[News] How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other 



  How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

Samanth Subramanian - February 20, 2020
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Soon after the violence began, on 5 January, Aamir was standing outside 
a residence hall in Jawaharlal Nehru University in south Delhi. Aamir, a 
PhD student, is Muslim, and he asked to be identified only by his first 
name. He had come to return a book to a classmate when he saw 50 or 60 
people approaching the building. They carried metal rods, cricket bats 
and rocks. One swung a sledgehammer. They were yelling slogans: “Shoot 
the traitors to the nation!” was a common one. Later, Aamir learned that 
they had spent the previous half-hour assaulting a gathering of teachers 
and students down the road. Their faces were masked, but some were still 
recognisable as members of a Hindu nationalist student group that has 
become increasingly powerful over the past few years.

The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing 
of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men 
who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding 
company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its 
role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS 
anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative 
theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology 
is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other 
parties. Hinduism <https://www.theguardian.com/world/hinduism>, though, 
has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. 
The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning 
and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million 
volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in 
quasi-military drills.

The word often used to describe the RSS is “paramilitary”. In its 
near-century of existence, it has been accused of plotting 
assassinations, stoking riots against minorities and acts of terrorism. 
(Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by an RSS man 
<https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/historical-record-expose-lie-godse-left-rss>, 
although the RSS claims he had left the organisation by then.) The RSS 
doesn’t, by itself, engage in electoral politics. But among its 
affiliated groups is the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), the party that 
has governed India for the past six years, and that has, under the prime 
minister Narendra Modi, been remaking India into an authoritarian, Hindu 
nationalist state.

It was nearly 7pm when Aamir saw the approaching mob. At that time in 
mid-winter, the campus of JNU, perhaps India’s most influential 
state-run university, is unnervingly dark. It spreads over more than 400 
hectares of wooded land, sealed off by a wall from the rest of south 
Delhi. Residence halls sit in groves of acacia and borage. To get 
anywhere from the gate requires a bicycle, an auto rickshaw or a long 
walk. The university’s 8,000 students appear to occupy a remote world 
unto themselves. Since its founding in 1969, though, JNU has functioned 
as a microcosm of national politics. The ideologies of its students and 
faculty – exhibited in its hyperactive student politics – have 
traditionally been liberal, leftist and secular. Through its academics, 
JNU frequently moulded government policy; its graduates went into the 
media, major non-profits, the law or leftist parties. Over the years, 
JNU has stood for much of what the conservative, ethnocentric BJP has 
resented about the country it governs today. The university has been 
like a stone in the boot of the BJP, hobbling the party with every step.

When he spotted the mob, Aamir ran into the dorms, up the stairs and 
into his friend’s room. They locked the door, then hid on the balcony. 
They heard the attackers shattering panes of glass, barging into rooms 
and beating students. Aamir silenced his phone. “I was sure they’d break 
my arms and legs if they caught me,” he said. The mob had come with 
clear intent, targeting students and faculty who had been critical of 
the BJP: a Muslim student from Kashmir, teachers with ties to the 
political left, members of groups that championed underprivileged 
castes. The president of the JNU student union, Aishe Ghosh, received 
<https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/aishe-ghosh-on-jnu-mob-attack> a 
deep gash to her head and her arm was broken. The rooms of ABVP allies, 
though, were spared.

Later, it emerged that the university’s own cadre of ABVP had been 
bolstered by students from other universities – and perhaps by people 
<https://liveupdates.hindustantimes.com/india/jnu-violence-protests-across-country-live-updates-21578277893284.html> 
who weren’t students at all, people who were just RSS muscle. Rohit 
Azad, who has spent two decades at the university, first as a student 
and then a professor of economics, told me that although he had seen his 
share of violence between student groups, “this thing – this act of 
bringing in attackers from outside – that was unprecedented”. It was as 
if the Young Republicans had invited some alt-right thugs to join them 
in running amok through Berkeley, beating up black and Hispanic 
students, Young Democrats and anyone who’d expressed support for Bernie 
Sanders.

