india majoritarianism

Was the Meeting of Muslim Intellectuals With the RSS Chief Really a Dialogue?

It was 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.

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.

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

Foreign policy is a sum total of many things, one of which is the character of the domestic polity – even for a supposedly “non-aligned” and non-interventionist Asian middle power like India.

It is an unsaid norm amongst large sections of India’s foreign policy community to stay away from commenting on domestic politics and society.

In reality, however, India’s relationship with the world has a lot to do with its internal character and more specifically, the health of its democratic order.

India might not have used ‘democracy’ as a foreign policy precondition in the initial decades after independence. But, implicitly, it has always deployed its own democratic credentials as a key pitch to the world. This was backed up by independent India’s core worldview of resisting discrimination and domination – by the strong, of the weak.

After the end of the Cold War, India doubled down on this as it began to base its relationship with the West (especially the US) on shared values of democracy. In fact, it was A.B. Vajpayee who, while discussing India-US relations in 1998, had said: “We are the two largest democracies in the world, and have similar political cultures, a free press and the rule of law.”

The liberal West, too, has viewed the resilience of the Indian multi-party system, social pluralism, and respect for the rule of law with great admiration. Geopolitically, it has seen a liberal India as a compelling counter to ascendant illiberal Asian regimes, such as communist China.

The entirety of this theoretical premise is under unprecedented stress today. But, India’s foreign policy community couldn’t care less.

Even as India continues to rapidly and visibly regress into a violent majoritarian state, the community continues to look away. The dominant thinking is that foreign policy is far above the “petty politics” of the homeland or that domestic affairs have no bearing on global diplomacy. At best, foreign policy voices contend themselves with paying lip service to the values of democracy and pluralism only for geostrategic ends.

That the rest of the world, especially the democracy-crusading West, has so far given a pass to Narendra Modi’s India has only aided this culture of silence and deliberate ignorance. It seems to have lulled our foreign policy commentators into an illusion that no matter what, India can continue to recite its much-loved fable of liberal democracy over and over again, to the point that it becomes an irrefutable – almost hypnotising – fairy tale.

On Monday, Prime Minister Modi and US President Joe Biden met virtually before the foreign and defence ministers of the two countries met for their much-awaited 2+2 meeting. There was lofty talk about “shared commitment to democracy and pluralism” and the two democracies – one oldest, the other largest – delivering “opportunity, security, freedom, and dignity” to their peoples.

This came just two days after a Hindu group vandalised pushcarts of Muslim vendors in Karnataka’s Dharwad district. Earlier, the state’s chief minister had himself called for an economic boycott of Muslim vendors. Over this weekend, at least nine places across the country reported mass violence against Muslims (who are in the middle of the holy Ramzan month) as Indian Hindus celebrated the birth of Lord Ram.

A screengrab of a video from the site of the Dharwad temple. Photo: Twitter/@harishupadhya

But, save for a tepid and arguably broad comment on “some recent concerning developments in India, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials” by the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, the Biden administration refused to talk about the naked display of sectarian violence, majoritarianism and ensuing human rights abuses in Modi’s India.

It also did not bring up the mounting legal intimidation and censure that vocal critics of the government, like Rana Ayyub and Aakar Patel (who was recently barred from travelling to the US), are facing in India today.

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The US today might be looking away from the alarming situation in India. But, that in itself should be a subject of critical scrutiny for India’s foreign policy scholars and observers – who are meant to offer unbiased analyses of India’s relationship with the world and how that can be secured for the long future, not write eulogies like court jesters or scribes.

After all, if foreign policy is the projection of “national interests” on an international stage, then there is every reason for its students to concern themselves with the fundamental character of the “nation” that those interests flow from. They also ought to ask whose “national interests” are they batting for – those of every Indian or only the religious majority?

It was refreshing to see former diplomats speak out against anti-Muslim hate speech earlier this year. But, that was, positively speaking, a rare occurrence. Most foreign policy scholars or observers did not bother to speak out against Hindu monks calling for genocide against their fellow citizens or publicly threatening to rape Muslim women in the presence of policemen.

