What a dangerous world we live in.
Consider for a moment the geopolitical goings on. Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine during a speech that culminates in a piercing assertion, “I am not bluffing,” In the context of the Beijing-Washington rivalry, we have Joe Biden’s only slightly veiled warning that the US would not rule out conflict with China over Taiwan. Then comes newcomer Liz Truss’s calculated elicitation, during her UNGA speech, of Great Britain’s imperial legacy rather than outlining a realistic role it has in the present-day world.
These anecdotes, individually and collectively, make the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the height of the old Cold War between the US and the USSR in 1962, seem a benign quarrel compared to potential “hot wars” today with unspeakable global consequences.
Close on the heels of such scary inter-state confrontations, we cannot overlook the agonies of intra-state discord such as Iran’s fixated policing of women, the numb pain of occupied Tibetans and Uighurs in China and chaotic scenes of the mild-mannered peoples of Sri Lanka roaming the palace grounds of their rulers as the latter flee towards their hoards.
Demonstrators run from tear gas used by police during a protest demanding the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, amid the country’s economic crisis, near the president’s residence in Colombo, Sri Lanka, July 9, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Dinuka Liyanawatte
In the glare of creepy rhetoric comes the curiously belated disclosure of an ostensible “dialogue” between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat and five prominent Muslims – a senior journalist, two former bureaucrats, a former military professional and a former politician turned businessman. It is an event that has provoked a broad spectrum of reactions ranging from skepticism to cynicism. A dialogue is reason for hope, but if the reportage of the five interlocutors (three appearing in an interview and one through a solo op-ed) is anything to go by, the word “hope” does not spring to mind.
Dialogue is the only way out of the lopsided polarisation that is India today, no matter how severe the polarisation or rupture among its citizens. But the effort of the interlocutors sounds more like five monologues for one hour followed by half an hour of bonhomie between utterly unequal conversers. Indeed, they validate this assessment in their self-reportage.
To wit: this was their first meeting with Bhagwat since 2019, an indication of the lack of any urgency felt by him even in the face of the studied disregard of victims and raucous bailout of perpetrators since that meeting. The genocidal rants at the Dharma Sansad were dismissed as the bombast of “hotheads” and remained unchallenged. When presented with statistical evidence that Muslims were not producing more children than non-Muslims, Bhagwat appears to have laughed – an odd reaction at best. (Bhagwat’s comments this week on population make it clear that he is not bothered about data). One of the RSS chief’s interlocutors pontificates that the concern of the Hindus on “the cow issue is valid” but advises (his interviewer?) that we must “not labour on [the discourse around] beef”, even though false accusations of cow trading and beef-eating have resulted in the severe beating and lynching of innocents.
In the same vein, we are asked rhetorically, presumably in recognition of Bhagwat’s generosity, “why should [Bhagwat] give us an hour and a half” of his time? Similarly, we are being told that his baseless comments about population were “balanced“. We have also been enjoined to accept the RSS chief’s pronouncement that he “cannot interfere with how the government functions” as an accepted fact. In the face of such articulate exonerations of majoritarian privilege by the five formers, it is difficult to imagine a dialogue in the room, let alone the tabling of hard questions.
To be fair to the group, they were facing an organisation that has relentlessly pursued a focused strategic direction for a hundred years to achieve the convergence of ideological certainty (in the RSS and its clan) and political methodology (in the BJP and its antecedents). This incrementally achieved success has weathered the ignoring of their sentiments about the kind of India they have overtly demanded since 1925. The RSS grudgingly tolerated a vision of the Indian state at the time of the withdrawal of the British empire from South Asia, swallowed the articulation of a constitution contrary to their beliefs and tetchily witnessed exercises in state-building antithetical to its vision. Their message, over the last eight years, has been: “our turn is nigh”.
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And let us make no mistake, the Hindutva ideologues are at the cusp of achieving their dreams in 2025, heralded by a potential victory in the 2024 general elections. The vision is within its grasp and to think that this potential will be endangered by the pleas of five concerned Muslim citizens of India is delusional at best. The more so when the Hindutva machinery is supported, driven and propagated by an impressive politico-military cadre of two million acolytes created to influence, precisely, an unquestionable ideological and political direction for India in the 21st century and supported by the state machinery.
That is where India is today, a “historic moment” which is no less than the implementation of a Second Republic; an idea that the RSS has “weighed” for a hundred years and the BJP has “counted” its way towards in the last 50. It is the price of the over-prioritising fears of “fissiparous tendencies”, solely vote bank electoral strategies and, indeed, economic growth rates over good politics or political discourse that contemplates the implications of India’s multitude of nations, linguistic multiplicity, lack of equitable wealth distribution and much more “minority-ism”. In the absence of any will to ponder, debate and decide on the pros and cons, these realities, by both “liberal” and the “conservative” factions of India, the “minorities” – religious, linguistic, ethnic, economic, political and otherwise – are doomed to wait.
Asking real questions
This is not to say that the group of five were wrong in their attempt to engage in a dialogue. We cannot scorn skepticism on them or allow our skepticism to devolve into cynicism. But such engagements must ask real questions. What does it mean for the Indian state to be called a nation – in the singular? How are the rights of the peoples of diverse religions, languages, ethnicities, territories – “nations”, in other words – going to be protected under it and encoded without resorting to shibboleths such as “unity in diversity”, “secularism but not like the French one”, “nonalignment”, etc.? What are the changes in the constitution (the Civic Bible) of India that the present majoritarian government contemplates?
In a dialogue where a segment of civil society feels aggrieved, one expects a citation of injustices, an enumeration of legal objections and critiques of faulty reasoning to power. But the five aggrieved, in their own accounts of the event, divulge no such exchange. It must be called what it feels like, a repartee to appease both participants’ requirements and an attempt to mitigate the growing doubts of a gullible international community about the new India.
No, this was no dialogic exchange. Dialogue is the “serious play of questions and answers…elucidation [of] the rights of each person” and a presumption of equality between the parties in the meeting. Nor is there a shred of evidence of the group of five having challenged power, exercised their right “to remain unconvinced, to perceive contradiction, to require more information…to point out faulty reasoning”. Instead, the imagery that emerges is one of an exchange in which power assesses the mood of the powerless, and the latter is told to wait in front of a bridge to nowhere.
It was banter between former power and current power.
Siddiq Wahid is a historian and former vice-chancellor. He is a native of Leh but now resides in Srinagar.