Opinion What upsets PM Narendra Modi

But the PM’s belated statements still require scrutiny on three grounds. One, we hear the word vigilantism quite often. Even in the statements by the PM, there appears to be an echo of that word. But there is a problem in keeping the discussion to the issue of “taking law into hands”. It is good that we are finally awakening to this malaise where self-appointed crusaders inflict punishments on alleged perpetrators. But the deeper malady is the willingness to have regulations that would in the first place impinge not just on freedoms but on diversity. We are reducing the debate to only private groups doing what police should anyway be doing — so the need for action is approved, only the agency is being debated. The debatable nature of the issue of cow protection is not recognised. Cow, as the Una incident has shown, is not just a Hindu-Muslim question, it is also not a “Savarna vs Dalit” question. (Unfortunately, as much as Hindutva thinking, the so-called progressive thinking too, is to be blamed for equating a certain kind of Hindu religious sensibility with all Hindu beliefs and practices and therefore, summarily rejecting or caricaturing Hindu religion as a whole.) It is fundamentally a question about different meanings of being a Hindu. Reducing issues to narrow frames is the equivalent of obfuscating the issue — and that is what a superficial criticism of vigilantism does.

The other area requiring scrutiny is the nature of the BJP and of the larger Hindutva family of politics. What action is the party likely to take against its members, including legislators, who either participate in or uphold such acts of overdoing their loyalty to Hindutva or to Modi? It might be easy to say that these are fringe elements, but then it would be a curious situation where the BJP has a fringe that is so central and large in size that it overshadows the party and government repeatedly. It is not only about the cow, it is about nationalism, being adequately Indian and almost anything that some zealots disapprove of.

Over the past two years, incidents have occurred and public discourse repeatedly defiled by party members, small and big. From the Union minister (of state) for external affairs to the minister of defence, and from MPs with spiritual backgrounds to MPs with a Harvard background, members and functionaries of the party (not to speak of sister organisations) have made problematic statements that deviate from the constitutional morality and spirit of democracy the prime minister has so passionately spoken of, not only in India but on foreign soil too. It is difficult to reconcile this inconsistency between the declared adherence to the constitution and the consistent urge to violate the spirit of constitutional democracy. The sober and media-savvy BJP and the raw, stick-wielding, trolling BJP can either be the convenient fictions being used for purposes of strategy or the fringe must be the real centre.

Third, it is hard to believe that the PM could not have quietly sent a message to the fringe elements. It is even harder to believe that the BJP loyalists would defy him. But perhaps, we are witnessing a deeper drama. Leaders can build political capital on the basis of populist appeals and skilful demagoguery. But such populism is not easy to switch off. Having allowed the search for national identity to take a particular turn, it is not easy then to go back and rein it in. The Babri moment is instructive. At the turn of the 1980s, in the backdrop of anxieties emerging both from the economic situation and challenges to national unity, L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee found it politically viable to release the energies of the masses through the rath yatra but failed to calibrate those energies in the early 1990s. The high-voltage campaign of the 2014 election clicked in the backdrop of material anxieties that engulfed the aspirations of new entrants to the lower middle class combined with institutional decay.

Of course, the campaign of 2014 was only a culmination of a long build-up. That build-up shaped through the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation, expressed an insecure nationalism, kept on searching for targets because it could not sustain itself without enemies and transformed material concerns into cultural anxieties. The implicit link between the idea of development and the idea of nationalism was thus already a political project.

Many would like to believe that the BJP’s campaign of 2014 was for “development”, but let us not forget this larger context and the campaign’s unmistakable appeal to national identity. That was a potent combination of material expectations, easy targets and cultural goals. After the victory of the BJP, irrespective of material achievements — and they are rather slow in coming — the socio-cultural discourse was bound to be informed by the populism that the 2014 campaign represented but a populism situated in a long build-up.

So, the onslaught of cultural assertions and vigilante intolerance of constitutional morality that now scandalises the prime minister should be seen as an inevitable consequence of the politics he and his party have long been pursuing.