Masked mob storms top Delhi university, injuring staff and students – video

Videos of the attacks 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/06/students-injured-in-india-after-masked-attackers-raid-top-university> 
leaked out through social media in real time. The police were called, 
but they didn’t move to stop the violence. Instead, a posse of policemen 
installed itself at JNU’s gate, allowing no one in. Yogendra Yadav, a 
political activist, arrived at the gate at 9pm. Ninety minutes later, 
the attackers emerged, still masked and armed. Even then, the police 
detained no one. Instead, they were permitted to walk away as if nothing 
had happened. When Yadav’s colleague took photos, Yadav was set upon by 
a knot of men, knocked down and kicked in the face. The police did 
nothing. Later, from a video, Yadav identified a local ABVP official 
among those who had hit him. In a statement, the ABVP blamed the attacks 
on “leftist goons,” but on television 
<https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/abvp-volunteers-were-part-of-masked-mob-that-attacked-jnu-students-tv-sting/article30537640.ece> 
members admitted 
<https://scroll.in/latest/949945/jnu-violence-police-name-masked-woman-in-video-abvp-admits-she-is-its-member> 
that the masked, armed men and women on campus were part of the ABVP. 
Still, the Delhi police pressed no charges. “The police gave the goons 
cover, gave them free rein on campus,” Yadav said. A JNU professor went 
further, claiming that: “The police are complicit.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The onslaught on JNU marked the middle of a season of nationwide 
protest, provoked by a new law. The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed by 
parliament on 11 December 2019, provides a fast track to citizenship for 
refugees fleeing into India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. 
Refugees of every south Asian faith are eligible – every faith, that is, 
except Islam. It is a policy that fits neatly with the RSS and the BJP’s 
demonisation of Muslims, India’s largest religious minority. To votaries 
of Hindutva, the country is best served if it is expunged of Islam 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/islam>. The act was both a loud 
signal of that ambition and a handy tool to help achieve it.

Since December, millions of Indians have turned out on to the streets to 
object to this vision of their country. The government has fought them 
by banning gatherings, shutting off mobile internet services, detaining 
people arbitrarily, or worse. After protests flared at Jamia Millia 
Islamia, an Islamic university in Delhi, cops fired teargas 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/dozens-injured-india-police-storm-universities-191216033648272.html> 
and live rounds 
<https://thewire.in/rights/jamia-millia-islamia-caa-protest-police-firing>, 
assaulted students 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/india-footage-appears-show-police-attack-jamia-students-200216053500418.html> 
and trashed the library <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Lxevq2iCw>. 
As demonstrations spread across the state of Uttar Pradesh, police 
raided 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/asia/india-protests-police-muslims.html> 
and vandalised 
<https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/bijnor-ground-report-muslim-families-flee-as-up-police-vandalise-homes-harass-women-after-clashes-over-caa-1631046-2019-12-24> 
Muslim homes 
<https://scroll.in/latest/947926/caa-protests-muzaffarnagars-muslim-families-accuse-police-of-looting-cash-vandalising-houses> 
by way of reprisal. Detainees in custody were beaten; one man reported 
<https://indianexpress.com/article/india/caa-protests-detained-in-police-facility-i-heard-screams-all-night-it-was-horrific-6180163/> 
hearing screams in a police station all night long. (In various 
statements, the police claimed to be acting in self defence, or to 
prevent violence, or to root out conspiracy.) At least 20 protesters 
died of bullet wounds. Police officials denied firing at the crowds, 
even though the police carried the only visible guns at these rallies.

Still, the protests have persisted well into February. At Shaheen Bagh, 
a neighbourhood in south-eastern Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people 
have turned up over nine weeks to take part in an indefinite sit-in. The 
BJP has taken a ruthless view of all this dissent. On one occasion, Yogi 
Adityanath, a Hindu cleric who is chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said: 
“If they won’t understand words, they’ll understand bullets.” One of 
Modi’s ministers used “Shoot the traitors to the nation!” as a 
call-and-response at a rally – the same slogan the ABVP had raised in JNU.

