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How Hate Has Been Normalised, Behaviourally and Institutionally, in Modi’s India

Raheel Dhattiwala

Prime Minister Modi’s most recent anti-Muslim bombast is an ominous signal. That it may fuel violence worries many, and quite rightly. But it is also the ease with which Modi and his party raise anti-Muslim rhetoric which is equally troubling.

The troublesome normality of scapegoating Muslims for every small and big problem is slowly permeating everyday life. The very mention of the word ‘Muslim’ in a political or social context generates a certain frisson in many parts of India today. Yet –until the last five years – I never felt the same everyday aversion towards Muslims in other parts of India that I came across growing up in Ahmedabad, a city casually comfortable with its implicit apartheid and deep prejudice against Muslims since the 1970s.

In an interview to Tehelka in 2006, Ganesh Devy called the anti-Muslim hatred in many cities of Gujarat “not conscious or learnt. It is just somehow normal, as nature would have meant it to be.” For many who have closely observed Gujarat, the horrific violence of 2002, and Modi’s subsequent rise was a consequence of the normalised bigotry of a large section of Gujarati society.

What makes such normality worrying?

Political hate speech emboldens people who already hold prejudice towards certain groups, especially when such speech is tacitly condoned by other political leaders and intellectuals. In the US, this came to be called the “Trump Effect”– people with existing prejudice towards Mexicans and Muslims began to voice their prejudice explicitly and aggressively. Bigotry became casual under Trump.

The ‘ordinariness’ of hate

I recently saw the brilliant Oscar-winner The Zone of Interest. The sense of doom does not come from actual visuals of violence against the Jews – there aren’t any – but from the excellent depiction of the nonchalance of murder. For many “ordinary Germans”, gassing and shooting Jews was a nine-to-five job and it helped to live close to your ‘workplace’, the extermination camp.

While watching the movie, a similarly excellent Gujarati play came to my mind. Written by the noted playwright Saumya Joshi in the middle of the violence in 2002, it was called Dost, chokkas ahinya ek nagar vastun hatun (Friend, I’m certain a city stood here once). An archaeological dig reveals a once-thriving city – Ahmedabad – long lost and forgotten, largely because of the apathy of its citizens. One scene sticks with me: as one part of the city reels under sustained killing, the other, oblivious or uncaring, savours street food.

Comparing the Holocaust and other global genocides with anti-minority violence in India is unjustified – if the scale of killing is the only measure of consideration. If what also matters are the conditions that make violence easy and ordinary, then the analogy works well.

Hannah Arendt became part of our intellectual dictionary when she used the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the notorious and “terrifyingly normal” Nazi officer, Adolf Eichhmann, who led some of the worst Jewish massacres under the Third Reich. There was nothing banal (normal) about what Eichhmann did, Arendt argued; the banality lay in the complete casualness in going about his deeds. Repulsion for Jews had been normalised to such an extent that they were “rendered superfluous”. The Kantian principle of ends – that being a human has value in itself – means nothing if you are no longer even seen as human.

So how does bigotry become normalised? Or what makes people to be rendered superfluous? Arendt reasoned that the concentration camp was worse than the extermination camp – the latter merely killed, but the concentration camp eradicated human individuality and human morality. Violence is easier if the victim is not human or – in the modern nation-state – a citizen of a country, Arendt had said.

While the universality of human rights is the ideal, nationalism has redefined human rights. The “right to have rights”, as she famously said, is, sadly, meaningful only if an individual belongs to a political community; human rights are no longer enough. As someone who remained stateless for 18 years of her life, fleeing the antisemitism of the 1930s and finding no refuge elsewhere, Arendt would doubtless have smirked at the purported virtue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” she wrote about the apathy towards stateless human beings, including herself.

India, of course, has no Russian gulags or Jewish concentration camps but the normalisation of hate has taken root, behaviourally and institutionally. In terms of behaviour, while Arendt may have dissociated Eichhmann from ideology, anthropologists find a close connection between the two. An ideology that redefines what it means to be human defines, in essence, what it means to be subhuman or non-human. Images of dehumanisation played a significant role in Nazi ideology and helped to normalise the Holocaust.

