Whataboutery’ is the Wordle solution in India’s ideological puzzle. The noun debuted in The Irish Times sometime in the 1970s when Northern Ireland was in bloody turmoil; a letter to the editor bemoaned the fact that “We have a bellyful of Whataboutery in these killing days and the one clear fact to emerge is that people, Orange and Green, are dying as a result of it…” Add a bit of Pantone dark to the Orange, and you get saffron. The Ram Mandir of Ayodhya is the BJP’s retort to whataboutery; for the word is bandied about as freely by liberals, all the while throwing shade as the political patois of the Right.
It goes something like this: “Why blame the Mughals alone for demolishing temples? Hindu rulers did it too. Didn’t King Indra III demolish the temple of Kalapriya who his arch foes, the Pratiharas, worshipped in 10 AD? Besides, more recently, didn’t Narendra Modi demolish ancient temples while developing Varanasi?”
“Why give Mahmud of Ghazni a bollocking for looting the Somnath temple? Didn’t the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I steal the Vatapi Ganapati idol from the Chalukiyas after desecrating their mandir?”
“Why blame only Mughals of massacring Hindus? Didn’t the Pandavas, helped by Lord Krishna, a Hindu god, kill their own brothers, the Kauravas, who were all Hindus?”
A professional Anglophile academic who is just a featherweight on her own campus, but lauded as a liberal icon busy defending Indian syncretism at various Lit Fests, ventures that Aurangzeb demolished temples because they were war rooms of Brahmins where funds to foment rebellion were stored. It was a law and order problem, she says, not sacrilege. In other words, the Hindus invited Mughal wrath on themselves.
And so on and so forth. However, the Left’s whataboutery versions have vanished like the Babri Masjid from the philosophical skyline. The new mass acceptability of the Right wing Hindu and their idea of Hinduism is enjoying an India moment. The Idea of Hindusim and the Idea of India have been sublimated by Narendra Modi, who has stamped his immortal imprimatur on India’s history with the Ram Mandir’s consecration.
The future and past came together inside the sanctum sanctorum on January 22, when an OBC Indian consecrated the most powerful symbol of faith and politics in modern India. In doing so, Modi has given Ram to the ordinary Indian, and institutionalised his right to worship beyond the restrictions of caste. It is a masterstroke—the term is unavoidable here—of social engineering.
The Idea of India as a Nehruvian concept belonged to another age when political correctness had not been invented, politicians smoked pipes, prime ministers spoke French, ministers toasted foreign counterparts with Merlot and malt, and journalists were respected for their work, not for studio makeup and their hectoring decibels. Oxford-educated ministers drove around in non-AC Ambassadors while today, semi-literate MPs with criminal records travel to Parliament in bulletproof Audis and Mercs.
India, with its non-linear history, is a construct of contradictions which have to be understood and streamlined by negotiating its political pitfalls. Modi himself is a contradiction: a solitary seeker who belongs to the masses. It is this singularity that makes him invincible and transcend this antinomy, and why even those who question his actions in private believe in him.
Muslim invaders converted Hindus into Islam using force and bribes. Modi’s mission is to convert all Hindus into Hinduism. What kind of whataboutery is that?
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com