[Reader-list] Dadri reminds us how PM Modi bears responsibility for the poison that is being spread

[Asit Das]

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-party-and-its-poison/

Dadri reminds us how PM Modi bears responsibility for the poison that
is being spread

Mohammad Akhlaq’s death is a tragedy. It exemplified the depths of the
barbarity that lurks behind the veneer of our civilisation.

Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Updated: October 3, 2015 9:42 am

Dadri lynching: Family members of Akhlaq, who was killed in a communal
clash in Jarcha area of Dadri, mourn the loss at his residence in
Bisada village -Express Photo by Gajendra Yadav,01/10/2015

***If you wanted an example of how vile, nauseating and morally odious
our public discourse has become, you need look no further than Tarun
Vijay’s ‘Death in Dadri’ in these pages (October 2). Mohammad Akhlaq’s
death is a tragedy. It exemplified the depths of the barbarity that
lurks behind the veneer of our civilisation. Vijay’s words, and those
of many in the party he represents, have given that barbarism full
rein in the highest circles of power.*** [Emphasis added.]

It is astonishing that this piece was meant to distance Hinduism from
violence. It instead represents the way in which violence is inscribed
into the self-appointed votaries of Hinduism. Vijay has accomplished
the astonishing feat of even making apology look almost homicidal. The
sentiments he represents are now becoming the moral common sense of
our public culture.

***The article gives full display to the moral twistedness of what
passes as BJP thinking. First, enunciate a seemingly moral claim that
leaves the door open for a deeper barbarism. “Lynching a person merely
on suspicion is absolutely wrong,” Vijay informs us with all
sincerity. It is almost as if lynching is fine so long as it is not
based on mere suspicion. It is saying, in effect, that if Akhlaq had
actually been guilty of eating beef, it would have been fine to lynch
him.*** [Emphasis added.]

Second, there is the canard: You people who eat beef, or oppose the
ban, you are responsible for the death of Akhlaq. You are the
provocation, you are the extremists. This confusion will leave anyone
petrified. Vijay clearly does not understand the idea of rights. He
also equates differences as tantamount to provocation to murder: If I
don’t eat beef because of my religion and you do, or if I hold the cow
sacred and you don’t, I have the right to treat you as a provocation.
He clearly does not understand the limits of offence in a liberal
society: You cannot take offence at what others do pursuant to the
exercise of their rights. You have the right to persuade them to do
otherwise, but you do not have the right to coerce them. Third, there
is the drawing of false equivalences. What is the crime of
secularists?

They did not protest when Tika Lal Taploo was killed by jihadists.
This is false as a description. On even the vaguest understanding of
secularism, any murder is wrong. But even if, for argument’s sake, we
grant Vijay more rope to strangle Indian civilisation with and admit
certain political inconsistencies in the positions of some groups,
does that make them liable for murder? Evidently it does. “The secular
brand of communalism is more lethal sometimes than the bullets of
violent people,” Vijay intones. And then there is the final canard:
Liberal Muslims never stand up for Hindus.

The list of falsehoods could go on: Seculars don’t care for Dalits, as
if most of society does. “Fanatic regions in our neighbourhood… have
become barren lands, devoid of the flowering of any kind of
creativity.” Perhaps Vijay should read more novels, watch more
television and listen to more music from our fanatic neighbourhood. It
might reassure him about their creativity. It will certainly calm his
soul more than the asinine and creative pronouncements on history and
science that his ilk from the RSS trots out. But a country that is now
murdering or threatening rationalists, where power and violence is
hollowing out all sense of value, is hardly in a position to lecture
about “fanatic neighbourhoods”.

One could go on. But the likes of Vijay have made the atmosphere so
suffocating that you know this is a fool’s errand. The issue is no
longer facts or morality. There is a strange alchemy that turns even
good things into the opposite: Vegetarianism is an excuse for
violence, tradition is an excuse to assault freedom, ideas are an
excuse to curb debate, disagreement is an excuse for provocation, and
facts are an excuse for mendacity. It is as if the nation is acting
out the violent convulsions of a deranged being, with no calm light of
reason, or compassion, or values to restrain it.

The question of whether these are fringe elements is practically
irrelevant. These elements are highly consequential. Such morally
odious speech comes from the highest levels of government. The
minister of culture, for example, whose praise for A P J Abdul Kalam
was accompanied by a congenital suspicion — “despite being a Muslim” —
and who described Akhlaq’s death as an “accident”, prefigures the
moral blindness that Vijay represents. Saying that these views do not
represent the majority is cold metaphysical comfort to those being
killed and threatened.

