Last week, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) moved the Calcutta High Court’s Jalpaiguri circuit bench against calling a lioness ‘Sita’, as it hurt Hindu religious sentiments. This news of victimhood—of the majority—was greeted with catcalls and derisory laughter by the liberal and woke crowd.
Sita and her male companion, Akbar, were brought to the Bengal Safari Park on February 13 from the Sepahijala zoo in Tripura, where the two cats had occupied a single enclosure. Their cohabitation continues in North Bengal.
The Bengal Safari Park officials said they had nothing to do with the naming. For close to six and eight years, respectively, the lioness and the lion had been responding to the names given to them by Tripura forest officials. There has been no violence between them. An exemplary marriage, as it were.
Names are just sounds for animals. But not for humans, who could kill and die for them, because a name is an abbreviated history. Of families, places, professions, gods and castes. This is a country where if you have the wrong name, you could end up dead.
The VHP activists said in their petition: “On Feb 8, 2024, Sepahijala Zoological Park handed over one male lion and a lioness along with eight other animals to North Bengal Wildlife Animals Park, Siliguri …. The Bengal Safari Park has named the female lion ‘Sita’. By using the name for a lioness, the respondent authority is hurting the religious sentiments of Sanatan Dharma… Such naming of a cat family after a religious deity is irrational, illogical… very much sacrilegious and tantamount to blasphemy.” The petition further stated that the animals be christened neutrally. This does sound ‘irrational,’ and ‘illogical’. Therefore, it is a reasonable demand in our woke times.
If the charge were made by a minority community, it might have had more sympathetic reactions. The VHP’s claim about ‘hurt sentiments’ can be almost laughed out of court because it is the VHP. Yet, ‘hurt sentiments’ represent the essence of the present-day culture of entitlement and victimhood: I feel offended. The feeling is the fact. The fact itself is nothing. If the prevalent guiding sentiment of justice is that one can take offence at another’s so-called insensitivity, then the VHP finding offence in the name Sita attached to a wild animal is justified. Especially if her partner is Akbar.
The progressive media has made it out to be some kind of a risible attempt on the part of the VHP to recast the Sita-Akbar relationship into a love jihad mould. But that is not what it is. Though in my book you could, you wouldn’t normally call your pet python Christ or Muhammad, or your favourite parrot after a Hindu goddess.
In India, especially in the big cities, pets are usually given Christian names. For instance, India’s most famous dog, thanks to Mahua Moitra, is called Henry. Would that offend the British royalty whose lineage can be traced to Henry VII? It just might, given our times. But it would not be taken seriously because the British royalty is privileged. But, can’t the privileged feel hurt? They can, but that would roughly be Yascha Mounk’s—more about him in a moment—universal value system in which everyone has rights, not just the ‘victim’.
The VHP plea for a change in the nomenclature is just insofar as ‘hurt sentiments’ is a valid argument. If it is valid for the woke-identitarian liberal, then it is valid for the VHP as well. A name change is unlikely to make much difference to the cat’s perception of the world—so long as her meals come on time.
The boycott-and-cancel culture, so much a part of the woke politics, has come home to say. It might be ironical that a majoritarian religion in a state transitioning to a majoritarian Hindu state is now compulsively claiming that their dignity has been systematically stolen over the centuries by the Mughals, by the British, and then by the anglicised comprador bourgeois class of Nehrus and Gandhis, is now taking offence at the so-called love jihad of wild cats. Yet this is the currency of correctness that the woke inaugurated their era with.
Yascha Mounk, a leading German-American public intellectual and academic, in his latest book, The Identity Trap, talks about the origin of a set of ideas about identity and social justice that is rapidly transforming the world. He explains why it will fail to accomplish its goals, owing primarily to a process innate to the identity politics of our times when race, gender, or religion are seen as representing vertical classes of separatism rather than universal humanism. If we rank identity over universalism, separation over whole, we end up in a world worse both for the dominant and the marginalised, Mounk says.
The Indian liberal has been laughing over the Sita incident. On the face of it, the cartoonish character of the VHP complaint is worthy of derision: the Sanatani Hindu is attributing religion to wild animals in an act of cartoonish anthropomorphism.
But, the arrogant guffaw is one reason why the BJP keeps winning major elections outside the English-spouting, upper-middle-class drawing rooms of urban India. Their scorn for the majority religion and its saffron eccentricities created the space that Narendra Modi so expertly manipulates. So much so, he opens or ends speeches in Parliament with Ram-Ram.
As the 2024 election nears, there will be many more Sita-Akbar situations. Laughing at them is one option. The other is to listen. Respect your enemy if you want a change in the outcome of the contest.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)