by NITASHA KAUL
Kashmiri writer Nitasha Kaul, who was a panellist at the ‘Head to Head’ discussion at the Oxford Union, lists the Modi government’s sins of commission and omission.
The 2014 general election was a watershed moment for post-colonial India since it brought to power a national government that combines Hindu supremacism, economic neoliberalism and social conservatism. Today that government threatens the very idea of India. This has partly been helped by the global scene of unfettered neoliberalism and Islamophobia, a propitious blend for the Hindutva forces who present themselves as the bulwark against problematic Muslims and as exemplary Asian capitalists.
Much blood and ink has gone into reconstructing the Sangh Parivar’s communal Hindutva discourse for post-liberalisation India between the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the Dadri mob lynching in 2015. Somewhere between those horrors came the rise of Narendra Modi, largely owing to the Gujarat riots in which his government was at worst complicit and at best remiss. A recent Yale University political science study of riots in India suggests that Hindu-Muslim riots are electorally costly for the Congress, but riots in the year prior to an election result in an increased vote share for ethno-religious parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Indian politics has been radically reshaped by the twin interests of the proto-fascist paramilitaries and the corporate sector, threatening the secular and socialist aspects of Indian polity. The Sangh Parivar-backed Brand NaMo – a mix of hardcore Hindutva, business interests and facile development talk – was tested in Gujarat (a shining example of what Christophe Jaffrelot calls “a typical case of growth without development for all”) before it was unleashed on the nation in 2014 when the BJP ran the most expensive election campaign in the history of India ($115 million), but managed only a 31% vote share, the lowest of any party that ever won majority. Modi’s corporate backers gained $1.3 billion on the stock markets in the single day when he won the elections (as a hedge fund manager said: “We have a new CEO for the country and he is a good CEO”). Meanwhile, in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the number of voters pressing the NOTA button on the voting machine was higher than the national average and especially high in tribal areas.
The portents were there before. Before the general elections, in August 2013, some students of the Film and Television Institute were beaten up by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (a right-wing national student organisation) outside the National Film Archives of India building in Pune after the screening of Jai Bhim Comrade (a film about Dalit oppression) and a performance by Kabir Kala Manch (an anti-caste pro-democracy cultural organisation formed after the 2002 Gujarat riots). Calling them Naxalites, the ABVP attackers demanded that the FTII students say “Jai Narendra Modi”. When they refused, they were beaten up. The FTII media release in response said:
“This incident would not be seen in isolation and we are increasingly witnessing that any individual or organisation that takes an opinion contrary to the mainstream, is labeled as anti-national, and all efforts are taken to intimidate them which can also amount to murder, especially looking at the recent case of Dr Narendra Dabolkar.”
Since coming to power, the BJP government has appointed (or attempted to appoint) people with Hindutva links to the FTII, a move resisted by the students who have protested, been on strike for a large part of 2015, and faced police crackdown. Such is the level of repression and paranoia that a few weeks ago, a student wearing an FTII shirt at the International Film Festival of India in Goa was “roughed up, hauled into custody, his wallet searched and his life turned upside down, his cell phone deconstructed, including his email account and picture galleries”.
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