INDIA existed long before the BJP was born and will survive the tinpot politicians who strut the contemporary stage and love nothing better than the raucous sound of their own voices.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s warning that the worst kind of communalism arises when the majority suffers from a minority complex comes to mind when reading the comments of many Bharatiya Janata Party politicians. One would have expected a party with such a handsome Lok Sabha majority to be bursting with confidence. Instead, it displays all the insecurities and persecution complexes of an insecure and beleaguered community that fears for its survival.
Given this paradox, punitive action in the name of tolerance against some of the more virulent speakers might itself be denounced as intolerance. That apprehension was inescapable when the Bollywood actor, Anupam Kher, recently declared that Sadhvi Prachi of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the BJP MP, Yogi Adityanath, should be jailed and expelled from their party. They can turn around and insist they, too, should have the right of free speech, citing the central figure of the current storm, the Jawaharlal Nehru University student activist, Kanhaiya Kumar, who rightly claims the Constitution gives every citizen the right to speak his mind. So it does, but then, as Mr Adityanath says, “Every citizen’s fundamental right to freedom has been provided by the Constitution but it does not mean that one gets busy in conspiring against the country or that the traitors are glorified”. “Conspiracy” and “traitors” are the two key words that can be subjectively interpreted. It’s not unlike the confusion of an earlier era when one man’s freedom fighter was another man’s terrorist.
The argument can go on for ever. It will not be settled through legal means alone. Yes, sedition (section 124A of the Indian Penal Code) is a colonial era law but so are most laws affecting the state and public life. It’s like Jagmohan claiming as lieutenant-governor of Delhi that Lutyens Delhi was a colonial creation and should be razed to the ground. Apparently, no one had told him that all of New Delhi is a colonial creation. So, if Lutyens Delhi goes because of its origins, so must Rashtrapati Bhavan, North and South Block and Parliament. What matters is how the sedition law is interpreted and enforced, and that calls for wisdom, a sense of history, an understanding of current sensibilities and the future requirements of a multicultural state. Above all, there is a desperate need for that most uncommon of qualities – commonsense. The objection is not to section 124A but to its misuse to suppress dissent.
India existed long before the BJP was born and will survive the tinpot politicians who strut the contemporary stage and love nothing better than the raucous sound of their own voices. One doesn’t need the revisionist Hindu-centric fantasies of late P.N. Oak to understand India is eternal. Murli Manohar Joshi can advise the BJP’s rabble rousers of customs, practices, rituals and institutions from Kashmir to Kanyakumari which indicate that an essential unity existed long before today’s commercial and political unity which British rule forged. If Jaswant Singh were well enough he would have shown ignorant ultra-nationalists his priceless collection of maps proving India was a nation long before it became a state. The “wonder that was India” to quote the British scholar, A.L. Basham, does not need the championship of ignorant demagogues who rule the political roost.
It’s not always clear what precisely these people mean by their diatribes, except, of course, that they intend to be abusive. In December 2014, for instance, at a rally in the run-up to the Delhi Assembly elections, the Union minister of state for food processing industries, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, said voters would have to choose between Ramzaade (followers of Lord Ram) and haraamzade (illegitimate children). Did he mean Hindus and Muslims, and if so, was he denouncing the Aam Aadmi Party as Muslim? Or the Congress? Mr Adityanath’s “No Jinnah will be allowed to take birth in any of the educational institutions of the country” is similarly mystifying. Since the comment was made in the context of the JNU uproar, he may have had Mr Kumar in mind. But Mr Kumar is a Dalit. Does Mr Adityanath then suspect him of conspiring to carve out an independent Dalit country like the old Khalistan demand? Or is the charge that he is in Muslim Pakistan’s pay?
In either case, using “Jinnah” in a pejorative sense exposes the BJP MP’s prejudiced refusal to accept the global view that the Quad-e-Azam loyally served the interests of the co-religionists that he saw as his constituency. By raising that particular bogey, Mr Adityanath is also positing India as a “Hindu rashtra” which it is not, no matter what people like him might choose to proclaim. India is a secular, socialist republic, and all Indians are expected to be loyal to that concept.
Some of these incendiary remarks are explicable in terms of the run-up to the campaign for the Uttar Pradesh and other assembly elections. Even so, the government did right to book Ram Shankar Katheria, the Union minister of state for human resource development, Kundanika Sharma, a local BJP leader, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Agra secretary Ashok Lavanya, under sections 295A (wounding religious sentiment) and 153A (promoting enmity against groups) of the IPC for what was said at a condolence meeting the Sangh Parivar organised in Agra on February 28 after a Dalit leader from the VHP, Arun Mahaur, was reportedly shot dead on his way back from a temple. Mr Katheria is alleged to have said then Muslims should prepare for the “final battle” and that a conspiracy was being hatched against Hindus.
Indian politicians often make provocative statements ahead of elections. But it’s a new trend for central ministers who have enormous power and can influence the simpler mass of voters to do so. It’s also a new trend for the government to look the other way and let rabble rousers get away with dangerous rhetoric. During the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, for instance, although the Shiv Sena journal Saamna reported explicit hate speeches made by party leaders, the courts convicted only two persons, and they were lowly Shiv Sena functionaries. The law must be more objectively applied to earn respect and save India. Attacks on church services and threats to life and limb must be vigorously punished.
It may not be enough to see hate speeches only in terms of danger to an individual. It is more to the point to consider the security – present and future – of the targeted community as a whole. The Supreme Court’s direction to the Law Commission in the context of a public interest litigation the Pravasi Bhalai Sangathan, an organisation working for the welfare of migrant workers, filed in 2014 is relevant in this context. The courts should take into account the speaker’s status, the audience’s fears and grievances, the impact of the words used, and the social and historical context in which they are uttered. It may sound complex but all that is really needed is the goodwill of an honest and impartial dispensation at the Centre.