In its 72 years as a free country, India has never faced a more serious 
crisis. Already its institutions – its courts, much of its media, its 
investigative agencies, its election commission – have been pressured to 
fall in line with Modi’s policies. The political opposition is withered 
and infirm. More is in the offing: the idea of Hindutva, in its fullest 
expression, will ultimately involve undoing the constitution and 
unravelling the fabric of liberal democracy. It will have to; 
constitutional niceties aren’t compatible with the BJP’s blueprint for a 
country in which people are graded and assessed according to their 
faith. The ferment gripping India 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/india> since the passage of the 
citizenship act – the fever of the protests, the brutality of the 
police, the viciousness of the politics – has only reflected how 
existentially high the stakes have become.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The RSS and the BJP’s success, over the past six years, is owed in part 
to its adept poisoning of the public discourse. Politicians, 
indoctrinated media outlets and squadrons of social media trolls lie, 
polarise and demonise all day long. Among their stratagems is the 
invention of categories of abuse for their opponents, to convey with a 
single label why such people should not be trusted to have India’s 
interests at heart. “Presstitute” is one, applied to liberal journalists 
to accuse them of selling their coverage for money or influence. 
“Sickular” is another, born of the RSS’s opinion that Indian secularism 
is a demented version of minority appeasement.

The term “JNU type” refers to leftists of every stripe – from Maoists 
yearning for the revolution, to moderates who abhor Hindutva. 
Traditionally, JNU has specialised in the humanities, so “JNU types” 
also came to be scorned for their soft humanism – for their opposition 
to capital punishment, to the army’s human-rights abuses, or to the 
state’s repressions in Kashmir. All while studying for years and years 
on the government’s dime, the BJP’s supporters complain. It’s enough to 
slot JNU types into the mother category: “anti-national”.

In its earliest years, JNU soaked up the ideology of the man it was 
named after – Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister – and of 
his party, the Congress. It was still only a generation since 
independence, and Nehru and the Congress, having led the freedom 
struggle, exerted enormous moral authority. The university’s ethos and 
its very curriculum were built on Nehru’s values, says Rakesh Batabyal, 
the author of JNU: The Making of a University. It was secular in its 
worldview, left of centre in its economics and technocratic in its 
thinking on policy. “Students came from all over the country,” Batabyal 
told me. “There was a pluralism to the university that Nehru wanted for 
India.”

Over the next few decades, the locus of power in student politics 
migrated further leftwards, into groups that allied themselves with 
national communist parties. The ABVP, which opposed all these -isms – 
secularism, pluralism, socialism, communism – remained on the margins, 
just like its counterparts in national politics. The Hindu right had 
done nothing of note during the freedom struggle; in fact, the RSS 
didn’t take part in the mass movements that forced the British out of 
India. For almost half a century after independence, the political 
parties backed by the RSS remained in the political wilderness. “They 
used to say that, back in the 1980s, if you were a supporter at an ABVP 
event, you went to it with a blanket covering your face,” Azad, the JNU 
professor, told me. “That was how embarrassing it was considered to be.”

Then a mosque was destroyed, and India changed. For years, the RSS had 
claimed that the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in the town of 
Ayodhya, stood on the very spot where the Hindu deity Ram was born. The 
location warranted a temple, the RSS declared, not a mosque built by an 
invading Muslim king. Late in 1990, a BJP leader toured India’s 
heartland for two months, in an air-conditioned Toyota mocked up to 
resemble a chariot, to rouse Hindus to demand that a temple replace the 
mosque. (The man who sat in the Toyota’s cabin, serving as the rally’s 
logistician, was Narendra Modi.) In December 1992, a crowd of men from 
the RSS and BJP razed the mosque, watched but unhindered by the police. 
In the following weeks, religious riots erupted across India, 
particularly in Mumbai. Two thousand people were killed 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/28/ayodhya-mosque-india-guardian-report>. 
The BJP’s obsession with the Babri mosque was bloody and divisive, but 
it also earned them new political capital. In 1996, the BJP came to 
power for the first time.

