Islam phobias in India; JAN 08, 2023;
Between the 17th
and 19th of December last month, a large collection of major religious leaders,
right-wing activists, fundamentalist militants and Hindutva organisations came
together at Haridwar. The event they held, called ‘Dharma Sansad’or ‘religious
parliament’, witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of hate speech calling for a
genocide of the Muslims of India. But despite the violent exhortations hurled
over the course of three days, authorities in India did not make a single arrest. Under
the regime of Narendra Modi, right-wing hate and violence against India’s Muslims has acquired a sense of
normalisation. But while they, along with India’s Dalit community, make the usual
targets, it was only a matter of time till the hate spread on to other minority
groups as well. On January 2, a mob in Chhattisgarh vandalised a church after
right-wing leaders accused the Christian community of carrying out ‘forcible
conversions’. While the global community has been slow to react to India’s slide towards Hindu nationalism,
observers in Western capitals too are beginning to notice. As the year 2022
came to an end, outgoing Democratic Congressman Andy Levin warned: “I have been
a vocal advocate for human rights in places like India, which is in danger of becoming a
Hindu nationalist State rather than a secular democracy, the world's largest
democracy.” In an exclusive interview with The Express Tribune, renowned
Indian-American anthropologist and professor at the New York University Arjun
Appadurai unpacked the historical ingredients that enabled an environment
widespread right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiment in India. In conjunction with a global
erosion of democratic ideals and yearning for quick results, he explained how India has found itself in a perfect
storm of Hindu majoritarianism: I am among the very large number of people who
are trying to tackle this big question of a kind of a worldwide trend, which is
very apparent, although the differences among the locations where this is
happening cannot be ignored.
It's difficult to see this in the way that one
might, for example, see the Coronavirus where you can actually see it moving. The
thing about the shift to autocratic authoritarian governments is you cannot see
an obvious sort of circulation path although many of the leaders in these cases
are aware of each other. But it's not easy to say that they're sort of
mimicking or learning something, and we are forced to look for deeper trends.My
main view is that though there are huge differences in the electorates and the
populations in these different countries, a common element might be that many
of these populations whether in Turkey or Hungary or the US, or India, have
lost patience with the slowness of liberal democracy, to deliver whatever it is
they want. There's a loss of patience and consequently, they are more ready
than ever to vote for leaders who promise quick, essentially overnight results.
The cost of writing that cheque is that we will have to get rid of this and
that procedural hurdle. But other ideological attachments to these leaders then
creep in and in many cases, that lubricant which lets people accept the promise
that results will be delivered overnight is some form of majoritarian racism – a
sense that some majority, however defined, has been poorly treated, and now
their moment has come to restore their place.I used the word democracy fatigue
in an essay I wrote about four years ago soon after Trump was brought into
office, saying that people are exiting democracy by democratic means that is
through elections and so on. In some other places, of course, even elections
are dispensed with, but the disturbing phenomenon is places that have
ostensibly democratic institutions, democracy itself is being dispensed with. The
conventional storyline is not at all wrong, which is that for some reason,
institutions – the democratic ones, the courts, the media, the press, the
legislature and indeed the executive – in India by all accounts were quite
healthy, vibrant and strong in the decades up to let's say, the early 2000s,
when we begin to see the rise of the BJP culminating now in the in the very
troubling situation under Modi. But in that long story, we must recall, of
course, that even under Indira Gandhi's rule, we had the emergency, which was
only a year but still showed a certain readiness on the part of even the
liberal Congress to crack down hard on dissent. Likewise, the 1984 opprobrium
on Sikhs or the whole Kashmir position of the Indian state starting with the birth of
the two nations has been a very hardline position. I think it had some
potentially flexible moments in Nehru’s early years, but quite quickly became
the rigid view that we see today. There is a mystery about why this descent
into right wing religious fundamentalism and majoritarian autocracy could
happen relatively fast. You could make a longer history from Babri Masjid to
today or you could make a shorter history from Modi's period as chief minister
in Gujarat to today. But in any case, you
can say it was obvious from 1947 that India was doomed to become a right-wing
majoritarian state. It's hard to fully spell out what has happened, but its
consequences are clearly massive and it has clearly led to the rise of very
militant Hinduism, which has historical precedent. And it's a history that is
now closely tied to a very powerful centralised state – it's not just regional
rules, or doing little wars and business here and there, it's got a kind of
elevator straight to Delhi. India is a land only of minorities. Not
also of minorities, but only of minorities. There is nobody who has a big writ.
