Malevolent Republic

by K S Komireddi

  The ‘transformation’ Modi was credited with superintending in Gujarat, where he expedited land clearances and permissions for big businesses, bred in him the belief that all that was needed to effect ‘parivartan’, or change, in India was his species of ‘strong’ leadership. And he put that belief into action when he moved to Delhi. There is a depressing inevitability to the actions of a man who, fetishised as an audacious decision-maker when he was chief minister, decided to shatter the earth when he became prime minister. Demonetisation, flouting democratic safeguards, reduced a country of 1.3 billion people into a hapless laboratory for the reckless fantasies of a strongman whose self-conceit was bomb-proofed by the adulation of a tiny elite that profited from his actions.

  Modi’s idealism, lethal to the poor, has always been modulated with realism. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the largest receipts of cash in Gujarat were registered by a bank whose board numbers Amit Shah, Modi’s menacing cup-bearer, among its members.24 The BJP’s income between 2016 and 2017 grew by 81 per cent.25 Months after demonetisation, Modi removed limits on corporate donations to political parties with statutory modifications so brazen that many dictatorships would not consider them. Congress’s increasingly desperate pleas for donations from the general public, however, suggest that India Inc.’s generosity is flowing only in one direction. And it is not by accident that those who most energetically pimped demonetisation when it was first announced happened also to be members of India’s post-reform aristocracy.

  But the consensus they sought to amplify cracked even as economic growth accelerated. Erstwhile cheerleaders of demonetisation have either suppressed their voices or reassessed their views. In 2017, Jagdish Bhagwati, the most ardent apostle of Modism in international academia, offered the qualification that ‘if demonetisation is to be judged narrowly on the basis of the triple rationale originally advanced … it would at best be unclear if it could be accounted a success’.26 A year later, Aravind Subramanian, the government’s chief economic adviser when demonetisation was launched, decried the policy as a ‘massive draconian monetary shock’.27

  The caution that governed dissent against the prime minister was a measure of the distance India had travelled from the very recent past when abhorrence of Modi was a common feature of our public life. So many Indians, revolted by Modi’s past, seemed resolute in their opposition to him. The betrayals of Congress made it possible gradually to accept him as a necessary evil. But as the American writer Matthew Scully once asked, when you start with a necessary evil, and the necessity either fades away or is never met, what is left?

  7

  Terror

  If we do not know how to work properly and run an economy, at least we know how to fight properly.

  —Slobodan Milosevic

  On 28 September 2015, Mohammad Akhlaq, a fifty-year-old farm worker, was dragged out of his house in the town of Dadri, an hour’s drive from Delhi, by a crowd of young Hindu men apparently incensed by a rumour that he had slaughtered a calf. They killed Akhlaq by striking him repeatedly with bricks, beat his son to within a breath of his life, assaulted his elderly mother and attempted to molest his young daughter.1 Akhlaq’s forbears had settled in the village just before the subcontinent’s partition, rejecting, like millions of their co-religionists, the snare of Islamic Pakistan for equal citizenship of a secular state. Seven decades on, the state had a new master, and the young men who burst into Akhlaq’s house were enforcing his idea of what India ought to be. The new establishment did not mourn the dead man. It supplied alibis for his executioners.

  India’s minister of culture, a local member of parliament, described the savagery as an ‘accident’. To the chief minister of the neighbouring state of Haryana, another Hindu nationalist, it all amounted to a ‘simple misunderstanding’. Top-tier leaders of the BJP issued posthumous condemnations of Akhlaq for wounding the feelings of Hindus by eating beef. Hindus should not be expected to ‘remain silent’ when a cow is killed, a parliamentarian in saffron robes told the press. He was ‘ready to kill and be killed’ for the cow.2 ‘When we hurt people’s sentiments,’ another leader explained, ‘such clashes take place.’ If the family consumed beef, the local legislator announced, ‘they are also responsible’ for what happened to them. The village should be left alone, demanded a party hierarch. ‘Fear has been generated with people being threatened with arrests,’ he complained, but Hindus were in no mood to ‘tolerate harassment’ by the authorities.3 They were in charge now. Their Great Leader, lost in deliberate isolation, did not utter a word.

