We are not enemies, but friends… Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land... when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Stirring words by Abraham Lincoln during his inaugural address as President of the United States. Soon after, America plunged into the Civil War, born out of a bitter divide between the North and the South that exists even today as an influential factor in politics.
The mystic chords of India’s collective memory even now reverberate to the twisted melody of pogroms and conversions, driving a deep chasm between countrymen. A Civil War is going on in India’s soul, over what and who is Indian. And politics is the provider of the answer. Yogi Adityanath has set anew nationalist paradigm by enacting a ‘love jihad’ law that persecutes and prosecutes young couples where the man is Muslim and the woman is Hindu. The pressure to prove who is more saffron has forced Madhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Singh Chouhan to come up with even more stringent legislation that promises imprisonment to Muslim Romeos.
Expect Haryana and Karnataka to be copycats. Democracy is not just about a party winning or losing, but also the loser standing up and fighting against assaults on what it represents—in this case the Opposition’s accreditation to secularism. The newly discovered Hindus, the Gandhis, are—not so strangely—silent on the law. Priyanka Gandhi, the UP-in-charge of the Congress, is reticent to take on the monk’s mass mandate magic; a fact Yogi knows too well. Akhilesh Yadav, whose party depends on its strong Muslim base, has stayed away from holding public protests like he did to support the farmers’ agitation. Nitish Kumar, the once stormy petrel of Muslim electoral reinvention, shrugged off the matter.
In Himachal Pradesh last year, the Congress and other Opposition parties with one voice supported a ‘love jihad’ law. Only Mamata Banerjee, facing an uphill battle with the BJP over minority appeasement, has been vocal against the law. The Muslim vote, once a crucial factor in winning elections, has been rendered obsolete by the electoral algorithms of master strategist Amit Shah as the Telangana local polls proved. India’s electoral calculus has changed forever with a shift in its cultural gestalt.
The chords of memory are strummed by the fingers of history. There are no bonds of affection between Hinduism and Islam. The savagery of Islamic conquests, Hindu massacres, rapine and conversions had a strong impact on the Hindi heartland and Karnataka. Genetic memory, enforced by oral tradition, kept reinforcing old injustices awaiting the avenging angels of our nature. This rage is not just Indian: Bosnia and Serbia, the Burmese and the Rohingyas, the Chechens and the Russians all fall under its shadow. Indian Hindus and Muslims have so far lived, if not as enemies, as wary neighbours. The ‘love jihad’ law has escalated suspicion into open hostility, sanctioned by the state. Those who bemoan the idea of India has changed have a new problem. Their idea of Hinduism has changed too.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com