Even if you take these big categories like Hindu, Muslim, and so on, they have
slowly crystallised over time, especially during the colonial period. It is
very difficult to see a macro idea of Muslims and Hindus and so on as big
identities. If you look even closely at riots in places like Lucknow in the 16th, 17th or 18th
century, it's Shias vs Sunni. Nobody is holding up the flag of you know, the
Ummah or some massive global Hinduism. It's all highly fragmented and this
relates to caste as well, but not only to it.
No one was not a minority in India over a massive part of its
history. The big question is how does a majority get produced in this place? In
a place like Serbia or Japan, there are of course minorities,
but you can also see there is some objective basis for a certain group of
people to say we are the majority. We look and talk the same, and eat the same
and these ‘untouchables’ in Japan or Okinawans, or Kosovars in Serbia, are different. Now, in all
cases, it is my belief that the majority has to be built, whether it's Serbia, Germany or here. It is not off the shelf.
But in a place like India it is a huge task because of the
minoritisation or the fact that you're in small cells, which have this quality
that is so hardwired. I don't think we have fully plumbed the dynamics of the
way a credible majoritarian identity has been not only created but also
installed, you might say in digital terms, into the population. I think the big
force, which I don't understand well enough personally, is the RSS and its
affiliates. They have clearly done a huge job in installing this majoritarian
software on a place-to-place basis. And of course, Modi was a lifelong RSS
person, a fact we sometimes forget. Each of these answers raises more questions.
Still, I would say a preliminary shot at it would be that the BJP did the wise
thing to keep the RSS relationship very alive. Otherwise, it would be like
every party going up and down with electoral fortunes. So, whether you go
slightly up in Punjab or down in Rajasthan or down in Bengal, there is a steady
force keeping your political apparatus in place as a national affair and it's
not the BJP alone, because the BJP alone, you know its leadership has a very
particular configuration of essentially Gujarat, UP, and a couple of other
states and the key actors. But RSS is in all those places. So somewhere there
may be an answer to your question. I think he deserves to be taken very
seriously. For one thing, he's the only person I would say at the national
level who has genuine large-scale appeal and charisma. If you made a charisma
index, he's close to 100 and everybody else is below 50, and most people are
below 20. No one can take away from it. He's an incredible speaker. He knows
how to make his appeals; he's also mastered how to make the cocktail of
visibility and invisibility. He’s there all the time in front of you, but never
at press conferences. You'd never see him with his hair out of place or him
laughing. He's a purely hologrammed brand and you can't escape him. Modi has
mastered what in the US in the 50s was called image
politics. I admire that skill. He's also been extremely shrewd, considering
that he's not a scientist – to put it mildly, not highly educated. He's been
extremely smart on the IT front. These BJP IT cells are amazing to me. The IT
game has totally been lost. He also has made a considerable effort, though this
I think has largely been a failure, to bring the military in which is the big X
Factor. The military is the 800-pound gorilla slightly off scene. General Bipin
Rawat was the first exception, the line crosser, who lined up with the regime
and said, hey, you know, this is the way to go and I'm at the service of this
regime and its vision. But it's not clear how far down you see that interest in
getting into the frontline of politics is in the Indian armed forces. But there
are many other things in which Modi has been very shrewd, one of which is the
question I still ask myself: how could this man in especially Europe and the US have a very benign reputation to
this day? Erdogan has not achieved this. Nobody else has achieved this. Orban
has not achieved this, Trump has not achieved this. Boris Johnson has not
achieved this. But Modi is still seen as a wise and strong leader in developing