On the campus of JNU, in tidy parallel, the fortunes of the ABVP 
bloomed: it won its first seat in the student union in 1992, three key 
union posts in 1996, and in 2000, the presidency of the union itself. 
The man who won that plum post, Sandeep Mahapatra, entered JNU in 1997 – 
a time, he told me, when the ABVP’s supporters were proud and vocal 
about their allegiances. No one wrapped blankets around their faces any 
more. Part of the reason for the ABVP’s rise, Mahapatra said, was 
fatigue with leftist ideas. “The Soviet Union had disintegrated. Even 
there, the left had been defeated,” Mahapatra, now a lawyer in Delhi, 
said. “The students thought there was some space for nationalist thought.”

The 90s were a decade of disillusionment with socialism and communism, 
and so too in JNU. Mahapatra’s opponents, he said, “were always talking 
about abstract things – what Mao had said, or what Marx had said”. The 
ABVP, for its part, mined the same faultlines on campus that the BJP 
exploited in Indian society. “We talked about Kashmir, about the Ram 
temple, about the Hindu nation.” These were all crucial items on the RSS 
wishlist: to take full possession of the disputed region of Kashmir, 
defeating Pakistan in the process; to build the temple in Ayodhya; to 
give Hindus primacy in India. Dust-ups and brawls between student 
parties, Mahapatra said, were common. Once, while speaking on a stage, 
he was injured by stones hurled at him by his opponents.

In the 21st century, the tracks of India’s politics and JNU’s politics 
diverged somewhat. Across the country, the old communist parties fell 
out of favour. In West Bengal, a citadel of the left, the communists 
were voted out of the state government in 2011, having held it for 34 
years. The Congress, run as a family shop by Nehru’s dynasty, turned 
complacent and highly corrupt. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, it 
won just 44 seats – a historic low. The slide was swift and brutal. On 
campus, the leftist student groups splintered; new caste-based factions 
arose. But they all decided, Mahapatra said, to band together against 
the ABVP. Its numbers grew, but its electoral triumphs stalled. There 
hasn’t been an ABVP union president since Mahapatra, but the group’s 
power and authority have expanded in ways that tracked the havoc let 
loose by the Hindu right under Modi.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Modi won his first term as prime minister in 2014, it was difficult 
to know how to read the result. Were those who voted for the BJP 
frustrated with the alternatives, or did they believe Modi to be the 
economic miracle-worker he claimed to be?**Had they simply chosen to 
disregard the fact that he had allowed 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/14/new-india-gujarat-massacre> 
mobs of Hindu fanatics to murder hundreds of Muslims in riots during his 
chief ministership of Gujarat in 2002, or did they actively approve of 
this overt anti-Muslim agenda?

Only after Modi settled into power did many BJP voters begin to clearly 
voice their sympathies for Hindutva. These revelations felt sudden and 
shocking, to the point that you wondered if these voters had silently 
longed for a pure Hindu nation well before Modi. Relationships ruptured 
the way they did after Trump’s election or the Brexit referendum. 
Families bickered on WhatsApp groups, and friends fell out. “Before 
2014, you’d have found a pro-ABVP student and a pro-left student who 
were friends with each other,” Cheri Che, a PhD student in history, told 
me. “After 2014, that was increasingly difficult.”

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At JNU, the ABVP’s influence swelled. Che claimed that faculty and 
administration positions were filled with people who had RSS or ABVP 
connections. At one point, he said, the “wardens” – or supervisors – of 
nearly every residence hall were shunted out and replaced with ABVP 
sympathisers. Beyond the campus, Hindu nationalists felt so empowered 
that they formed gangs to lynch Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, on 
flimsy suspicions that their victims were smuggling cows or in 
possession of beef. (In Hinduism, the cow is revered as sacred.) Since 
2014, at least 44 people 
<https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/02/18/violent-cow-protection-india/vigilante-groups-attack-minorities> 
have been murdered and 280 injured. The gangs acted with impunity, 
sometimes filming themselves, as if they’d never be prosecuted – and 
they were proven correct. In one Uttar Pradesh town, a Muslim man, 
beaten so badly 
<https://scroll.in/latest/883618/up-police-apologise-for-photo-of-personnel-escorting-people-dragging-a-lynching-victim-in-hapur> 
that he would eventually die, was dragged injured along the ground. A 
photo showed a policeman clearing a path through the crowd as the mob 
hauled the body behind him.