No one had expected this morally odious part of the BJP — and it is
part of the BJP — to vanish easily. But there was the hope that
opportunism would tame fanaticism, that the need to take India into
the 21st century would have enough momentum to overcome many of these
nasty folks. Vijay himself seems to acknowledge this. He seems to
think Akhlaq’s killing can derail Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
agenda, as if only an instrumental reason should make us worry about
this death. But the truth is that a lot of nasty people within the BJP
and the Sangh Parivar are feeling empowered to the point of
shamelessness. No one in the party is willing to signal an intolerance
of the intolerant.

The blame for this has to fall entirely on Modi. Those who spread this
poison enjoy his patronage. This government has set a tone that is
threatening, mean-spirited and inimical to freedom. Modi should have
no doubt that he bears responsibility for the poison that is being
spread by the likes of Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Vijay —
whether through powerlessness or design is irrelevant. But we can be
grateful to Vijay for reminding us that the threat to India’s soul
emanates from the centre of power, almost nowhere else. It is for that
centre, and Modi in particular, to persuade us otherwise.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and
contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’

*(This article first appeared in the print edition under the headline
‘The party and its poison’)*

II.
http://scroll.in/article/759539/rss-leader-tarun-vijays-response-to-dadri-murder-marks-the-death-of-the-moral-indian

OPINION
RSS leader Tarun Vijay's response to Dadri murder marks the death of
the moral Indian
The Hindutva ideologue's article in the 'Indian Express' redefines the
idea of innocence and guilt.
Ajaz Ashraf  · Today · 07:56 am

As you read through Tarun Vijay’s Death In Dadri, published in the
October 2 issue of the Indian Express,  discomfort segues into panic
and, then, deep depression. Death In Dadri reads like an epitaph to
our moral universe, as we knew it until yesterday. It is befitting
that Vijay’s commentary should have appeared on the day Mahatma Gandhi
was born – after all, he had in many ways crafted the principles of
modern India’s moral universe, all of which were undermined in Dadri
town, next door to Delhi, on Monday, when a mob killed a Muslim man,
acting on a rumour that he had killed a calf and stocked the meat in
his fridge.

Vijay is no ordinary intellectual in the stable of the Hindu Right.
For over 20 years, he edited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's weekly,
Panchajanya. He is now a member of the Rajya Sabha and of the party’s
national executive. He is also the battering ram of the Bharatiya
Janata Party, often pitched into TV studios to battle anyone who
questions the party or its Hindutva philosophy. He provides
intellectual ammunition to the followers of the Sangh; an ideological
justification for their emotions and actions.

In his op-ed, there's no doubt that Vijay expresses dismay at the
killing of Mohammad Akhlaq. But his dismay seems to arise from the mob
having mistakenly picked a wrong man to vent its fury on.

The wrong reasons

In the opening paragraph of Death In Dadri, he commends the daughter
of Mohammad Akhlaq for seeing the “bigger picture”. And pray, what is
this bigger picture? It is her refusal, says Vijay, to “dissolve this
incident [Dadri] into the bigger issue and make it political”. The
bigger picture, therefore, pertains to her seeing the lynching of her
father as a personal tragedy, as an accident.

His lynching was an accident because Akhlaq and his family hadn’t
consumed beef. It is this fact the daughter did not lose sight of
amidst her grieving, prompting Vijay to hail her as the most mature of
all those who wish to turn the grisly Dadri incident political. Vijay
writes: “She has been asking us: Can her father be brought back if
proved innocent?”

Through this question, Vijay is re-defining the idea of innocence and
guilt. Akhlaq is innocent because the meat stocked in the refrigerator
of his house wasn’t beef.  But he would have been guilty – and
presumably deserving of being lynched – had he partaken of the beef.
It does not concern Vijay that the mere possession of beef isn’t
illegal in Uttar Pradesh.

He commends Akhlaq's daughter because she subscribes to the “big
picture” – that Hindus are entitled to feel outraged and resort to
violence against a person guilty of eating beef. Of course, Vijay
doesn’t say this explicitly. Instead, he writes: “Lynching a person
merely on suspicion is absolutely wrong, the antithesis of all that
India stands for and all that Hinduism preaches.” From this, it's easy
to conclude that Vijay believes that lynching a person would be
justified it it were proved that he had eaten beef. Vijay's choice of
words tantalisingly leaves the interpretation to the readers.