countries. So he also gets credit there. I don't know whether credit is at the
sending end in how he manages his image and statements or the receiving end
that there is some, which has been my theory, that the receiving end has India
locked in a kind of 1970s image, struggling democracy, developing country, and
they just don't understand that a new chapter, a new drama has been going on
for 10 to 15 years. There's a kind of arrest on the reception side. That's my
private theory or my personal theory. But there too, we have to go because he's
not allowed his image to correspond more to the reality of his policies. Gandhi
represents the exact opposite of what Modi represents in terms of tolerance,
abhorrence of violence and so on and so forth, commitment to truth. All these
really put him in the opposite place. Conceptually, he's still the main
alternative because Nehru was too much involved in day-to-day politics. Gandhi
still has a certain special status, which sometimes is used to also distance
him and say who cares, he's somewhere up in some other realm. But still, he is
a kind of conscience for India. There is however, another side
which is more tricky for where Gandhi feeds into the hardwiring of Indian
politics and society in a way that is not totally separate from the world of
Modi or others and that has to do with these ideas about Hindu and Muslim. Even
if he had a different idea how they should connect, the idea became, I think,
quite important him. Several people also have complained about Gandhi over the
decades that while he was extremely humane, especially at partition towards the
Muslim population of the Subcontinent, he never really understood Islam much in
the way that he understood, say Christianity. There was a kind of imagination
limitation – not a genocidal impulse but something soft, a lacking. Gandhi also
had a certain social conservatism on caste on the order of things. You can
attempt to reinterpret his writings but the landscape is there, such as the
idea of Harijan, a term the Dalits hate. Although someone like Modi is not a
subtle intellectual or historian, I think at a gut level he knows that Gandhi
had a conservative Hindu side. Gandhi made it as humanistic and universal as
possible, but the DNA was there. Modi just took that social conservatism and
put it on steroids. Having said that, Gandhi was not genocidal or believed in
majoritarianism – that's a Modi copyright. Gandhi would have been horrified and
would literally be turning in his grave seeing this. I'm a firm believer that
Mahatma Gandhi would have not supported what is happening in India. No doubt. I was recently
stimulated by a colleague with whom I was in one-on-one correspondence to look
at the election results for Modi over the last two elections. The numbers are
not staggering – 40% or fully 45%. I mean, Nehru sometimes had 70 or 80% vote. So,
the question is who's in that 40 or 45, and who's in the 60 or 65? Modi has
managed to get a large part of the population to overcome their parochial or
localised sectional interests to go for this big message that is true. No one
has succeeded in mobilising the other side in the same way, which is made up of
bits and pieces. Modi’s side have been successful aggregators. The numbers are
not overwhelming but it's a number enough to dominate the parliament. He has
leveraged that number in a brilliant way. I think one thing has to be kept in
mind and it holds not only for Modi, but all his predecessors Manmohan Singh,
Narsimha Rao, basically the Indian Congress leadership, which is the topic of
corruption. What do we mean by it? How do we measure it? Is it getting worse or
better? No one would deny the flow of black money and other dubious money into
Indian elections is one of the scandals of all democracies today. If you take
the amount of rupees flowing in from black accounts, unknown people both used
to manipulate elections and to launder that money in elections. That is a very large
amount of money so we need to be cautious about fetishising elections, because
this is not just a Modi issue. Modi has been very smart about how to capture
elections, because elections without cash in India are a thing of the past. Modi has
captured the national pot so that means he also captured the election machinery.