If empathy is so passé, then at the very least why India’s foreign policy commentariat should care about India’s democratic backslide because it could severely erode its diplomatic capital and by extension, affect its interests.

Foreign policy is a sum total of many things, one of which is the character of the domestic polity – even for a supposedly “non-aligned” and non-interventionist Asian middle power like India. So, one administration in the White House or Number 10 might not bother too much about the situation in India today, but that doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride for an increasingly illiberal India forever.

It is notable that even Union defence minister, Rajnath Singh, during his visit to Washington DC for the 2+2, said that India has “critical roles to play in the Indian Ocean region and in the wider Indo-Pacific…as a democracy.” This might be a duplicitous stand for him to take, but it shows that even the Modi government, whose ministers and cheerleaders often deride the West for its preachings on democracy, knows full well what the West values India for.

In fact, just two days after his visit, the US Department of State released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which offers a detailed and damning lowdown on various forms of human rights abuses underway in India. This includes attacks against Muslims, violent eviction of Bengal-origin (Miya) Muslims in Assam, and prolonged detention of political activists.

All of these become especially relevant today as Western governments and the intelligentsia drag India to the witness box over its neutrality on the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

As New Delhi defiantly refuses to call out Vladimir Putin’s cross-border aggression and buys Russian oil, some heads are turning. Modi is being equated to Putin – certainly on Twitter, and probably behind closed doors. Washington is sending emissaries to New Delhi with ominous warnings. The sanctity of its commitments as a Quad member is being scrutinised. Reportedly, Germany is contemplating dropping India from its list of invitees to the upcoming G7 meeting in Bavaria over the latter’s position on Russia-Ukraine.

None of this means the West will abandon India anytime soon. In fact, the depth of the recent India-US 2+2 shows that Washington still sees great value in empowering India, as also captured in its recently-recent Indo-Pacific strategy. But, India’s sharp turn towards a decidedly authoritarian and majoritarian future means that it has one less insurance against global censure, and a time-tested one at that.

US President Joe Biden, seated with US secretary of state Antony Blinken and India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar holds a videoconference with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in Washington US, April 11, 2022.  Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

With all its intellectual capital and access to global networks of knowledge and influence, if India’s foreign policy community remains silent as a stone today, it will be equally responsible for abetting the terrifying endgame that the ruling regime in New Delhi is pushing India towards.

And those who fully understand the gravity of the situation in India need to decide for good how they see the nation’s foreign policy – as a meaningful extension of Indian interests of which every citizen is an equal stakeholder or an ivory-tower public relations exercise that represents only the majority.

Angshuman Choudhury is senior research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He is also a member of the Indo-Pacific Circle and works on Indian foreign policy, Myanmar, and Southeast Asia.

How Social Psychology Can Help Us Understand India’s New Majoritarianism

Two of the most famous social psychology experiments demonstrate that people can agree with opinions that aren’t their own and inflict pain on others at the behest of an authority figure.

Although social psychology as a bona fide field of study came into existence in the late 1800s, it wasn’t until World War II engulfed the world and the stories of Nazi atrocities became public knowledge that the most important research in the field actually began.

Since social psychology is the field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations, it comes as no surprise that the leading psychologists of the mid-20th century started looking to it in earnest to find answers to the big question that thinking people tend to ask after a period of extreme dehumanisation – “How could this have happened?”

In many ways, the last five years have left many in India asking the same question. For those bewildered at the speed and ease with which majoritarian and discriminatory narratives of hatred and prejudice have spread, two of the most well known experiments in social psychology provide some answers.

The Asch Conformity Experiment

If you have ever wondered why so many seemingly intelligent and educated people fall so easily for outright lies (for example, those factually incorrect and dangerously bigoted messages on family WhatsApp groups) and why so many fail to stand up and speak out against strong prevailing opinions, the Asch Conformity Experiment provides some insights.