On the JNU campus, Muslim students felt more and more anxious. On the 
day in 2017 when Yogi Adityanath, the Hindutva hardliner, was elected 
chief minister, a Kashmiri Muslim student was walking to a canteen. It 
was close to midnight. “I saw a guy, a hardcore ABVP supporter,” said 
the student, who asked not to be named. “As soon as he saw me, he said: 
‘Now that Yogi’s here, we’ll cut down and devour the Muslims.’ He said 
it openly. There were a lot of people standing around. You wouldn’t have 
heard anything like that earlier.”

In February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar, a communist who was then the student 
union’s president, was part of a campus protest against the hanging of a 
Kashmiri man dubiously convicted of terrorism. The ABVP called in news 
crews from pro-BJP channels. Over the next few days, these channels 
aired footage that seemed to show Kumar and others yelling slogans 
calling for the break-up of India. For viewers, the videos confirmed 
what they already suspected: that JNU was a hothouse of treason. A few 
weeks later, the videos were found to have been doctored 
<https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2016/03/02/kanhaiya-video-court-irani_n_9356936.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS91cmw_cT1odHRwczovL3d3dy5odWZmaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5pbi8yMDE2LzAzLzAyL2thbmhhaXlhLXZpZGVvLWNvdXJ0LWlyYW5pX25fOTM1NjkzNi5odG1sJnNhPUQmc291cmNlPWhhbmdvdXRzJnVzdD0xNTgyMjE3NzQ1MDQxMDAwJnVzZz1BRlFqQ05HVmlPZHIyZXlXY1VKTS1RYmlIQjlBSnlKMWtn&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHwqd5ZfKqHSH5HuJACKi3MJkOUAEIDWKZRkEzxnCBSJO6vOiCHj99L8lSObz_rRN4SojDoPj9grfB1wlj6fZ5QcdsulGPmlnuUjo_3xnZ6gEXmv7ATC84xZQGlkpt2IkWEHrvQBWxkW3KikRy-vPgNPS6rs9FHHli1m87Jdem9K>.

Regardless, the BJP’s leaders kept referring to JNU’s students – and to 
anyone who supported them – as “anti-nationals” and traitors. The Delhi 
police arrested Kumar and charged him under a century-old sedition law. 
When the police took him to the courthouse for his hearing, they 
encountered a mob of dozens of lawyers and at least one BJP legislator 
hollering slogans. “Shoot him!” they shouted. Then, inside the 
courthouse, while the police stood by, the mob beat Kumar up. 
Afterwards, a news report said, one of the attackers claimed 
<https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/jnu-student-kanhaiya-kumar-dragged-kicked-by-lawyers-at-delhi-court-1278385> 
with satisfaction: “Our job is done.”

After the February 2016 protest, the Kashmiri JNU student learned that 
police had visited his home in Srinagar, in Kashmir, and taken down a 
host of details about him and his family. He hadn’t even been at the 
protest, he said. Then he discovered that every Kashmiri student he knew 
in JNU had a similar story to tell. It shook him. “We decided – a group 
of us – that we’d just stay out of things having to do with politics,” 
he said. “We’re vulnerable here.” A little over a year ago, when he was 
going to the campus library one morning, he saw a big truck filled with 
people shouting slogans about the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Out of a set of 
loudspeakers on the truck, music from the Hindutva songbook poured out. 
Accompanying the truck, he said, were “people on bikes, people on foot – 
and they were outsiders, not students,” he said. “I thought: ‘The goons 
have come inside.’”