Dehumanising a group of people has historically often been a precursor to ‘morally righteous’ war and genocide. One of the themes covered by the Third Reich during the winter of 1943 was ‘The Jew as universal parasite’; the Rwandan state termed Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ to morally legitimise the genocide and, now, Hindu nationalists speak of ‘infiltrators’ – code for Muslms – as ‘termites’ – each group of people a biological danger that deserves exclusion and, at its worst, elimination.

In her analysis of the anti-Sikh violence in 1984, anthropologist Veena Das observes how an all-encompassing “Sikh character” was attributed to the entire community – that a Sikh does not believe in loyalty; is like a snake that will bite the hand that feeds him; is naturally aggressive and attracted to violence, etc. The subject of the “character” changes depending on who is targeted as the aggressor at a given time.

Once prejudice is codified into law, individual bigotry gains legal legitimacy; repression gains sanctity. Under the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow laws, the degradation of black citizens and the restoration of white honour went together. Systemic bias permeates the judiciary, the media, the education system, housing, employment, the criminal justice system etc. But it is subtle and, therefore, more treacherous— rewritten history textbooks or redefined citizenship principles get internalized over time and are not as palpable as hate speech. In India, whether the Citizenship Amendment Act is implemented or not, a message has been sent: the Muslim is oppressive, and an outsider.

Whether Modi gets re-elected for a third term, the language of bigotry normalised during his rule is likely to linger.

[Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist. She is the author of the book, Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Courtesy: The Wire.]

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Modi’s Hypocritical Doublespeak About Religion and the Constitution

Badri Raina

Passing references apart, the most worrying feature of the current election campaign has been the lack of popular or systemic outrage against the way Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have succeeded in normalising the use of religion and communal hate as their chief electoral strategy.

Indeed, the list of epithets and items – mangalsutras, buffaloes, cricket, government tenders – deployed to obtain the grossest denominational polarisation is getting to be endless, with next to no pushback either from the fourth estate or the catchment of experts who routinely populate prime time shows, with honourable exceptions, it must be said.

Mentions are made but then the “debates” go on after academic observations about how canny Modi’s tactics are, and how all is fair in electoral battles, as among corporate wars. That the electoral contest is indeed projected as war is evidenced by the sort of terms the vernacular media unfailingly applies to a description of campaign episodes; phrases like “hunkar,” “shankh naad,” “vaar/palat vaar,” “hamla,” to underscore a few, cast the democratic contest as a battle reminiscent of the Mahabharata.

From disgraceful scare-mongering about how non-BJP parties, with the Congress always the chief culprit in Modi’s anxious mind, mean to “turn Hindus into second class citizens,” steal “reservations” from the Schedule Castes, Schedule Tribes, and Other Backward Classes and hand them over to Muslims, even steal all the gold from Hindu women to pass on to Muslims, to continuous projections of the Ram temple and fake propaganda about how the Congress will embrace Pakistan etc, Modi has insistently used the majoritarian card to counter his failures on livelihood issues, and his falling ratings among the masses.

One look at the five guarantees he has promised to the people of West Bengal, and it is again clear as daylight that his chief tool for electoral success continues to be religion.

Guarantee number three promises that there will be no hurdles tolerated to the celebration of Ram Navmi; number four vows that no one will be allowed to alter the status of the Ram temple at Ayodhya—as brazenly a cooked-up fear as can be; and number five refers to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act which for the first time in our post-independence, constitutional history, makes religion a criterion for grant of citizenship).

None of the above, the Election Commission would have us believe, amounts to a violation of the constitutional injunction or the provisions of the People’s Representation Act which forbid discriminating among citizens on denominational grounds or using religion to appeal for votes.

Cutely, his guarantee number one – namely, that religion cannot be a basis for granting reservations – seems to Modi the only constitutional caution against the use of religion in matters of state function.

Accusing the opposition of being Muslim-friendly, he has no problem with making a no-holds-barred Hindu (read: upper caste Hindu) friendly frenzy as his chief campaign gambit.

Modi’s success lies in the fact that both the media and the elites seem to think that being pro-Hindu is not a religious phenomenon, but a nationalist one—an eventuality that Jawaharlal Nehru had cautioned us against when he predicted how the communalism of the minority will be referred to as communalism, but that of the majority as nationalism.

It is the best-known secret that the one word, most of all among many others, in the constitution that the right-wing wish to eject is the word “secular” in the Preamble. And yet we are to believe that it is not Modi who has been pressing religion into political service with undiminished resolve and fury but the opposition which has been doing so.

