Fight rising intolerance, don’t become part of a mob

There is, as has become the norm, much anger in the country these days. Everyone is angry about rising intolerance. There is also hysteria at the decline in rationality. Rationalists have been killed; reason itself is allegedly under attack. The chosen way to enhance the rule of reason, and improve the national climate of tolerance, it seems, is to turn the whole country into the equivalent of a Times Now television debate. Everyone is basically screaming at the top of their voice at everyone else and nobody wants to hear any other side.

I really don’t see how this is helping either reason or tolerance.

Some writers, filmmakers, etc have returned national awards in protest against the “rising intolerance in India”. Moody’s, a foreign credit rating agency, has warned that it could impact India’s economy.

The main incidents that are cited as evidence of rising intolerance are the lynching of a Muslim man in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh, for eating beef; and the murders of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi.

According to a report in The Hindu published October 7, a group of academics, journalists and students of Janhastakshep, which calls itself a “campaign against fascist designs”, visited the village in Dadri on October 2 and spoke to locals to find out what led to the incident.

The Hindu said the campaigners found that “All the people they spoke to in the village said there had been no programmes or events organised by mainstream Hindu nationalist organisations like the RSS. But, organisations like the Rashtravadi Pratap Sena, the Samadhan Sena and the Ram Sena had sprung up there recently, with their posters and banners pasted around the village.”

Brihesh Sisodiya, an office-bearer of Rashtravadi Pratap Sena, told the team that “it was a political outfit which had nothing to do with the BJP”.

The murders of the rationalists had occurred earlier. Dabholkar was shot in Pune in August 2013. Pansare was shot in Kolhapur in February 2015. Kalburgi was shot dead in Dharwad, Karnataka, in August 2015.

At the time of Dabholkar’s killing, there was a Congress-NCP government in the state and the UPA at the centre. The murder went relatively unnoticed.

Karnataka currently has a Congress government. Uttar Pradesh has a Samajwadi Party government. Law and order is a state subject. The state police are controlled by state home ministers.

The investigations by the Karnataka Police and the Maharashtra Police have both identified members of Sanatan Sanstha, a cult with its headquarters in Goa, as the prime suspects.

As anyone who has ever been to a Kumbh Mela knows, there is a very great diversity of Hindu groups and gurus. These groups hold wildly divergent views and revere multitudes of different gods.

To equate the Sanatan Sanstha or Ram Sene with all of Hinduism is a bit like equating ISIS or Al Qaeda with all Islam. To equate them with all culturally Hindu groups is like saying the Palestinian Fatah is the same as the Afghan Taliban, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is no different from the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

It is perhaps too much to expect the excitable hordes to take the trouble to distinguish between the many different Hindu groups, but it is the minimum one expects from intellectuals.

It is also not supportable by reason to argue that intolerance has risen in India beyond what it was when many of these eminences received the awards they are now returning. The scientist PM Bhargava, for instance, won his Padma Bhushan in 1986. Between 1989 and 1993 the country was convulsed by intolerance. The Babri masjid was brought down in 1992; there were riots in Mumbai, and bomb blasts; the Mandal agitation led to caste violence and immolations; Kashmir saw the eviction of Pandits and the start of insurgency; the Northeast saw ethnic cleansing. Mr Bhargava was not moved to return his award by all this. Perhaps he is following the Hindi aphorism, \"Jab jago tab savera\". When you wake, is morning.

Reasonable doubt It is rational to ask whether there is greater intolerance now than in 1992 or 1993. To talk of a trend in the life of a nation of 1.25 billion people, the least any rational person should do is look at the big picture over a period of at least 25 years. That larger trend, as I see it, is positive.

I would argue that things have improved greatly from 1992 to now. We thankfully don’t have riots and mass murders any more.

I made a post saying this on Facebook, and received a reply that the concern now is because the people who led mobs then are now in power. Actually, even this argument is specious. The people named by the Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan commission of inquiry for involvement in the destruction of the Babri masjid were the old guard of the BJP — people such as LK Advani, MM Joshi and Kalyan Singh — who were in power between 1998 and 2004, and are now side-lined. If the rise to power of these individuals was the issue, Mr Bhargava and his friends could have returned their awards then, or even in 2002 when Mr Modi was chief minister of Gujarat and Mr Advani was Union Home Minister.

India has come a long way since those days. The politics of hate has largely been replaced by the politics of development. Religion, language and caste remain factors in politics, but people of all castes and communities have come to seek development as well; pure chauvinism won’t sell any more, and the politicians know it. The package peddled by erstwhile communalists and casteists now is chauvinism-lite wrapped in “development”.

This is far from perfect, but it is still a vast improvement over what we had in 1992 or 2002.

That said, there is definitely reason for concern that the gains of the last 25 years might be lost. The spread of the loony fringe (a process that came to notice with incidents such as the now-forgotten January 2009 attack on a Mangalore pub named Amnesia by the Ram Sene, which was the first anyone heard of that group) and the weak response to its assertiveness by the BJP leadership, is worrying. So, too, is the descent into politics of food taboos by the BJP. These are not 21st century issues; they are superstitions of ages past. It does not become a mainstream political party to elevate such anachronistic beliefs to state policy.

That minorities are feeling threatened by such steps, and related incidents, is understandable. It is important that the concern does not turn into mass hysteria. A sense of proportion is important.

News television, mobile phones, and social media have flattened the distinction between local, national, and global news. In the rush for TRPs and \"hits\", they have also developed a tendency to put sensationalism over sense. The entire ecosystem now is geared for daily outrage. This favours the rise of fringe loonies.

Raising fears to the level of phobias, and legitimizing anger as the default response to any provocation, are sure ways to ensure a return to the bad old days. The trouble with fear and anger are that they amplify each other. Anger on one side provokes anger on the opposite side. Polarisation increases. The middle ground disappears, until finally, only two warring mobs are left.

India will burn if everyone adopts the George W. Bush line of “you’re either with us or against us”. Unfortunately, such an attitude is increasingly common across the political spectrum. “Liberals” exhibit this attitude as often as “Sanghis”; they're becoming mirror images of one another.

This is the rise in intolerance that I see, and it worries me greatly.