While the successful conduct of our 18th Lok Sabha elections should have been a cause of celebration, it has been anything but celebratory for many of our fellow citizens. Ever since the results were announced, a spate of anti-Muslim violence has occurred, threatening to submerge the very idea of India we celebrate while conducting the world’s largest election.
The electoral outcome may have weakened the BJP politically, but we cannot seek solace in thinking that it has also strengthened secularism. While replying in the Lok Sabha to the motion of thanks on the president’s address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that after years of “appeasement politics”, it was only now that a government was truly practising secularism. These words overlooked his own conduct during the campaign, when he led his colleagues in a savage assault on our republic’s religious pluralism.
The people of India watched in horror as the prime minister, while campaigning in Rajasthan’s Banswara, his stentorian voice climbing to a crescendo of hate, wove a web of Islamophobic falsehoods. Modi described Muslims as “infiltrators” and thundered that the Congress would make Muslims the foremost recipients of India’s resources; that they intended to snatch away the Hindu majority’s hard-earned wealth and give it to Muslims, sparing not even the mangalsutras of their “mothers and sisters”; and that they would redistribute wealth to Muslims (those who “have more children”).
As a subservient Election Commission of India watched on, he carried on this fearmongering offensive, bizarrely and baselessly accusing the opposition of plotting to rob the OBCs, STs and SCs of their reservations and award them to Muslims for turning out en masse in a “vote jihad” against the BJP.
But then came the verdict. Not only did Modi’s party lose Banswara by over two lakh votes, it lost Faizabad-Ayodhya too, where, on January 22, the prime minister inaugurated the Ram Mandir, and the PM’s own majority in Varanasi collapsed from nearly six lakhs to one and a half. Confronted with this humiliating electoral setback and embittered against Muslims, the foot-soldiers of Hindutva cracked down on them, signalling that Muslims and other minorities still have much to fear.
A sister weeps in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh for her older brother who made tandoori rotis at local eateries, and was on his way back home a day after Eid-ul-Adha when he was surrounded by a mob of over a dozen men, armed with lathis and iron rods, who beat him to death. For the victim’s family—especially his younger sister and elderly, ailing mother—the festival will no longer be joyous; every Eid will now remind them of the grisly murder of a beloved family member.
And as if this could not get any more macabre, the local police registered an FIR against the dead man and eight others, charging them with dacoity and assault of women. One wonders whether, in a state that prides itself on law and order management and eliminating goonda raj, these accusations could not have been investigated without the accused being massacred by a mob that arrogated to itself the roles of judge, jury, prosecutor and executor.
Ultimately, protests were staged—not to demand justice for the victim, but by radical Hindu groups to defend those accused of the lynching and demand their release. Unsurprisingly, the BJP joined this sordid chorus, with its local MLA throwing her weight behind the accused and another popular leader, a former mayor of Aligarh, declaiming, “If the police do not investigate properly, we know our way around. It is Uttar Pradesh, where [the] bulldozer rules.”
Around the same time, in Madhya Pradesh, the homes of 11 Muslims were demolished, since the local police claimed that these individuals were involved in cow slaughtering and selling beef, which is banned there. Once again, does such an act not fly in the face of natural justice and due process? Indeed, one of the individuals whose homes were demolished said that his family “were never served notices”, while another revealed that her family had been compelled to sleep out in the open on Eid. There are four women in her family, including herself, all of whom have one set of clothes apiece. “We begged the local sarpanch for help,” she continued. “No one wants to come to us. Everyone here fears their home is next in line for demolition.”
In Telangana, following a brawl between a cabal of cow vigilantes and Muslims—who, on Bakrid, had bought 40 oxen for a collective sacrifice by over 700 individuals—two injured Muslims were rushed to the Medak Orthopaedic Hospital. Horrifically, the fundamentalists stormed this hospital, vandalising it and the new car of the doctor (a Hindu) who was treating the injured individuals.
According to a media report, “Broken window panes and medical equipment littered the blood-stained floors when staff reopened the hospital three days later. The hospital now stays open for only a few hours a day.” As if this were not enough, incidents of anti-Muslim violence have been reported over the past month in Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi.
For over a decade now, countless Indian Muslims have been living in terror of the mob, which they frequently see embodied in the BJP, especially when the prime minister makes it his own business to breathe fire against them. This is deplorable and unbecoming of a people blessed with a trailblazing Constitution that protects all of India’s citizens, regardless of faith, from unfair, arbitrary treatment at the hands of power. Must our minorities face the worst aspects of majority rule?
While a vigorous opposition bodes well for the future of our democracy, our republic will remain imperilled until we breathe new life into India’s secularism. For only by facilitating harmony among all of our citizens can we attain the Ram Rajya that Mahatma Gandhi dreamed of, live up to the values that B R Ambedkar enshrined in our Constitution—or attain the aspirations our prime minister proclaims for the nation.
Shashi Tharoor
Fourth-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Sahitya-Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life
(Views are personal)
(office@tharoor.in)