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Institutionalizing The Politics of Discord

By Ghulam Mohammad Khan

15 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Banning the sale of beef and annihilating the intellectual and rationalistic voices (interpreting them as dissent by a strange logic) one by one clears the xenophobic intentions of the government. In a country like India, where people speak hundreds of different languages, follow as many beliefs, and live in as many diverse socio-cultural settings, administering the system in accordance with a specific religion, culture or belief would not only jeopardize the functioning of the system, but also incite what James Davison Hunter calls ‘culture wars’ in the public sphere. Since the intentions of the BJP government are as clear as day light, to divide India in two states; in one the Hindus will ever live peacefully and where the rulers can implement any law of their choice, and in another, let the rest of the people be left to their fate, at least they too could get a chance to frame laws of their choice; and in this way avoid any possibility of the politics of discord? The people of Kashmir have been eating meat for decades now; what harm has the same done to the successive governments over all these years, or how eating meat involves any infringement of any constitutional criterion? Under no circumstance can it be the state’s business to tell people what to eat, unless on public health or such grounds.

Banning meat to appease the people of a particular religious order or enforcing a new brand of partisan and cultural hegemony that imprisons the rest in a definite social orthodoxy, may not only breed group insecurity, but also come up as a threat to the very cultural legacy of other groups of what we usually call secular and democratic India. The clampdown on the consumption of beef had never been at the center of Kashmir politics for last seven decades: why with the emergence of the non-vegetarian BJP government, it becomes an important political issue? The government can’t enforce this vegetarian terrorism in a state which is already disturbed and also has a totally different religious and cultural legacy. Imposing a bourgeoisie cultural hegemony over the diverse nation of multiple ethnicities indicates a very dismal future of the Indian society, where there is every possibility of religious extremism or theocracy replacing democracy. The problem is that “they tie issues like vegetarianism or non-violence to sectarian identities, not to ethical values; they relocate them from the realm of rational and moral argument to the domain of cultural politics.” The only consequences of this massive state intrusion will be protests, confrontations, arrests and killings. This is yet another disastrous move that only undermines the secular character of the state. It is the time when BJP government should be dealing with other grave and sensitive issues like the scarcity of drinking water, raising basic education quality, establishing a substantial health industry, balancing the disoriented industrial structure, reconsidering financing arms manufacturing, foreign currency regulations, gender inequality, curbing the menaces of crime and theft, re-evaluating the inefficient government bureaucracy, resuscitating the deteriorating agricultural industry and many more rather than wasting energies on enforcing an inadmissible religious orthodoxy and encouraging extremist outfits that kill the intellectuals and rationalists whose sin is their unconventional attempts to fly beyond the fetters of unwittingly accepted orthodox, normative claims and ideologies. This new brand of right-wing jingoism takes India back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, when dissenters or iconoclasts were either excommunicated or permanently exiled; in most of the cases they were not killed even religion as an institution was far more powerful than politics then. In twenty first century, the era of individual liberty and freedom of speech, intellectuals like Kalburgi, Pansare and Dabholkar – ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – should not have been adjudged as heretics or rabble-rousers and finally assassinated, when only they raised their voice for the erasure of certain unnatural and irrational fears that had implicitly crept into the sociological consciousness of the Indian society over decades.

Disallowing the consumption of beef or silencing them, who venture to critically evaluate a religious tradition are just a few examples of many of how the government is all set to enforce a cultural politics. This is clear not only from the way the government takes its decisions, but also the way the belligerent BJP parliamentarians talk to the media or different popular news shows. Recently, watching the dedicated follower of RSS ideology and Minister Mahesh Sharma - holds three key portfolios of culture, tourism and aviation - in a charged conversation with Barkha Dutt, a reputed television journalist and columnist, on a news show was absolutely illuminating. In the debate when Barkha asked him to explain his phrase ‘cultural pollution” that he had used in reference to inessential assimilation of western culture, the minister continued unruffled, “Western encroachment on Indian ideas is an example cultural pollution…It’s a misfortune that we read our text books only in English.” This statement only reflects his unjustified grudge against a culture that he himself indispensably forms a part. It also reflects his desire to institutionalize a particular ingenious culture, but that may not necessarily work in India, for India comprises of hundreds of different cultural patterns and processes. When Barkha reminded him of his quote, ‘we will cleanse every area of public discourse that has been westernized and where Indian culture and civilization need to be restored, be it the history we read or our cultural heritage or our institutes that have been polluted over the years’, I was comprehensively shocked; ultimately what does the minister want? The trivial issue of assimilating or dismantling westernization should never occupy the mind of a minister when issues far more complex and sensitive than these lie unheeded. Giving similar irresponsible speeches and conferences has become the second nature of BJP politicians. The government should better learn it now; all these tactics will earn it nothing, but the public displeasure. India has to exist as a democratic and secular country, choosing the BJP way of sustaining it, will only destroy and disintegrate it. To conclude, I agree with these words of Barkha Dutt, ‘In any case if it is about civilisational history – ours is built on diversity and assimilation.’

Ghulam Mohammad Khan is PhD Scholar at Central University of Haryana
Email id: [email protected]



 

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