This against the starkly demonstrable fact that the electoral campaign of the INDIA alliance has unrelentingly centred on non-religious, livelihood concerns of all citizens.

Many who may well be helpless in countering in any large-scale measure the make-over of the republic, ought at least not to descend to hypocrisy, but remain sentient about the fate that seems to be overtaking the nation.

(Badri Raina taught English at Delhi University. Courtesy: The Wire.)

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At Rae Bareli, a Picture of Contrasts in Amit Shah and Priyanka Gandhi

Sanjay K. Jha

Amit Shah: Triple talaq, Article 370, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Muslim personal law, surgical strike, Ram temple, 400 paar…

Priyanka Gandhi: Education, future of children, unemployment, mahngai, GST on agricultural equipment, farm loan-waiver, voter awareness…

The two sets of phrases reveal two kinds of politics. Union home minister Amit Shah and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi were today campaigning in Raebareli, a prestigious constituency considered to be the pocket-borough of the Nehru-Gandhi family from where Rahul Gandhi is contesting this time. The difference in their language and content tells all about the nature of electoral contest in this election.

While Amit Shah began his speech by saying that a victory in Rae Bareli would guarantee 400 seats for the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA and asked the people how many times Sonia Gandhi had visited the constituency during the last five years, he said the Congress leader who represented the seat had spent 70% of her MPLAD funds on minorities. He then swiftly moved to the Ram temple, claiming that Rahul Gandhi didn’t attend the consecration ceremony because he was scared of his “vote-bank.” The BJP describes Muslims as Congress vote-bank.

Shah then went on to ask five questions, insisting that Rahul Gandhi should seek vote in Rae Bareli only after answering them:

1. Scrapping the triple talaq law was good or bad and does Rahul Gandhi intend to bring it back?

2. What is preferable – Muslim Personal Law or Uniform Civil Code? 3. Do you support the surgical strike carried out by the Modi government inside Pakistan or not?

4. Do you support the abolition of Article 370 or not?

5. Why didn’t you attend the pranprathistha [consecration] of Ram temple?

The unmistakable and inescapable Muslim angle in all the five questions cannot be overstated. Shah also spoke about India’s claim on Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and recalled how Congress leaderMani Shankar Aiyar was trying to scare India by saying that Pakistan possessed atom bomb. He made passing references to Modi’s achievements like the moon mission and G-20 conference while promising to take Rae Bareli to dizzying heights of development if the seat went to the BJP.

Priyanka’s speech was entirely different in both intent and purpose as she appealed to the people to show awareness and voter for a better future of their children.

“What’s the biggest problem you face?” she asked the audience and then went on to dwell on “mahngai” or expense, explaining how the women struggled to buy even essential items because of high prices. She referred to the cost of petrol and diesel and told the people that Congress governments were providing cooking gas cylinder for Rs 500. She said the Goods and Services Tax imposed on agriculture equipment tormented farmers who were denied even loan-waiver relief, while resenting corporate loans worth Rs 16 lakh crore being written off.

She also talked about legal guarantee for MSP, crop insurance, unemployment, apprenticeship scheme, paper leaks and pension. She said the government was selling public sector units, airports, ports and giving all the contracts to crony capitalists, instead of making policies to help the poor.

Talking about the constituency, she said whatever development that happened in Rae Bareli was done by Congress MPs, particularly her mother Sonia Gandhi. Taking a dig at the BJP candidate Dinesh Pratrap Singh, who is the local MLA, she said, “I challenge him to show one work, instead of threatening people and grabbing their land.”

She then moved to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lamenting how low he had dragged the public discourse to, talking about stealing buffalo, snatching mangalsutra and Hindu-Muslim divide. She said, “A true leader will never mislead you in the name of god or religion. A true leader will speak the truth and serve the people. A true leader will seek votes on the basis of his performance. The prime minister has nothing constructive to talk about? The BJP has taken donations from the vaccine manufacturer through electoral bonds. The vaccine has been withdrawn because of its ill-effects. The BJP took donations from the builder of the bridge that collapsed in Gujarat killing so many people. We ruled this country for 55 years but the BJP became the richest party in the world in barely 10 years. Some reports suggest they spent Rs 60,000 crore in building offices across the country.”

(Courtesy: The Wire.)