Mohammad Alishan Jafri | Clarion India
FOR THE past few days, some of my Hindu friends from school days have been irritating me with an “innocent” question, “Is it fine to hurl stones and spit at doctors?” I did not tell them whether it is fine or not. Instead, I asked them to never hurl stones or spit at anyone.
“Why would I”, replied one of them with extreme disbelief at my stupid response to his stupid question.
“Just because you don’t know if it is right to spit at or hurt somebody with stones,” I answered. All the same time, I must strongly acknowledge here that no friend from any minority community has ever asked or posted such a typical majoritarian question to me. This is not an individual experience by any means.
Amid the deadly pandemic and the surrounding humanitarian crisis, in a bigger frame, a prime-time rabble-rouser is making news for the same kind of overtly innocent but covertly sinister majoritarian questions which he asked Sonia Gandhi. The only difference is that unlike my schoolmates, Arnab Goswami lacks slightest hint of even basic public decency while yelling at the “other” on air.
Arnab’s recent debates around the painful murder of two Juna Akhara sages in Maharashtra attests to the shallowness of his noisy marauds while not forgetting that Arnab was himself late by three days in picking up the issues. This “why are liberals quiet” furore after the Palghar lynching followed by Sonia Gandhi’s loathsome trial on Republic TV gave me a chance to explore the problematic cultural conditioning and bigoted curiosity of my school friends in the recent years. It is a symptom of a larger societal malaise.
A trail of communal vultures
Recent months have been deeply unsettling for India’s Muslims. When the Palghar lynching happened, several Muslims prayed to God that the perpetrators must not be Muslims because it would have invited extreme but “justified violent retaliation”.
For two days, BJP supporters desperately hunted for a Muslim angle but when that did not succeed due to the timely clarification of the Maharashtra government, a communist-Christian conspiracy was hatched!
It was asked, “How have our innocent people been brain-washed to kill saffron sages?” This is what Goswami asks in his intro:
“Do santon ki KHULE AAM hatya… jis desh ki 80 pratishat se zyaada aabadi HINDU hai, SANATANI HAI, kya wahan HINDU hona ek appradh ho gaya hai? Arey mere desh ko yeh manzoor nahin hai. AUR YEH MERA DESH HAI!!!!” (Two Hindu saints get murdered in cold blood. In a country were 80% of people are Hindus, is being a Hindu a crime now? My country refuses to accept this. And this is my country.)
Any sane mind would argue that a mob killing anyone, whether a saffron sage or a Muslim maulvi is wrong! Why should one lynching be more shocking than the other. In this ear-snapping intro, Arnab forgot to even acknowledge that one more person was killed by the mob. Is it because he was not a “Hindu Sage” but an ordinary driver or it is because he was not wearing Saffron?
We know that this heinous mob violence is not a religiously motivated crime. The victims and perpetrators (all of them) belong to the same community. It happened because rumours of child lifters and organ traffickers entering the village were spread in the local WhatsApp groups!
After this, Arnab begins his cacophonic character assassination of Sonia Gandhi in the following words:
“In India, being a Hindu and wearing the Saffron colour has become a sin. I ask that if a maulvi had been killed, would people be silent? Would Sonia Gandhi, who hails from Italy, be quiet? Today, she is silent …I think she is happy in her heart that saints are being attacked in a state where she has formed the government. She will send a report to Italy saying that ‘Where I formed government, I am getting saints murdered’.
Arnab makes a communally demeaning accusation that she would have been enraged, had Christian clergies been murdered. To make his case stronger he repeatedly uses Sonia’s former name Antonio Maino and even says that deep down Sonia’s happy that the Hindu saints were lynched. And that she is getting Hindus killed in Maharashtra. If this is not a hate speech, then I do not know what it is.
Notably, Narendra Modi has not yet condemned the Palghar lynching too. And that his government refused to pass the national anti-lynching law. Is it not true that the IT cell trolls have been sharing several Facebook messages like “Jihadi imposters are entering our villages as sages to spread the virus?”
Since the Prime Minister hardly condemns any hate crime, Arnab did not bother to break his record. Moreover, the relentless attack on Sonia is premised around the bigoted far-right assumption that a person with Catholic Christian name and Italian roots cannot be pained enough by such a gory murder of Hindus. To assume that Narendra Modi in his heart is sad and Sonia is happy is atrocious. Put it the other way round. When a Muslim/Christian is killed who becomes happy?
Anchors like Arnab through their relentless vilification have made the humanity of minorities suspect in the majority’s eye. However, when you look closer, it is an attack on the humanity and compassion of the majority. India’s majority has been made to doubt every minority as a traitor. Antonio Maino is, therefore, a “perpetual other” and finds in place in the India of Arnab’s intro. This culture has also percolated to my friends and their families. This is the source of their “innocent” questions that has numbed their empathy.
Attacking a woman’s dignity seems to be New India’s political culture.
As slurs like #RKM** and bar dancer trended on twitter and millions of BJP trolls and hate bots unleashed slander against the 78-year-old Congress president, I was reminded of a misogynist, communal and racist crass comment for Sonia and her kids made some years ago. A person had called her a “Jersey cow” and Rahul Gandhi as “hybrid kid”. Amongst other such misogynist bigotry, he also referred to a woman as a “50-crore Ki Girlfriend” (A girlfriend worth 50-crore) and compared another woman with Surpnakha for her loud laughter. That man is now the Prime Minister of India.
Therefore, it is neither new nor surprising for the BJP, especially for a Modi-led BJP to make misogynist comments without an urge to even appear decent. We have seen how IT cell trolls openly issues rape and murder threats to woman journalists and actors. Often a common line found in the Twitter bio of some of these rabid trolls is, “Proud to be followed by Shri Narendra Modi”.
In a civilised society, this would have created massive outrage. Sonia Gandhi came under the worst mass sexual slander that I have seen happening online in recent years. BJP leaders mockingly inquired if Sonia was a bar dancer. In Narendra Modi support groups, a viral post was circulated alleging that Sonia gave birth to Rahul only four months after her marriage with Rajiv Gandhi. Fact-checkers exposed this lie in minutes. These mass insults for Sonia reflect where Indian society stands today.
What makes someone Indian enough?
Often Sonia Gandhi is attacked for her Italian roots. It is a fact that she is a legal Indian citizen. Political commentator Zainab Sikander rightly points out that there is no point in claiming that a law like CAA will provide dignity to the immigrants from religious minority communities of our neighbouring “Islamic countries”, when “secular India” can outrage the dignity of a Christian woman who became an Indian citizen legally years ago.
Arnab’s callous rant against Sonia’s roots somewhat also points to a larger grim picture of the acceptability of inter-community marriages in India. Standing at around 5.3% since the past four decades, as per the last census data, India’s inter-faith marriage data cuts across a sorry figure. Moreover, in such marriages, wife generally converts to the husband’s faith sacrificing every single sign of her former identity.
Despite that, the ostracisation she faces by her in-laws of being the “other” is immensely overwhelming. The communal frenzy and the maliciously engineered debate around “love jihad” have constricted the narrow corridors of this love even more.
Had Rajiv Gandhi sacrificed his identity instead of Antonio Maino, “secular India” would have buried his political career! Sonia Gandhi deserves our unconditional solidarity if not as a politician then as a woman and an Indian Christian/Hindu or no matter whatever her faith is. What remains secular of new India must rise in rage for letting the world know that a flicker of democratic hope and some civil decency is still alive in India.
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(The writer is a final year Journalism student at Delhi School of Journalism under University of Delhi.)