  The threat of a mass agitation by Hindu supremacists terrified the local administration—run by a secular party—which dispatched the police to seize the meat in the Akhlaq family’s refrigerator and send it away to a lab for tests to determine if it was beef. It was not. But the family could no longer live there. Akhlaq’s young son had to undergo two brain surgeries to survive. Journalists who covered his plight were pelted with stones by relatives of the men charged with his father’s killing. Akhlaq’s oldest son served in the Indian Air Force. His boss, the chief of India’s air force, had the family evacuated to a base. For decades they had coexisted happily with people of other faiths. On Eid, they sent packed meals to Hindu neighbours. They could not fathom why this happened. ‘We were completely taken by surprise,’ Akhlaq’s brother told the BBC. ‘Although it is true that we are the only Muslim family here, we have been living here for four generations and had never faced any issues before.’4 The village that turned on them in the dead of night had until that moment been their extended family.

  Communal prejudice has always existed in India. The room for giving homicidal expression to it has expanded exponentially under Modi. One survey suggests that 90 per cent of all the atrocities committed in the name of religion in the past decade have occurred under his reign.5 The mood music for the terror has been composed and played by card carriers of Hindu nationalism. The Akhlaqs were not victims of an outburst of rage. They were exhibits in an organised campaign to entrench Hindu supremacy. Modi, who has a long history of singing from the hymn sheet of majoritarian bigotry, has rarely halted to even acknowledge the murders of minorities. Rarer still are instances where he has condemned them. Not once, in fact, has he memorialised, by name, Muslims slain by his fellow travellers. This is not by accident. Barbarity against Muslims is not a digression from his beliefs: it is an affirmation of them. The killers are fulfilling the potential for extreme violence Ashis Nandy once detected in Modi.6

  Unable to induce Modi to so much as feign outrage at the slaughter of Muslims, the media advanced an elaborate fiction. ‘Modi breaks silence on Dadri lynching’. A variation of that headline appeared on the front page of virtually every major Indian newspaper on 9 October 2015. The problem: he did no such thing. Modi’s speech to an election rally in Bihar the previous day—the source of those headlines—did not in fact contain a solitary reference to Akhlaq or Dadri. Instead of the execration of Akhlaq’s killers suggested by the newspapers and talking heads on television, Modi’s speech contained the blandest of warnings against religious violence—a cursory ‘appeal’ to Indians to reject ‘hate speech’ by ‘politicians [who] are making irresponsible statements’ about the cow ‘for political interests’. There are holocaust deniers who have managed more emphatic denunciations of anti-Semitism.

  Far from condemning what happened to Akhlaq, Modi in fact sought to profit from it. Immediately after that much publicised speech which the press painted as his finest hour, he proceeded to milk the cow for political mileage. The devil, he thundered at another rally, had penetrated the soul of his rival Lalu Prasad Yadav, who had vehemently decried Akhlaq’s killing and suggested that many Hindus also ate beef. Modi pounced on that remark, insufficiently deferential to the cow, and traduced Yadav as a traitor to his caste’s tradition of reverence for cows. ‘I come from the land of Gujarat,’ he reminded the crowd after whipping it into a religious frenzy, ‘where people worship cows.’7

&
nbsp; The cow is sacred to Hindus. Sectarian strife centred upon it is a recurring motif in recent Indian history. Hindus worship it. Muslims dine on its flesh. Some Dalits scratch a living from selling its hide. The framers of the Indian Constitution were subjected to intense pressure to prohibit its slaughter. They resisted it, but then reluctantly, in language that omitted any allusion to religion, inserted a directive—a toothless piece of guidance appended to the Constitution—asking future governments to introduce measures to protect certain breeds of cow. As of 2019, there are only six states out of twenty-nine—accounting roughly for a sixteenth of the union’s landmass—where cow slaughter is not in some form proscribed.8 Buffaloes and bulls, on the other hand, are allowed to be slaughtered; and so many of them are killed annually that the land of the holy cow has been the world’s top exporter of beef for many years.

