India on the precipice but do the bigots care?

I have a bone to pick with former vice president Hamid Ansari. At a virtual meeting with some US groups, including some American senators, he said a political majority is being sought to be converted into a religious majority and that cultural nationalism is being equated with Hindu nationalism.

I am Hindu but I am in the political minority – I have never voted for the BJP nor ever will. And I do believe BJP voters are still in a minority. Moreover, as a Hindu, it is not my culture to lynch Muslims, ask them to go to Pakistan, bring down mosques or consider anyone unworthy of Indian citizenship --certainly not Hamid Ansari for merely expressing a differing view.

Why should I rail against Ansari for merely stating the facts as he sees it? Isn’t it true that bigots think the entire Hindu community is anti-Muslim like them? Hadn't Modi himself brought India a bad name abroad by pretending that Indians had been unhappy at being Indian before 2014?

Do bhakts have any clue about the all-encompassing and assimilating nature of Hinduism which has survived one thousand years of conquests by Islamic dynasties and European kingdoms and is still alive and kicking?

Why do I blame Ansari for speaking of these issues to any group abroad though my quarrel with him is that he should equate all of us with such bigotry?

Only the bigots do not realise (or do they?) the power of the Internet, smart phones and globalisation and believe all the atrocities they commit against the minorities can remain within the four walls or at least the borders of the nation and that the world’s nations are fools either not to know these facts or to mollycoddle the Modi government over its transgressions.

These bhakts must be fools of the first order if they do not realise why Saudi Arabia gives Modi an accolade and Modi accepts it in all humility. They are even bigger ninnies if they believe Modi will be on sufferance forever – he has already played the game of the Western and Chinese powers and destroyed India to such an extent that it will take us at least half a century to get back to the pre-Modi days of progress, development and becoming an economic threat to the world powers again.

Today, after the West’s annoyance with China, it is not India which is benefitting from the diversion of manufacturing and production facilities these powers are setting up in Asian countries. These have gone to previously economically inconsequential nations like Vietnam and Thailand that could never be the powerhouses that India and China were and while China may still continue to call the shots in the world, India has been reduced to a complete non-entity.

Do the bhakts even understand why despite the RSS hatred for Mahatma Gandhi and Gautam Buddha, Modi has to continue to sing paeans to both whenever he travels abroad? Why he must pay lip service at Rajghat every year while those of his ilk are shooting bullets into cut-outs of Mahatma Gandhi and equating Emperor Ashoka with Emperor Akbar because his spread of Buddhism has given Dalits a safety net against upper caste exploitation?

I do not claim to know the antecedents of the group that Invited Hamid Ansari to speak at the international conference but I am sure at least those NRIs in the US who are wearing Yogi Adityanath on their sleeves this election season must know that after four excruciating years of Trump atrocities, minorities – including Muslim minorities – were chiefly responsible for the return of the Democrats to the Whitehouse.

If the current US administration does not take action to protect minorities across the world, they are likely to face the wrath of their own voters sooner rather than later - perhaps that is why Modi cannot openly support those who call for genocide and gets called anti-Hindutva.

Bhakts should then realise that it is the honest assessments of people like Hamid Ansari and the open acknowledgement of the evil plaguing our society that keep us from sinking into a quagmire of our own making – so long as there is even one person in the country who recognises what is going wrong then there can be a course correction and hope for the country.

Else, all Islamic oil producing nations could stop the supplies of crude to India and bring our economy further down – that is presuming Modi has not already driven it to the ground. All nations, Western, Gulf or Asian, could repatriate Indians working in their countries, some of them these very bhakts who are abusing Hamid Ansari – remember the five-star chef who said nasty things about an Indian actress and was compelled to quit his job in the Gulf?

Indian students will no longer be welcome at foreign universities, an Indian passport will become as worthless as the paper it is printed on, Indian companies will have to shut shop abroad, those Indians seeking foreign citizenship will no longer be welcome in any country in the world...

I am convinced that India is at the edge of this precipice and just one step away from all these catastrophes. So let us not pretend all is well or that Hamid Ansari was not flagging the right issues before an international forum.

Modi, I believe, is wiser than Burmese leader Aung San Su Kyi who for some reason was compelled to defend the killing of Rohingyas in her country by the military junta. Perhaps her physical survival dictated that, though that statement instantly took away the glory of her Nobel Peace Prize and brought her international opprobrium.

Modi is luckier that the RSS does not hold a gun to his head to support their genocidal policies. And though he is unlikely to win a Nobel for anything but his jumlas, the international retribution might be swifter given he has no record of his fighting for democracy and freedom, as Su Kyi who, nevertheless, the second time round has not received the same sympathy and international support as she did earlier before she marred her record with her own lack of compassion for the plight of her nation’s Muslims.

Modi knows full well the international consequences of such behaviour, hence he refrains from supporting the perpetrators and, from time to time, even mouths some pain in his heart whether he feels it or not. After all he has lost most of his right-wing friends and those still around, like the Chinese premier, are no friend-- that he knows well.

So, the only hope is to keep upholding the peace and non-violence of Gandhiji and Buddha, however much he hates it for that is what defines and distinguishes India, after all.

It is quite shameful that when Sylvester Stallone was shooting Last Blood in his Rambo series, he had a great story but no proper credible setting for it. He consulted the United Nation for which country was the worst in human rights violation and he was told that was Burma whose leader had received a Nobel Peace Prize.

Modi does not even have a Nobel and not likely to get one in the near future. So, he has to keep up the façade of hailing from the land of peace and non-violence.

I must say his own bhakts are marring his chances and making it difficult for him to survive politically, internationally and as a statesman (which he is unlikely to be). For it is people like Hamid Ansari who are more listened to and knocking this diplomat only places Modi in a situation he might find it difficult to extricate himself from.

The next Rambo film might well be situated in India for its killings, mayhem, human rights violation and denial of both food and freedom to its people. We are already on that precipice.

(The writer is Consulting Editor, National Herald, Mumbai. Views are personal)