Crying For Bharat Mata
By Swapnil Dhanraj
01 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org
Since the time the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government has come into power the attacks on right of free speech and expression of thought have become its main target. The aggressive government is now hell bent upon asking people especially from minority communities to say “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”. Minority communities like Christians and Muslims have been targeted by the Hindu fundamentalists on the plank that these communities unlike Hindu did not have their origin in India. The recent debate over Bharat Mata Ki Jai has again fueled the communal tension among people. The fundamentalist vocabulary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) and BJP has ended up creating schism in the country. People were forced into saying particular slogans like “Jai Shree Ram” in the Ayodhya campaign for the Ram temple late in the 1980s. Similar situation was witnessed in Mumbai when BJP’s crime ally the Shiv Sena forced minority communities to say specific slogans like ‘Jai Shree Ram and Jai Maharashtra’. The trend of using such kind of slogans was visible during the 2014 election campaign by the BJP where it used patriarchal slogans like ‘Vikas Purush’ to portray its prime ministerial candidate.
It’s imperative to know here the crime which the BJP and its faithful cadre in Hyderabad have committed with the help of the University administration. The institutional murder of a Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula was a result of continuous harassment and caste discrimination. Appa Rao, the main culprit with the university administration, thought that he would easily wash the stains of the blood out of his clothes. However, students from various varsities had started registering their protest against his crime. A new form of solidarity among the university students had emerged to punish the culprits where students from both rural and urban areas were coming to the streets to raise their voices of dissent.
Unable to control the public anger, the autocratic BJP government tried its best to divert the public attention from the issue but all its efforts remained futile. However, the BJP government and its hooligan student wing, the ABVP found an opportunity to deviate the furious public. The event held on the 9th of February in JNU, against the hanging of Afzal Guru, who was convicted in the parliament attack in 2001 was not new in the university campus. The group of students who organized the programme had been organizing it since 2013. Interestingly, the loyal news channels of the BJP and RSS circulated the videos showing anti-India and pro Pakistan slogans being raised during the event. While the matter that who raised anti- India slogans is sub judice, the ABVP took this opportunity to divert the issue of Institutional murder of Rohit Vemula declaring the event and the university anti-national.
Such anti- national and anti- democratic politics to divide people on caste and communal lines has been the nature of the BJP and Sangh politics which has damaged the democratic fabric of the country. Beef ban, attacks on independent thinkers and public intellectuals, scuttling the rights of free speech and expression of though ensured by the Indian constitution have been the strategies of the government to annihilate the voices of dissent today. Many of the social and cultural problems which India is facing today are the gifts by the current government which is trying to shelter and propagate the agenda of Hindu nationalism by its political mentor, the RSS.
The incidents starting from the brutal murder of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, Mohmmad Akhlaq in Dadri, and Rohith Vemula are not isolated. These are the atrocities which we have witnessed against various minorities and rational thinkers by the BJP led government. This clearly shows that violence continues to have a vital role in the politics of the BJP and Sangh Parivar with legitimizing their “violent nationalism.”
The project of nationalism by the Hindutva forces has always been discriminatory and exclusionary for marginalized and minority communities because the role played by caste, and religion in the project of nation building has severely damaged it. Moreover, questioning and challenging certain beliefs has become a criminal act today where people are labeled as anti-national. The BJP with its political mentor RSS should introspect what exactly they mean by “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” Is it a kind of worship or merely respect? Unfortunately the growing minds in schools and university too have to bear this burden of chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai without understanding its political meaning. During my school days in Maharashtra I witnessed the same pattern of saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai after every prayer which is still in practice. Such socialization of young minds dissolves their power of common sense by compelling them to say Bharat Mata Ki Jai and imposing a patriotic duty. Today, socially there are various forms of segregation in the Indian society. However, there is a need to develop an indomitable spirit with a new form of solidarity among the marginalized and minority communities to challenge the religious and casteist hegemony so that we can put an to the enforced silence in the name of nationalism.
The recent imposition of the slogan “Bharat Mata Ki jai” is another attempt to ignite deep communal tension and separatism in the name of nationalism. The shocking suspension of a MLA , Waris Pathan in Maharashtra for not chanting “Bharat Mata Ki jai” indicates that communal nationalism is in play. Such kind of enforcement for chanting particular slogans or forceful nationalism has ended up creating schism rather than uniting people for the so called cultural nationalism of the BJP. To quote Romila Thapar nationalism has to be inclusive of all communities and it has to be secular. It cannot be determined by any single identity such as religion, language. So what we need today is creation of egalitarian conditions where every person can think and speak fearlessly without any governmental imposition.
Author Bio Swapnil Dhanraj: I am a research scholar at Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. My interest areas include- Caste, minority communities, nationalism and social movements. I specialize in political sociology. I am currently working on changing political trends in Maharashtra.