  Muslims are the principal, though not the only, stakeholders in the beef trade. In his election rallies, Modi seized on this fact to accuse Congress of incentivising traders of beef—of presiding over a ‘pink revolution’—and barked: ‘Do you want to support people who want to bring about a pink revolution?’9 After his victory, in states ruled by his party, the life of a cow has become measurably more valuable than the life of humans of the offending faith. Laws have been amended to enshrine severe punishments for the slaughter of cows. Two years after Modi vacated Gujarat for Delhi, the home minister of his native state boasted that his government had ‘equalled the killing of a cow or cow progeny with the killing of a human being’.10 (This is the state, lest we forget, where Muslims still await justice for the massacres of 2002.) In Modi’s India, Muslims accused of harming cows are presumed guilty. The lucky ones are hauled away to prisons. The rest become quarry for hunters licensed by the regime. The prime minister, diligently dispensing his deepest condolences via Twitter to victims of tragedies in distant countries, maintains a sociopathic silence on the mounting horrors right under his nose.

  The killings multiplied after Modi’s speech in Bihar. On the very day the press praised the prime minister for breaking his silence, a mob of enraged Hindus in Jammu, sniffing around for culprits after coming upon carcasses of cows in their neighbourhood, flung petrol bombs at the first Muslims they encountered.11 A few months on, the bodies of a twelve-year-old Muslim boy and a thirty-five-year-old Muslim man—their eyes covered with a cloth, hands tied behind their backs—were found hanging from a tree in Jharkhand. The father of the boy, a cattle trader, witnessed the lynching and heard his son’s yelps for help. Paralysed by fear, he remained hidden behind bushes.12 The following year, a family of Dalits in Modi’s Gujarat was skinning the carcass of a cow—the source of livelihood for many ‘outcastes’ for centuries—they had purchased. As they were going about their business, upper-caste Hindus appeared on the scene bearing sticks and pipes. Four members of the family were bundled into a car, driven to a nearby town, stripped naked and paraded through the streets as the cow protectors administered lashes.13

  The dissolution of caste is a theoretical tenet of Hindu nationalism. In practice, however, Dalits have always been treated as chattel by the movement’s upper-caste followers. Democracy enabled Dalits to mobilise and make gains. Their successes, such as they were, bred intense resentments among caste Hindus. And those resentments have found the ideal atmosphere for release under Modi.14 The violence against Dalits—promising converts for Muslim and Christian missionaries—has at least prompted a display of distress by the prime minister.

  Muslim suffering has elicited nothing of the kind.

  Around the third anniversary of Modi’s election, a fifty-five-year-old Muslim dairy farmer in Rajasthan called Pehlu Khan was chased along a motorway by a lynch mob of young Hindus wielding rods. He was beaten and kicked so brutally that he died three days later. The police immediately performed a raft of arrests—not of his killers but of alleged cow smugglers.15 The half dozen men named by Khan as his attackers just before his death were allowed to walk free in less than six months.16 Snuff films of Khan’s lynching, shot by the hundreds of spectators who relished it live, continue to circulate among Hindu nationalists to this day.

  There is a tragic irony to the designation of the cow as the mascot of murderous religious nationalism. Indian zoolatry, often ridiculed in the West, is in fact a measure of the sophistication, not the benightedness, of its cultural traditions. It is anchored in Indian civilisation’s profound emotional investment in the non-human world, its reverence for nature, its compassion for living beings. It is these beliefs that account for the historic prevalence of vegetarianism in India and the abhorrence for the taking of life, any life. Early European travellers to India were astonished to find a society with a highly developed ethic of non-violence towards animals. Voltaire, Thoreau, Emerson were among the Western thinkers who regarded this aspect of India as the instantiation of humanity at its most virtuous.17

  And more than a millennium before them, the great Chinese emperor Wu, of the southern Liang dynasty, moved by the example of India, wrote and circulated essays about the exploitation of animals, gave up meat and exhorted his subjects to cultivate benevolence for other living creatures. Wu was haunted by the life of the Indian emperor Ashoka, who, after ravaging the republic of Kalinga in BC 261, had asked in horror:

  Is it valour to kill innocent children and women? … One has lost her husband, someone else a father, someone a child, someone an unborn infant … What’s this debris of corpses?

