by MUKUL DUBE
Since the results of the general election were declared, I have been in a state of unbelief. The country now has at its head a man who has widely been called a mass murderer, who likened a massacre of Muslim citizens to the accidental death of a “kutte ka bachcha”, who delights in preening for the cameras holding swords and wearing diverse kinds of head-gear, and whose stated qualification for the top job is a thorax whose circumference is 142 centimetres.
Modi may well be described as a manly, muscular manifestation of Hindutva. He is at once modern and mediaeval, moving among Tatas and Ambanis and space scientists and posing before a fawning populace in a regal crown and robes. Regal also are his declarations. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his address to the nation through radio Friday morning, said the nation belongs to everyone and 125 crore Indians are blessed with immense skill and strength.” (IndiaTomorrow.net, October 3, 2014)
This is the classic line of the oppressor. Praise to the skies those whom you oppress and exploit, imply that you have no privileges that they too do not have — and then proceed to bleed them dry, to snatch away the natural resources which belong to them, to turn their property into your own monstrously costly gift to a temple for the benefit of your own immortal soul, to remain loftily silent while your underlings threaten and attack them.
The manliness and muscularity of Hindutva have taken a form that can only be called bestial. “The systematic use of gang-rape as a weapon occurred in the Surat riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, and an ugly innovation was the videotaping of the gang-rapes…. According to Praful Bidwai, Modi was the mastermind of the unspeakable atrocities against women in the 1992 Surat riots.” (https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/india-united-against-fascism/india-bjp-rape-and-status-of-women).
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