Will these bad times never end?

How much can a population fool itself? The idea of mass hypnosis floats around the murky areas of human existence even if the notion is obnoxious. That so many people can be so easily distanced from their rational and humane sides to fall completely into bigotry and hatred. Abraham Lincoln’s “can’t fool all of the people all of the time” sounds like an unattainable pipe dream right now. Too many people remain fooled and non-application of mind has infected all our symptoms.

Let’s not hide behind figures of speech. India now faces one of those tipping moments. If we allow Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and the Bharatiya Janata Party, ably handled by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to sink us further into uncontained hatred, there is no way up. India as a democratic republic will be destroyed. We will become an authoritarian state, run by religious and social bigots.

There are many Indians who believe that a “firm hand” is all that is needed to set India back on track. These may be people with severe daddy complexes but more than that they are champion hypocrites and liars. This “firm hand” is not for them. It is for “those” people, other people. They must be able to carry on with their lives, their fiddles, their manipulation of all systems and their prejudice and discrimination against humans they dislike. As long as the iron fist lands hard on someone else.

Authoritarian states however do not distinguish between citizens. Only a small group of courtiers get privileges and even those perch on a knife’s edge. People who believe that because they hate Muslims or Dalits or Christians or Communists or liberals or women or non-heterosexuals, they will be better treated by a ‘Hindu Rashtra” are damning not just the targets of their hatred but also themselves. There are no free passes once India passes into fascism.

The Delhi riots of 2020 have brought us to this tipping point. The six long years of guerrilla warfare against democracy, of sporadic incidents, skirmishes and lynchings, now reveal their insidious and dangerous pattern. Whether Modi, Shah and the BJP wanted the riots to pan out quite like this or not, whether they happened too early into their second term, whether they played their hand sooner than anticipated, the fact is that it has happened. The intentions are now clear.

You could ask yourself why BJP leader Kapil Mishra, a relatively small fry who recently jumped ship from the Aam Aadmi Party, was allowed to make inflammatory speeches just before US President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India. You might then look back at speeches made by other BJP leaders including Union ministers like Anurag Thakur in the run up to the Delhi assembly elections.

You might remember that the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Ajay Singh Bisht has never stopped making sectarian comments and inciting crowds to continue with the othering of Muslims. You might think back to the number of times Amit Shah has called both Indian Muslims and Muslim immigrants, “termites” and “outsiders”. You may even open your headspace beyond Modi’s nonsensical “mann ki baat” pap and his cringingly ignorant speeches to students and scientists, to his election rallies which are always full of innuendo, invective and Islamophobia.

Maybe you are one of those people who really believed the lies of the Gujarat model because your brain was so warped by Whatsapp messages that you no longer allowed yourself access to simple fact-checking. Maybe you believed the publicity blitz about economic growth and reform and glory that Modi would bring us. Maybe you thought five years wasn’t enough to destroy India’s growth prospects because Modi had been hampered from his grand objective by his own party, by bureaucrats, by experts, by crows in Balakot, by his left toe and his right nostril.

By April 2019, if you still believed that Modi had the answers, and evidently you did, where do you see India now? In some cheap jugaad RSS version of Hitler’s Third Reich? Where in India do you see anything but violence and incompetent governance? Why has no Union Minister been able to adequately explain this citizenship fiasco? Why have the courts not bothered to assist citizens in their search for answers?

And how many dead people will it take for people to open their eyes to our horrific future if this current course continues?

(The views expressed in the article are author’s own)