As pinpricks of early morning wintry chills get increasingly felt, the smog laden air of North India will carry, additionally, a suffocating overload of chilling political rhetoric. Political temperature will take quantum leaps as leaders criss cross the five election bound states. Expectedly, North India will be in the throes of an intense political ferment, galis and mohallas will echo polemics, abstruse punditry in caste and creed dynamics, and partisan prognostications : social media will be awash with rancor, fake news and doctored videos : TV channels will reverberate with opinion polls invested with the aura of infallibility, sanctified as baptismal Truths. TV anchors will pronounce doomsday for one , glory for another.
The grammar and structure of poll campaigns will remain as before, too familiar for comfort - idioms ,however, will change. Abbajaan and chachajaan will replace, Ramzade and Haramzade : a census of kabristan and shamshan will get underway : Ayodhya being a done deal will give way to Mathura, Krishna not Ram will be the toast of the season. A Balakot maybe found to spice up electoral prospects. Lesser known temples will become political spaces with VIP darshans. Leaders will vie with one another to crash-land on scenes of crime and police atrocities, and homesteads of families of victims will become places of political pilgrimage to offer condolences and commiseration.
Previous narratives will take a 180° turn. Inflation, once a डायन, will now become फाइन, an essential ingredient of vikas’s वाइन. Agitating farmers demonized as khalistanis, terrorists, anarchists, anti nationals will regain their 'value and identity’ as annadatas. More importantly, they will provide yet one more occasion to plaster the walls and hoardings with the inscription ‘ Thank you Modiji’. The non-negotiable will magically turn eminently negotiable, like the farm laws and MSP.
CMs of poll bound states will cotton onto Modiji’s coattails, rather plough the electoral fields with his immense oratorical skills and capacity to spin attention grabbing catchwords and phrases to ford the Baitarani river of polls. Some will even walk in the shadow of his car to inauguration sites. Welfare schemes and project announcements, sins of opponents and virtues of rulers will get highlighted.
One thing is certain, this winter will be warmed by the seething cauldron of politics. The resplendent flamegold tree in full bloom overlooking my balcony will stand as a stark reminder of the fireworks in offing.
And the springboard for all of this feverish activity will be the two antithetical ideological strains- composite and territorial nationalism versus overt profession of secularism, covert evangelism of a Hindu Nation or Rashtra .
Leaving aside considerations of legality, constitutional legitimacy, social solidarity and harmony, relevancy in a globalizing world, issues beyond my mental faculties, I pose a very commonsensical question- how much more Hindu our Rashtra is to become and how morally commensurable is a Hindu Rashtra ? It’s time we confronted this issue and lifted the veil off subterranean motives that impel this demand.
In this information age data is gospel truth. Let’s roll out some.
All panoply of power are monopolized by Hindus, even the one muslim state, J&K ,has now a Hindu head. There isn’t a single elected muslim central cabinet minister and of the 543 elected LS members only 27 are Muslims, almost half of them from just the two states of UP and Bengal. Central investigative agencies are Hindu held. Except for a couple in North East all CMs are Hindus. In the central bureaucracy all levers of power are held by Hindus and in the country as a whole Muslims hold less than 4% posts in government services, that too mostly in the lowly third or fourth grades, a figure disproportionately low compared to their 15% population. In the Supreme Court the galaxy of honourable judges, CJI and 32 puisne, has but one Muslim , the 24 High Courts only 26 out of 601sitting judges. In the entire country there isn’t a single Muslim DGP heading the state police, not even in the Muslim majority state/UT of JK and Lakshadweep. More data to labour the point would make for dull, nauseous reading. Unarguably, the Rashtra couldn’t get more Hindu than it is now.
Yet, the once muted now increasingly expressed, oftener in shrill, strident notes, the cry for Hindu Rashtra finds elevated traction with a not too inconsiderable section of Hindus and Hindu intelligentsia. Obviously, it cannot just be for pelf and power, Hindus have always had ample scope for it in a free India. Also proven is the efficacy of an appeal to Hindu Rashtra in religious polarization for electoral gains, and to shepherd Hindus into the supremacist embrace of Nagpur and impliedly into the BJP fold.
But there is more to it than meets the eye.
In the concluding part to follow I will delve into it. For now, I sign off with this delectable Persian poem,
What you and I hear are different
You hear the sound of closing doors
But I of doors that open.
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