In 1958, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments in which he found that a surprisingly high percentage of people were quite willing to ignore reality and give incorrect answers in order to conform to the group that they belong to.

Solomon Asch. Credit: De la D-janous – Operă proprie, CC BY-SA 4.0

For each experiment, eight subjects were seated around a table. Only one participant was actually a genuine subject for the experiment, the rest being ‘confederates’, carefully tutored to give certain pre-selected responses. Each participant was asked to answer a series of questions, such as which line was longest or which matched the reference line. The ‘confederates’ gave a variety of answers, at first correct, to avoid arousing suspicion in the subject and then started giving deliberately incorrect responses.

The results were interesting. When surrounded by people giving an incorrect answer, the non-confederate in the group also ended up giving incorrect answers! In fact, over one third of the subjects in all the groups ended up voicing factually incorrect opinions.

At the conclusion of the experiments, participants were asked why they had gone along with the rest of the group. In most cases, the non-confederate volunteers stated that while they knew the rest of the group was wrong, they did not want to risk facing ridicule. A few of the participants suggested that they actually believed the other members of the group were correct in their answers. Peer pressure is a powerful thing.

It is also a somewhat unfortunate fact that the human brain does not like to burn too many calories. It likes things simple, clear-cut, categorised and explained and will gravitate towards the empty slogan much more easily than it will towards the nuanced argument.

That is why, bewildering as it might seem in hindsight, a simplistic, rhyming slogan like “Ab Ki Baar, Modi Sarkaar” and the even more vacuous claim that “Achhe Din Aane Wale Hain” found such enormous appeal in the run-up to the 2014 general elections.

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Clever politicians understand what Adolph Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, had figured out a long time ago – that an untruth or a fundamentally ridiculous claim repeated often enough becomes the truth. As the Fuehrer himself used to say, “Tell a lie; repeat it often; make it burn.”

There is, however, a silver lining to the Asch experiments. Follow ups to the experiments showed that, even if only one other participant disagreed with the confederates, the subject was more likely to resist peer pressure. If one is isolated, it is more difficult to resist the majority, but if there is even one more dissenting voice, it becomes much easier to call a spade a spade. Someone, somewhere is always watching and will find their voice hearing yours. As with Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, it just took one small, insignificant boy, to point out the emperor’s nakedness.

The Stanley Milgram Experiment

A much more disturbing set of experiments was conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961. Conducted at Yale University, these experiments measured the willingness of men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

Participants called ‘teachers’ were led to believe that they were administering electric shocks to ‘learners’ – actors they could hear, but not see. The teachers quiz the learners and every time the learner answered wrong, those on Milgram’s team (called ‘experimenters’) would instruct the teacher to give the learner an electric shock.

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. Credit: Fred the Oyster, CC BY-SA 4.0

The learner had no idea that either the shocks or the resultant screams of pain were not, in fact, real. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. What was real enough was the level of discomfort and anguish that many teachers felt as they administered ‘shocks’ of increasing intensity. However, a number of subjects continued to ‘hurt’ others simply out of obedience to an authority figure.

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Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 ‘teachers’. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (between one and three) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage on the learners. To everyone’s great surprise, in Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65% (26 of 40) of participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock. Milgram summed up his learnings from the experiment in an article titled, ‘The Perils of Obedience’ thus:

I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

A sober warning for India where it is becoming easier and easier for members of majority communities, so-called, to inflict unthinkable brutality on members of minority communities.

Timothy J. Snyder, professor of History at Yale University and Holocaust researcher and author, references this experiment in his book On Tyranny. He writes:

Milgram grasped that people are … surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority… Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead of what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Excessive obedience can be dangerous to a democracy that is not functioning well. As citizens of a country that has suffered the scourge of high-handed authoritarianism over the last five years, it is high time for us to take a solemn pledge that instead of unwittingly teaching power what it can do, we will teach the next government of India what it cannot and should never do.

If we don’t, then we will have no one left to blame but ourselves.

Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescence issues to help make schools bullying-free zones.