  Tormented by the memory of Kalinga, Ashoka converted to Buddhism, abjured violence, became a vegetarian and abolished the slave trade. His royal edicts, the first of their kind, extended the state’s protections to animals. Wu and Ashoka did not—could not—actualise their ambition to eliminate the suffering of all living creatures. But by their example they ennobled the idea of mercy towards animals—not as a rejection of human supremacy, but as its highest affirmation. When Muhammad Akbar, the mightiest emperor to rule India since Ashoka, declared plaintively in the sixteenth century that carnivores ‘would have satisfied their hunger with my flesh, sparing other living beings’, he was voicing an ancient human longing to which India had given the most eloquent expression.18

  Modi, a vegetarian like Wu and Ashoka and Akbar, is a different kind of vegetarian. Before he held high or low political office—in those days of ennui in Delhi when the most exciting event in his calendar was the occasional invitation to appear on television, when he baited minorities, circulated damaging gossip about his political rivals and scolded journalists concerned about the fate of Indian secularism as peddlers of ‘footpath politics’, when his clothes were actually cheap and his glasses not designer, when he did not have the means to pass himself off, as he does today, as a learned philosopher of the human condition—Modi opined sneeringly to a Muslim journalist: ‘people who eat meat have a different temperament.’19

  The self-righteousness that sometimes consumes herbivores mixes in Modi with a sinister contempt for carnivores. And in this there is something of John Oswald about him. A Scottish mercenary dispatched in 1782 by the British to subdue Indians, Oswald defected from his side, lived among Hindu ascetics, took up a vegetable diet and wrote one of the first tracts ever in English on the toll of mankind’s abuse of animals. The year in which his pamphlet decrying meat-eaters for their ‘callous insensibility’ was published, Oswald was devising, as a member of the Jacobin Club in France, effective methods for staging wholesale massacres of human beings. His idealistic longing for the liberation of animals generated in him a sadistic craving for human blood. Thomas Paine, alarmed by the young Jacobin’s impatience to impale the enemies of the revolution with pikes, chided him: ‘Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh, that you now have a most voracious appetite for blood.’20 Modi’s Hindu revolution is devoid of such moderating authority. And with no Paines to temper its Oswalds, with an Oswaldian figure at its head, the Hindu affection for the cow, emanating from a canon of compassion, has dissolved into pure terror against h
uman beings.

  As the fantasies of instant prosperity purveyed by Modi unravelled under the burden of his own incompetence, the euphoria of 2014 degenerated into full-blown sectarian hysteria. According to a 2018 study by the independent Centre for Sustainable Employment, unemployment has been ‘the highest seen in India in at least the last 20 years’.21 An entire generation has missed the tide that may have carried them to a stable, contented future.

  Into this crucible of foiled aspirations, Modi tossed a tonsured fireball called Ajay Bisht. The head abbot of a militant monastery, Bisht—who goes by his born-again name, Yogi Adityanath—is an unadulterated bigot. He was one of the first politicians to demand the prosecution of the Akhlaq family. In 2002, he founded a private militia that recruited from the human debris of India’s transition from ‘socialism’ to capitalism—men left behind in the republic’s rush to remake itself—and grew over a decade into an army of more than a quarter million foot soldiers. Bisht enjoined them to claim ten Muslim scalps for every Hindu killed. And if a Muslim should ‘take one Hindu girl’, he roared at a rally, ‘we will take a hundred Muslim girls’.22 In 2007, he spent nearly two weeks in jail for defying a ban on public gatherings to deliver a speech dripping with sectarian malice. His worldly possessions included a revolver, a rifle and two luxury cars.23 And among the litany of criminal cases filed against him over the years were attempted murder, trespassing on burial sites, criminal intimidation and rioting.24 This is the character whom Modi installed, in the summer of 2017, as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. The largest state in the union, home to more than 200 million people, suddenly found itself placed at the feet of a feral priest enrobed in saffron. Yogi’s first order of business was cracking down on Muslim-owned businesses such as abattoirs. ‘Humans are important,’ he explained a year into his appointment, appalled by the coverage being lavished on the lynchings of Muslims, but ‘cows are also important.’25 Once written off as a fringe figure, Yogi is now a cynosure of the BJP.