The place where we can see his brilliance as far as elections are concerned is
in Gujarat. He showed himself as the master
of Indian electoral politics in terms of speeches, rhetoric, and mobilisation,
and also how you control the money flow. This is definitely true about that
aspect of the whole Indian electoral system that responds to national and
international issues. Of course, a lot is going on, which is totally local. When
those things are subordinated to issues of a bigger scale, I think what you say
is absolutely true. The observation I would add to that is it is the same coin,
which has two sides. One is creating a uniform commitment to Modi and to the
BJP among people who have a lot of sectional interest but getting them to
transit, in other words, producing a majority of some kind. The other side of
the coin is that somebody has to be denigrated. So polarisation always means
one side is becoming solid and the other side has to be liquefied, conceptually
speaking. For me that is the most basic kind of anthropological sociological
human issue I've been struggling with more or less my entire career. What is
the ‘we’ they think, to produce a strong and aggressive ‘we’? Why is there
always a need for ‘they’? Why can't I just say we are all Hindus and we are
good people, let's all be together. No, until you say that those other people
are responsible for all our troubles - they are spies or Pakistani agents, this
or that. In a slightly different way, it applies to Christians and in a murky
way to Dalits as well, who are both ‘us’ and ‘not us’ – ‘us’ as long they
remain quiet and obedient, but not as soon as they talk back. But Muslims are
in a permanent default state of ‘otherness’. The deep question that very few
social scientists have been able to answer and I certainly cannot answer is why
is a ‘they’ required in order to produce a ‘we’, both perennially in human
history and in the era of modern nation states. The ‘they’ involved can be a
religious idiom or an ethnic one. It can be a migrant idiom. But no one can say
they promote a vigorous nationalism without any sense of some dark spectral
figure that needs to be managed in prison or eventually removed. In India, this genocidal impulse exists
because the numbers are so large. It’s not like there are a handful of Muslims.
And the minute you think about Muslims this way, you ask, “what about Dalits,
are they on our side?” People have pointed out to me that BJP has succeeded in
co-opting a significant number of Dalits. But I still think that number is not
large and those in the Dalit community who think radically against the BJP are
many, and very vocal. However, it's obvious that BJP has not co-opted Muslims
and the Muslims are quiet because they are afraid in India. The ‘we/they’ problem [in this
region] is a historical question. Why has Modi succeeded in mobilising or
intensifying that feeling which clearly has a longer history? There was always
some deeper issue, at least as far back as Jinnah and Nehru. Modi did not
manufacture the ‘us vs them’ problem but he has leveraged the hell out of it. I
think the elected government has made inroads into the other independent
branches of government massively. That's why I think, just as in Pakistan, you can talk about the
establishment, we can talk about the BJP regime because there's more than just
the prime minister's office doing its job with the court keeping an eye and the
legislature doing its own work. It's become all too close and too tight. That's
my reason for using the word. It is too deeply involved in the others for it to
be a healthy democratic condition. Separation of powers is at the very heart of
the idea of democracy. When all of these are very closely aligned with the
current ruling party you have to find some word for that. My fears are that we
are approaching something resembling a tipping point, which will go in one of
two ways. One of them is where the BJP and Modi consolidate this regime and
dissent is more or less eliminated. While the talk we have been noticing from
some quarters is technically genocidal, that project is impossible in India with its 200 million people. Rather,
it’s about producing fear and compliance on a large scale. Will that happen? Or
will Dalits, farmers, urban intellectuals, Marxists, women, Sikhs, etc. find a
way to make common cause and push this government out. I think that would
require a new order of leadership – either one person or a few, who can rise to
Modi levels of credibility. But the tipping point could go that way as well. It's
a very troublesome and troubling question. I haven't really thought about that.
Calling for genocide is one thing and carrying it out is another thing in the
current year. The numbers are too big to make it possible. I think all these
tactics are ways to produce fear. They are threats and statements of impunity
about the vision, not the execution. Anybody in their right mind knows it
cannot be done and is an extremely risky path to embark on. You can trigger
many things, including overseas intervention. Do Modi and his allies want to
run those kinds of risks? I think that the pragmatic, utilitarian part of this
current government, which is also deeply concerned with facilitating massive
corporate profit making, sets limitations to the actual execution of a
genocidal vision. I take great comfort in that. But I still think the ability
to say these things is alarming. And we have to ask, what is that agenda about?
And secondly, how can we nip that in the bud – through legal means, public
opinion means, elections or whatever else is possible? https://tribune.com.pk/story/2394796/the-makings-of-a-hindu-nationalist-state
