The results in the two States—Jharkhand and Maharashtra—that held Assembly elections over the past two weeks will be known by the time you hold this issue in your hands, although too late for our magazine to analyse the vote. But whoever wins, one thing has been irrevocably lost—the idea of grace. I have spent the past week feeling a deep sense of anguish at the depths to which we have sunk as a nation. A horrific video, apparently created by the BJP’s Jharkhand State unit, was forwarded to me. After the first few minutes, I found myself unable to watch, so vile was its message. I am told that the video was subsequently removed from circulation, but it was too little, and it came way, way too late.
One is certain that the video is still doing the gleeful rounds of a crazed section of our compatriots who seem unable to think beyond hatred. And whose basest emotions are continuously stirred by the many-tentacled monster that is the BJP’s IT cell.
The foulest ingredients in the pot are added at a level that is one step removed from the Prime Minister, leaving him at liberty to claim that his mission, in fact, is to unify India while he rages against what he calls the “divisive agenda” of the opposition parties. The truth is so far removed from his claim that it would evoke mirth in a sane country. But this expedient strategy of placing himself above the fray, in a frame invested with halo and sceptre, has given Narendra Modi a huge margin of plausible deniability. And the ability to descend, messiah-like, and replace his Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath’s ugly “batenge toh katenge” campaign slogan (we will be slaughtered if we are divided)—which deliberately uses the word “katenge” to invoke the slur word with which Muslims are consistently targeted in Modi’s India—with the milder “ek hain toh safe hain”. The former slogan, which has already taken root, is changed not because the party has had a change of heart but because its Maharashtra allies have protested.
Nothing, in fact, moves in Modi’s India unless it has electoral outcomes. There is a reason, as the economist Ashoka Mody wrote in his excellent essay in our previous issue, why government hospitals and primary schools continue to languish even though the blaze of the Gujarat model of development has supposedly lit up every corner of India. It is because policy favours only visible, photo-op projects like flyovers, bullet trains, and bridges, which sell elite development ideas and win elections. Hate, similarly, is a high-visibility electoral project today.
The BJP’s supporters, those who still believe they have not voted to divide India along sharp communal lines but are merely interested in “correcting” the past, will insist that venomous videos like the one mentioned above are products of the fringe. This is either very naïve or very clever. Because the mushroom cloud of cinema, songs, books, and videos peddling the foulest communal messages are not happening in a hermetically sealed “fringe” space. They are thriving in a carefully cultivated soil of impunity and approbation that has been prepared for them.
The return of Trump in the US has been read by many as the triumph of every disgusting message he trotted out, but it would be foolish for the right wing globally to bask in his reflected glory. As we are seeing in Manipur, it is often easier to light a raging fire than it is to put it out. In the end, it will consume us all. The truth is that it is impossible to impose a solitary, fascistically imagined singularity upon our hopelessly diverse modern reality. We will be destroyed in the trying.
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