The announcement slipped quietly into the Lok Sabha on September 15.
Alongside the fisheries minister’s relief package for fisheries and the health minister’s study on the efficacy of yoga in the recovery of Covid-19 patients, the culture minister declared an expert committee would start a “holistic study of original and evolution of Indian culture to since (sic) 12000 years”. The members included archeologists, a former Supreme Court judge, a Canadian-Indian immunologist and veterinary surgeon and the chairman of the “World Brahmin Federation”.
Do not be surprised if a report emerges some day of Hinduism and the caste system predating the Indus Valley civilisation and finds evidence of ancient flying chariots and nuclear physics. The cue to blurring the boundaries of religious myth and science came six years ago, when, soon after taking office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the elephant-headed god Ganesha as proof of ancient India’s prowess in plastic-surgery.
Farce and falsehood
The transformation of irrational belief, farce and falsehood – manufactured in the Hindutva thought factory – into WhatsApp forward and elevated to party and government policy is largely established. This process will be increasingly deployed in drawing the contours of the new republic, which is here in form, if not in constitutional decree. You can call it the Hindu-Rashtra strategy of political guidance and administrative procedure.
The Hindu-Rashtra strategy is leery of reason, hostile to minorities and inconvenient data, benevolent to misinformation and hate speech, manipulative of law and derisive of scientific inquiry. It is increasingly apparent that a diversity of Hindutva thought, once fragmented and scattered, is cohering into a strategy that is being put to action. It is currently being road-tested nationwide in varying degree, its contradictions managed by a largely captive mass media and powerful social-media engine.
If Gujarat was the first experiment, Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh are now the leading laboratories. Detentions, preventive or others, on specious or non-existent grounds are common, the state has dropped democratic pretense, elements of majoritarian cultural hegemony are increasingly visible, and journalists are commonly subjected to intimidation through criminal cases or imprisonment.
As with the case of the 12,000-year study, culture and history may appear be a relatively harmless use of this approach, but they are important cogs of the backing long-term majoritarian narrative (students in Rajasthan, for instance, learn that Rana Pratap won the 16th-century battle of Haldighati and Akbar – the victor – lost).
The immediate narrative is unfolding before us, in police practice, in the courts, in government policies, on television screens and on social media.
On the same day that the effort to probe Indian culture was announced, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta defended falsehood in the Supreme Court, as he has before, on behalf of the government and its proxies. This time, he tried to pass off hate speech as the constitutional right to freedom of expression. The case involved Sudarshan News, a Modi-loving Hindi news channel running a series –based on false or misleading claims – on “UPSC Jihad” or how Muslims were conspiring against India by entering the civil services.
“Freedom of the journalist is supreme,” said Mehta, who only earlier this year had likened journalists – reporting on despair and death among migrant workers after Modi’s four-hour lockdown in March –to “vultures” and critics of the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis as “prophets of doom who always spread negativity, negativity, negativity”.
Mehta’s arguments in the Sudarshan case took their cues directly from Hindu-Rashtra strategy, which conflates hate and free speech, refusing to distinguish opinion from incitement. As the Law Commission of India’s 27th report notes, “Incitement to not only violence but also to discrimination has been recognised as a ground for interfering with freedom of expression”.
Public hatred for Muslims
Unfortunately for Mehta and the government, the Sudarshan case was heard by some of the Supreme Court’s few, remaining liberal justices, who suspended telecast and brushed aside his arguments, which have otherwise been received almost without question by fellow judges. “The drift, tenor and content of the episodes is to bring the community [Muslims] into public hatred and disrepute”, wrote Justices Dhananjay Chandrachud, Kurian Joseph and Indu Malhotra.
This observation appears unexceptional, following as it does the letter and practice of the law. But in the Hindu Rashtra, doing the right thing is a career-altering mark of disfavour and disrepute. It is no longer news that the prime minister follows a host of serial abusers and hate-speech mongers or that police now routinely file cases against minority hate-crime or riot victims instead of Hindu perpetrators. Wanton hatred, such as last week’s hacking of a Muslim man’s arm with a chainsaw simply because it had a religious tatoo on it, barely stirs public conscience, and any references to such incidents are drowned out in a flood of whataboutery.
