BJP’s Hindutva driven policies and social media
DIVERSITY is the basic element when we talk about any nation. Every country, be it developed or developing, tries to practise maximum liberal values in its society. However, in the case of India, the situation is abnormal there.
Although India has rich historical values and possesses historical culture, yet situation is different in Modi’s Hindu Rashtra.
Liberal voices are being silenced and killed. There is no space for secularism in Modi’s India. Unfortunately, Indian media has completely become the mouth-piece of the Indian government.
It is playing a significant role in poisoning the hearts and minds of Indian masses against Indian minorities.
Media is strictly obeying instructions of the ruling elite by dispersing news which falls only in BJP’s court.
This opinion illustrates how state machinery is being utilized to give maximum political edge to BJP.
The entire Indian federation is now pariah in the hands of BJP. The social media cells of BJP are proactively spreading venom against non-Hindu communities in order to accomplish their dream of Akhand Bharat.
All this is being done at the behest of the Indian government.
This trend, however, is making the life of minorities miserable as they are being killed and their properties are vandalized by Hindu fanatics.
Policy makers and other practitioners are of the view that the continued restlessness in South Asia started immediately after BJP rose to power in 2014 with a landslide victory over Indian national Congress.
BJP’s government was following the sway of RSS. The BJP can be called the political brand name of the extremist outfit RSS.
There is a noticeable escalation in RSS development and supremacy of Hindutva dogma in domestic, foreign and security policies of India.
RSS is pursuing an ostentatious strategy of greater India with the institution of Hindu domination in India and Hindustan’s (India’s) supremacy in South Asia.
Pragmatic substantiation advises that a well-choreographed consumption of collective ferocity and Pakistan-bashing have been hired by BJP for the realization of its objectives.
BJP’s repealing of Articles 370 and 35-A to effectively engross India-occupied Jammu & Kashmir and enactment of Citizen Amendment Act are the utmost demonstration of RSS long-term design.
The violence of innocent Kashmiris is not something new, it dates back since 1947 and the violence goes on.
However, it was increased from the 2008 mass-agitation in the valley. After 2008, the people of Kashmir are under physical and psychological torture.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) issued an India centric propaganda material called Voice of Hind in early 2020.
Majoritarian violence against Indian Muslims is not only a different stream of ideological extremist violence in itself, but also alienates a community from the rest of society, and has the power to radicalize the youth towards terrorism or extremism, thereby exacerbating the threat of jihadi violence in the country.
The trend towards Ghar Wapsi reconversions and cultural as well as political implications of this tendency cannot be understood independent of the current political climate of the country and its traditional stance with regard to the interface between religion and politics.
BJP government, which came into power in 2014 headed by Hindutva icon Narendra Modi with a campaign slogan: ‘Toilets first, temples second.
’ Illustration on Gandhi’s philosophy and legacy some 150 years after his birth, Swachh Bharat or Clean India is a monumental project with sweeping programs, propaganda, and political agendas.
Gandhi famously said ‘sanitation is more important than independence’ and Modi has leveraged that sentiment to fuel everything from urban renewal and heritage gentrification to outsourcing controversial corporate-funded infrastructures within World Heritage properties.
India’s vast archaeological and historic legacy is now being marketed, tendered, auctioned, and ‘adopted’ by corporations within a neoliberal strategy that leverages the past for the future.
And while it is easy to cynically caricature these moves, it is more difficult to offer pragmatic alternatives for a nation of 1.3 billion people, millions of whom are without basic services like water and sanitation.
It is evident that this “homecoming” then becomes a multi-layered process; one that sees transformation of citizen-body from a subject into an object of law, shift of focus from individual to community as primary actor, and evolution of ‘conversion’ from a momentary shift of identity to a long drawn out process of change.
When these processes and spaces of grey are facilitated by those in power, it would seem, is when religious conversion can be described in language of “Homecoming”.
Either loved or loathed, VS Naipaul wrote in his musings on Gandhi, the imputed father of cleanliness campaign, that toilets must be reconsidered in broader context of colonialism and civilization: ‘Sanitation was linked to caste, caste to callousness and inefficiency and a hopelessly divided country, division to weakness, weakness to foreign rule’.
But an unclean public domain still persists, Rodrigues contends, precisely because of inadequate response to that untouchability, to caste prejudice, discrimination, and indignity.
Indeed, by denouncing public filth, Gandhi was also denouncing ‘structures and social relations that reproduced filth’.
Today, BJP effectively appropriated Gandhi’s nationalist, anti-colonial emancipatory rhetoric for its own brand of government mentality.
Gandhi, Clean India, and heritage have all been leveraged in a recombinant civic adoption campaign to liberalize the past.
Another point of contention is that the nexus of ‘temples and toilets’ programming is not intended to address basic needs of ordinary people but rather those of fee-paying tourists and to promote burgeoning, branded international industry.
—The writer is a regular contributor based in Islamabad.
