appearance is also perhaps an acknowledgement that most senior members of the ruling dispensation have burnt their bridges with the minorities.
A few weeks earlier, when parliament began its monsoon session, the Lok Sabha was informed that radicalisation [among the minorities] was ‘miniscule’ compared to our population, despite some “inimical’ foreign forces being bent on creating distrust. The junior home minister attributed this happy state of affairs to the Narendra Modi government’s policies and practices, including its promotion of “composite culture.”
Juxtapose this note of self-congratulation with the third-degree treatment that was directed from the BJP corner at Hamid Ansari. An honourable man who was the vice-president of our republic for 10 long years was accused of providing comfort to a Pakistani ‘journo-spy.’
It was suggested in some frivolous quarters that the insinuations and insults that were hurled at the former vice-president were in fact conceived and designed by the deep state within the Sangh parivar in order to pre-empt the vice-presidential prospects of Kerala governor Arif Mohammed Khan or Mukhthar Abbas Naqvi. Since conspiracies and intrigue are intrinsic to the saffron crowd’s working culture, the argument would have had some kick to it – especially given the fact that neither Arif Saheb nor Janab Naqvi made the vice-presidential cut. But it also carries with it a suggestion of serious discord within the ruling dispensation, and nothing could be further from the truth. The two Chanakyas are firmly in control of cultivated waywardness.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah. Photo: PTI/Files
The brutal and blunt unreasonableness that the BJP directed at Hamid Ansari was not without purpose.
The idea was to tell India’s Muslims that even educated, cultured, urbane elite members of the community like the former vice-president are not beyond the reach of the marauding crowd. It is possible that the idea is to drive the Muslim underclasses to desperation, helplessness, anger and alienation and then wait for them to react, individually and collectively.
Perhaps it was a sheer coincidence but what a telling coincidence: the very day (July 14) that The Times of India reported the BJP’s accusations against Hamid saheb, its Delhi edition also carried a Kanpur datelined story on the same page. As per the report – which was based entirely on police claims, we should note – two Muslim ‘businessmen’, Haji Wasi and Hayat Zafar Hashmi, had sold their properties to raise Rs 1.3 crore for financing the riots that took place in the aftermath of BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma’s rhetorical exuberance.
Also read: Kanpur Violence: ‘Muslims Being Picked Up Indiscriminately,’ Say Families of Those Arrested
Assuming this police claim is not a fanciful invention, no seasoned intelligence officer will be able to categorise, with any degree of professional confidence, whether Haji Wasi is ‘radicalised’ or not. But it must be presumed that Doval and his colleagues in the national intelligence community would want to understand the utter alienation that must have informed the decision by two Kanpur Muslims to sell their properties to finance the stone pelters.
Any thanedar can deal with an organisation like the People’s Front of India; but, only a wise ruler can address Muslim alienation.
Is that wisdom still available to the ruling elite? On the one hand, there are the smart realpolitik practitioners whose electoral calculations are predicated on positing a zero-sum Hindu-Muslim conflict; on the other, the ruling party feels no need to honour the Gandhi-Nehru-Patel-Azad promise to the Muslims of an honourable partnership and respectful voice in our nation’s life and prestige. What has become most problematic is the insistence that the minorities not even express their unhappiness at being left out of the Indian story.
And any expression of unhappiness is dubbed as insubordination or worse – and is dealt with by the now familiar ham-handedness, of which the bulldozer has become the new metaphor. The message is directed equally at moderate Hindus who are made to appreciate that it is not that the new ruling elite is being unreasonable but that Muslims simply cannot be trusted.
The coercion and the humdrum intimidation of Muslims has seeped into the majority’s collective psychology – as being normal, not undesirable, but necessary and corrective. The bigger loser is the majority itself – it loses its sense of right and wrong and it comes to see policeman’s highhandedness as acceptable and normal.
And, now having lost its own grounded sense of democratic fairness, the majority community finds itself the target of the new rulers’ cultivated authoritarianism. Most of us have become enamoured of a ‘strong’ and ‘tough’ government. A silent surrender of the idea of freedom and democratic rights. What a Kafkaesque denouement in the year we celebrate Azadi ka Amrit Mahatosav.