It would be unwise to harbour hope in the observations of Justice Chandrachud – who concurred in the judgement that paved the way for the Ram temple in Ayodhya – and his colleagues. Other recent judgements in high courts and some lower courts have upheld the law, devoid of ideology or governmental influence. They have recently freed on bail peaceful dissenters or protestors, raising hopes that Hindu Rashtra strategy is so inherently wrong and violative of legal and constitutional principles that it will stall.
These hopes currently stand on thin ground.
The process of shuffling and replacing judges, administrators, police officers, to ensure they are regime-, Modi- and Hindu-Rashtra friendly is gradual and deliberate, as is coopting of the media and other watchdogs. This strategy was honed in Gujarat, where police officers who insisted on following the law instead of then chief minister Modi’s diktats found themselves transferred, suspended, or their careers effectively over.
So, too, has it been with inconvenient judges: Justice S Muralidhar of the Delhi high court, moved out overnight when he tried to hold the Delhi police to account during the March riots: Justice Akil Kureshi, batted around high courts before being moved to Tripura because he had delivered judgement regarded as adverse to Modi; or special judge Brijgopal Loya, who died in mysterious circumstances while hearing an extra-judicial killing involving Home Minister Amit Shah.
Independent public figures are islands in a rising sea that will, as things stand currently, subsume or drown them sooner or later. The Hindu-Rashtra strategy is to tolerate when possible, sideline when required and eliminate when unavoidable.
The shackled press
In contrast, Recep Erdogan in Turkey tackled institutional independence with a hacksaw. Thousands of judges, army and police officers, bureaucrats and journalists are now in jail. Major Turkish media groups have been sold to Erdogan backers, a tactic used in the Philippines as well by another demagogue Rodrigo Duterte.
The Hindu-Rashtra approach is more subtle and gradual but equally effective, as evidenced by the state of journalism in India. The whittling away of independence has been quiet, beginning in Modi’s first term and accelerating it his second. It began with phone calls of displeasure to owners of mainstream media, who quickly learned to censor their editors or fire them. They have learned what is acceptable, what is not, an editorial or story at a time.
Those who turned into unabashed mouthpieces of the government, the ruling party and majoritarianism retain not a whit of independence. They distract attention from widespread incompetence and mismanagement, they fulminate against anyone in dissonance with the Hindu-Rashtra strategy, as it relates to politics, law, or culture.
These propagandist media are now essential cogs in the Hindu-Rashtra strategy, deployed when required to turn an unfavourable narrative or create one. That is how terms like “love jihad” or “urban-naxal” or “jihadi” – once dismissed as imaginations of a fevered, somewhat insane minds –
are firmly entrenched in WhatsApp forwards, political speech, printed book and police chargesheet.
That was the order followed for the Delhi riots investigation: fake news that made its way from WhatsApp forwards to a dodgy “fact-finding report” – accepted with alacrity by the home minister –
to Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story, a book ridden with falsehoods.
Delhi police chargesheets submitted to the courts overlap substantially with these manufactured narratives, helping create a grand conspiracy. It claims, with virtually no evidence, that peaceful protest against a discriminatory citizenship law was pre-planned from the start to cascade into riots meant to destabilise India. It ignores the the only real evidence: ruling party leaders on camera instigating Hindu rioters and policemen smashing closed-circuit cameras and brutalising Muslims.
The book captures this alleged conspiracy in one line when it say that “anti-CAA, anti-NRC, anti- NPR protests eventually became a protest against all other religions of the country, anti-police, anti-government and anti-India”; it talks of poets and artists who drummed up “anti-government” and “anti-Hindu hysteria”. By no great coincidence, the same allegation finds its way, as do many others, into Delhi police chargesheets (this particular one is from chargesheet 59/20, which runs into 17,000 pages): a great fabric of conspiracy, held together by strands of credibility stretched gossamer thin.
If it is rejected, it will be a setback to the Hindu rashtra. If it is accepted, it will be an important leap towards the new republic.
Samar Halarnkar is the editor of Article-14.com, a project that tracks misuse of the law and the hope it offers.