A talk ‘Righting the Nation’ was held as part of the ongoing HLF. Senior journalist and author Ashutosh spoke at the event, attended by nearly 300 people.
He began with the dramatic changes seen in the country since May 2019. “Today, we are living in difficult times. In the last six months, the fabric of the country has undergone a radical transformation. Let’s not live under any illusion that under a Hindu Rashtra, the judiciary, press and agencies will be independent. Why are judges not being impartial?
Why are central agencies behaving in a biased manner? This is what happens in an ideological state,” he said. What is an ideological state? Ashutosh points out: “For the first time, the country is witnessing the march of an ideological state, similar to Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Ideological states have just one utopia. Every arm of the executive, every arm of the society, and every individual would have to be working solely for the construction of such a utopia.”
Ashutosh says we have not yet realised the danger posed by right-wing ideology, and are unprepared to fight it. “Today, liberals and leftists are painted as anti-nationals. Anybody who protests against the government is immediately branded as anti-national, and trolled viciously. They say Jawaharlal Nehru University, where I had once studied, is a den of terrorists. The fact is, right-wingers are discrediting the stellar credentials of all such institutions that pose a threat to their way of thinking,” he said.
What exactly is the ideology of right-wing nationalists? “In my opinion, Hindu civilisation has never faced such a serious crisis in the last 5,000 years. All that is good about Hinduism, such as tolerance and non-violence are labelled by right-wingers as ‘perverted virtues’, which in their opinion, allowed foreign invaders to conquer India and rule for centuries. Right-wing nationalists believe in militant Hinduism. They want to mould Hindus to hate, and to kill if needed,” shares Ashutosh.
In his book ‘Hindu Rashtra’, Ashutosh makes a stark prediction, saying, “To assume that only Muslims or the minority are their (Hindutva proponents) targets will be reading history the wrong way.”