One day a 50-year old man is killed by a mob in a place called Dadri near New Delhi on suspicion that he had consumed beef. Another day, a nine-month-old boy and his toddler sister belonging to a Dalit (low-caste Hindu) family are burned alive in an arson attack in Faridabad district, around 40km outside the Indian capital. In between, some people smear the face of Sudheendra Kulkarni, chairman of Observer and Research Foundation, with black ink in Mumbai for organizing the book launch of Pakistan's former Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. A member of the Kashmir Legislative Assembly, Engineer Rashid, had also had his face blackened with paint, ink and Mobil oil for hosting a beef party in Srinagar earlier this month.
All this while India's Narendra Modi government was already on the defensive after more than 50 prominent writers either returned their Sahitya Academy awards or dissociated themselves from the academy over "rising intolerance and growing assault on free speech” in the country.
They were protesting the academy's silence at the killing, by suspected right-wing Hindu groups, of liberal thinkers like Dr. Kalburgi, 77, in southern state of Karnataka and Govind Pansare and Narendra Dabholkar in Maharashtra. Even those like Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth who have not yet returned the awards have expressed disquiet over some recent developments in the country.
To be fair, there has always been violence directed against minorities and low-caste Hindus in India. The Congress governments at the center and in states have also banned books and films to placate one community or the other. A ban on cow slaughter was in force in some northern states even before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party came to power. The Maharashtra-based Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP, has behaved as a law unto itself even when the Congress party was in power at the center and in Maharashtra. There have been challenges to freedom of speech and expression earlier too.
But nobody can fail to be struck by a sinister pattern behind the recent upsurge in violence and its aftermath. It is as though there is a neat division of labor under which the low-level workers of the BJP or of its affiliates indulge in lawlessness and those at the top maintain a studied silence while middle-or junior-level ministers and party functionaries make statements justifying the violence or threatening more of it. They also accuse the opposition parties of “politicizing” issues by blowing “minor incidents” out of all proportion.
Thus we have the BJP chief minister of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, making the Muslims' continued stay in India conditional on their banishing beef from their dining table. Modi's Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma calls former President APJ Abdul Kalam a “nationalist and humanist despite being a Muslim.” To him, the Dadri killing of Mohammad Akhlaq was just “an accident” when that involved a 200-strong mob scaling the walls of his house and dragging him out to be lynched.
V. K. Singh, minister of state for external affairs, compares the incident of burning of Dalits with throwing stones at dogs. How is the government responsible, he asks, “if a stone hits a dog and it dies.”
We don't know whether or not Modi shares such insensitive remarks. What we know is his silence is emboldening people belonging to RSS and other extremist Hindu groups who helped him capture power. But sooner or later he has to rein them in if he is to move forward with his vision of an economically vibrant India. Nearly 40 British MPs — mostly from the opposition Labor Party — have signed a motion calling on Prime Minister David Cameron to raise human rights concerns with Modi when he visits UK next month. This should give him an idea of the extent of the damage to his image caused by his supporters.
