Thank Modi for the mirror, honestly

If Modi loses, we can all celebrate. But if he wins, it will expose each of us. A victory for the BJP under Modi will prove that we either don’t believe in what we profess or feel too self-important to see anything beyond our noses. But when riots bring rewards, each of us needs a mirror. We should thank Modi for telling us, and on our face, how unreal we have been.

Let’s also thank the prime minister for not removing the BJP’s proudest harvester of hate from his constitutional office. If he had sacked Modi, we would never get to know the real ‘we’ and the space now Modi is all set to capture would remain hidden under the quicksand of our illusions.

What does Modi’s gift of his mirror show to us? Don’t get into the collective history of communities. It’s been far more simple, and direct: you kill hundreds — not enemies in uniform but neighbours — and feel vindicated. It’s silly to buy the logic that each and everyone in the rioting mob had a ‘socio-political’ motive to loot — a personal dispute to settle or a free TV set to take home. If Modi wins, his mirror will also reflect lakhs of those who didn’t actually take part in the riots but will now endorse the carnage.

However hard we try, we can’t deny that they are people like us. While we kept trivialising lynch mobs in our conscious, they sought sanction in our unconscious. Even after Gujarat, we read about the Dalit killings in Jhajjar, the sati ceremonies in MP and we labelled these as aberrations. If Modi sweeps Gujarat, we will have to admit that our exceptions are rules in Gujarat and potential rules anywhere else.

You cannot kill someone and celebrate unless you dehumanise both yourself and the victim. He or she becomes ‘it’ for you and ‘you’ cease to exist. Fanaticism is an expression for alienation. Modi’s mirror has shown us that we all are fanatics. We are fanatics when we don’t take our own decisions and don’t question the merit of decisions imposed on us. When individuals are without identities, it’s easy to bulldoze them with fabricated sentiments in the name of numbers. That’s when mob culture gets social sanction. Mobs snowball into bigger mobs till they get big enough to decide poll outcomes.

In the Modi mirror, none of us look clean. Not even the media. We already discriminated between deaths, now he’s taught us to do it better. For us, stabbing on a local train is a one-para item, shooting at a disco is page one. Hunger deaths versus a celebrity wedding — we make our choice every day. And still we want to retain the right to be surprised when a politician kills conscience and charms tens of lakhs we claimed never existed. Better thank Modi for the wake-up call. Maybe, it’s not too late yet.