The big picture

Ironically, it is Vijay who seems unable to perceive Dadri outside the
political framework, to condemn it for its barbarity. Akhlaq's killing
makes him wonder where the secular media and leaders were when Tika
Lal Taploo was killed by jihadis and his daughter was left alone in
this world. The secular brand of communalism is more lethal sometimes
than the bullets of violent people.”

Vijay doesn’t tell us who Taploo was. That you might not know him
indicts you. It tacitly suggests you have no reason to condemn
Akhlaq's killing, or, alternatively, that your condemnation is
hypocritical because you cannot recall the deaths similar to his. For
all those who don’t know, Taploo was a Kashmiri Pandit leader and a
BJP vice-president whom the terrorists gunned down in Srinagar in
1989.

It is for Vijay to tell us why among the many "unjust killings" over
the years he has chosen to refer to Taploo’s. Perhaps he knows that
Indians are bound to recoil at the horrific image of a Muslim family
being targetted in a village overwhelmingly Hindu. Not only was his
lynching unjust, it also renders the failure of his neighbours to
spring to his protection morally reprehensible. In reminding the
readers about Taploo and his tragic death, Vijay is telling them that
deaths similar to that of Akhlaq have also occurred in areas where the
Hindus are a minority, where terrorists have gunned down Hindus
without Muslims coming to their rescue.

After establishing a moral equivalence between the deaths of Akhlaq
and Taploo, Vijay goes on to ask the “so-called liberal Muslims”:
“Have you done anything to show Hindus that you stand with them when
they are assaulted by the Andrabis? Muslim silence on Hindu woes is
often taken as support for intolerant Islamists.” The intolerance of
Hindus in the Dadri village is consequently justified, portrayed as
commonplace in India, even a tit-for-tat reaction.

Bringing in Kashmir

What Vijay is also telling his readers is that Muslims outside Kashmir
support the secessionist movement there, evident from their silence
over the killing of Hindus in years past. Not for him the indisputable
fact that Kashmiri terrorists have gunned down an infinitely larger
number of Muslims than Hindus.

He must assume that all Muslims in Kashmir and outside it are united
by the bonds of religion. Had this indeed been the case, we would have
had the Muslims from the Hindi heartland joining the terror gangs in
the Valley. Vijay insinuates Kashmir into the discourse on Dadri
because he seems to have run out of reasons to explain the Hindu
outrage in Dadri – after all, even the much-maligned ulema have issued
innumerable fatwas condemning terrorism.

Acutely conscious that his party would be accused of triggering social
tension on the cow-slaughter issue, Vijay tries to blame the Samajwadi
Party government in Uttar Pradesh for fraying governance. This has
become a standard operating procedure of the Hindutva forces. Come an
election, they raise divisive communal issues. An outbreak of violence
is then blamed on the state government’s inability to govern.

>From this perspective, it isn’t the BJP’s responsibility to ensure
social harmony as long as the party is out of power. This has been
indeed the theme underlying its programmes such as love jihad, ghar
wapsi and cow slaughter, executed with a clinical fury in the states
where non-BJP parties are in power. It is they who are to be blamed
for the social tensions in India.

Addressing the wrong party

Vijay says this as much: “Should we allow emotive religious issues,
matters that concern our personal beliefs to derail what we have
achieved through pain-staking struggle? The UP government should take
serious note of this.” In fact, it is not the UP government but his
party to which Vijay should address his plea.

He doesn’t want the “emotive religious issue” to be raised not because
of the threat this would pose to the country’s social fabric or the
fact that it could lead to the spilling of blood. Instead, Vijay
doesn’t want these issues to be raised because it could derail what
has been achieved through “pain-staking struggle.”

What has the country achieved? The answer, according to Vijay, is that
India has now embarked on the “path to rediscovering itself through an
all-inclusive development missions…. This is because of the buzz that
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has created the world over.” He goes on
to elaborate, “The Modi phenomenon has taken the world by surprise.
The world is looking at India with awe and appreciation like never
before.” Emotive religious issues could derail India, he suggests.

***When a killing is argued against not because it is immoral, but
because it could adversely affect development, we must lament the
collapse of our moral universe. Tarun Vijay's Death in Dadri marks the
death of the moral Indian.*** [Emphasis added.]

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before
Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores.