India is drawing flak due to the rising tide of intolerance on religious line as also due to muzzling of the freedom of speech.
It’s a global shame as the country is regarded as world’s largest democracy and pluralistic society.
A country of 1.25 billion, India has traditionally been house to over 170 million Muslims, and which is largely seen as its biggest claim to world’s best secular country.
But the problem gets compounded when the state machinery is viewed as being lenient toward the radical elements in the society that are contributing to the rising tide of intolerance.
It’s a challenge for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
One would have hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would stem the rot, sending a strong message internationally that the secular and tolerant fabric won’t be allowed to be torn by any individual or political party howsoever powerful and influential the attackers of this fabric may be.
Modi needs to begin from Maharashtra, a large state where his BJP had stormed into power last year. The challenge in Maharashtra has come from none other than BJP’s coalition partner Shiv Sena.
Two untoward developments took place in Maharashtra in past few days, which brought bad press to India abroad and Pakistan figures in both these incidents. One pertained to Pakistani ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali not being allowed to perform in Mumbai while the other one was about abortive attempts made to scuttle the release of former Pakistani foreign minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri’s book “Neither a Hawk nor a Dove” in Mumbai.
In both the cases, it was Shiv Sena that took intolerance to unacceptable extremes. And in both the cases Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis appeared quite tolerant about Shiv Sena’s blatant intolerance.
In the case of the Ghulam Ali concert, the chief minister offered to protect the Pakistani singer after Shiv Sena had threatened to mar the show through violent means. But the chief minister’s offer was nothing but lip service as the concert was called off anyway. The political fallout was quick and spread across the country as opposition parties offered to host a Ghulam Al show: Aam Aaadmi Party in Delhi, Trinamool Congress in Kolkata and the Congress in Mumbai.
The second case was even more bizarre as Shiv Sena activists actually used physical force and smeared black paint over the face of columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni, a close aide of BJP patriarch LK Advani when the latter was India’s deputy prime minister, who had organised Kasuri’s book launch. Kulkarni had refused to be cowed down by Shiv Sena’s threat and had even invited the extreme rightist party to present its views at the book launch. However, an undeterred Kulkarni went ahead and turned the tables on Shiv Sena by waving Kasuri’s book to TV channels to make a visually arresting statement.
Shiv Sena remained defiant though. A day after this development Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece daily newspaper ‘Saamna’ compared Kulkarni to Ajmal Kasab, the main perpetrator of the Mumbai November 2008 terror attacks.
In this case too, chief minister Fadnavis displayed an unusual ambivalent approach, one doesn’t know whether deliberately or by chance, where he did not block Kasuri’s book launch but also said that “no anti-India propaganda will be tolerated”. Shiv Sena used this ambivalence to the hilt. The chief minister had clearly played it both ways by running with the hare and hunting with the hound.
It is exactly this kind of politicking that India needs to keep itself away from.
Simultaneously, the civil society and literary figures have stepped up pressure on the Modi government in the recent past as many celebrated award-winning writers have returned their Sahitya Akademi award, a prestigious government award for writers. By the last count, more than 40 writers have returned their literary awards or written letters of protest in an unprecedented outburst against what they call “rising intolerance and growing assault on free speech.”
These literary figures have expressed their anguish about a spate of incidents conveying rising intolerance in India, which none other than BJP patriarch LK Advani himself has talked about twice at two different places within 24 hours earlier this week. They have specifically mentioned their unhappiness in the lynching of a beef-eating Muslim in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh and recent murders of rationalists like Malleshappa Kalburgi and Govind Pansare.
The Modi government needs to act fast in conveying a stern message to all troublemakers that their shenanigans are anti-national and won’t be tolerated. It’s not just about music concerts and book launches. The picture is much bigger.
Modi is vigorously wooing the international community and spending much of his precious time in visiting foreign countries to hard-sell India as a global destination of investment. But do we have any intention to rein in the radical elements in our society to provide the right atmosphere for the global investors.