In 2016, Modi’s government installed at the head of JNU an engineering 
professor named M Jagadesh Kumar. The students and the press described 
Kumar as an RSS loyalist – part of the government’s wider campaign to 
seed universities and cultural institutions with RSS appointees. Kumar 
denied any links with the RSS.

On the evening of 5 January, as the attacks on campus escalated, Kumar 
messaged the police via WhatsApp, according to a police enquiry report 
<https://indianexpress.com/article/india/as-masked-men-ran-riot-on-jnu-campus-v-c-told-police-be-stationed-at-gates-of-jnu-6207129/>. 
Instead of requesting help in curbing the mob, though, he asked for 
police to be stationed outside the gate. (Later, to a reporter, he said 
that he’d wanted campus security to tackle the assaults, which he called 
“unfortunate.”) Only at 7.45pm did a JNU official ask the police into 
the campus to intervene, but by then the violence had ended. The 
attackers were still on the premises hours later, but the university and 
the police let them leave, as if they’d dropped by for a visit and were 
now hurrying to catch the last bus home.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Even before the ABVP attacks, JNU had been seething. For weeks, the 
student union had been aggressively opposing a fee hike, boycotting 
registrations and forcing classes to be suspended. When the nationwide 
demonstrations against the citizenship act began, that was folded into 
the mobilisations on campus. To many students, the JNU administration, 
the RSS and the BJP were part of the same machine.

By itself, the new law defies India’s constitution, which is a long 
document steeped in the resolve to treat castes and religions with 
scrupulous equality. Written between 1946 and 1949, it was an exercise 
in nation-making – in gluing together a giant modern state from 
fragmented communities living across the land. To effect this, one of 
its chief promises was that citizenship would bear no connection to 
religion. The citizenship act’s exclusion of Muslims violates that promise.

But the act is most menacing when read in tandem with other recent 
government measures, which in totality aim to redefine who does and does 
not belong on Indian soil. These measures can be perplexing, even for 
Indians. For one, some of their functions seem to overlap. For another, 
they’re constantly referred to by the kind of abbreviations that are 
unavoidable in Indian life. The Citizenship Amendment Act is the CAA; 
the National Register of Citizens is the NRC; the National Population 
Register is the NPR. On Twitter, hashtags about the #CAA-NPR-NRC issue 
devolve into a thick alphabet soup.

The government started to create a register of citizens five years ago, 
in the north-eastern state of Assam. The riverine deltas and paddy 
fields of Assam lie across a porous border with Bangladesh, and migrants 
have crossed in both directions for decades. The arrival of Bangladeshis 
– many of them Muslims – became a heated political issue in Assam 
through the 70s and 80s. The migrants were blamed for taking jobs, 
usurping land and signing up for welfare benefits despite being 
ineligible for them.

Previous governments, as well as India’s supreme court, had agreed that 
a citizens’ register was necessary to distinguish migrants from locals. 
Citizenship isn’t always simple to prove in India; in a country of more 
than 1 billion people, fewer than 100 million hold passports, while 
other documents, issued at local levels by corrupt or inefficient 
officers, can be unreliable. For the BJP, the idea of a citizen’s 
register served as both a profitable electoral tactic and a religious 
wedge. In a stump speech in 2014, Modi told an audience in Assam that 
while Hindu migrants would be accommodated, other “infiltrators” would 
be sent back to Bangladesh. In April 2019, Amit Shah, now Modi’s home 
minister, said that 
<https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-politics-shah-quotes-factbox/factbox-indias-new-home-affairs-minister-amit-shah-in-his-own-words-idUSKCN1T10U7?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuters+World+News%29> 
Bangladeshi immigrants were “eating the grain that should go to the 
poor”. They were “termites”, Shah added. The BJP would pick them up, one 
by one, and “throw them into the Bay of Bengal”.

To get into the register, people had to prove first that an ancestor 
lived in Assam before 1971 and then that they were related to that 
ancestor. In a country of spotty electoral rolls and property deeds, of 
inconsistent name spellings and patchy documentation, this was always 
going to be difficult. When the registration of citizens began in 2015, 
Assam scrambled for its papers. Poor families, worried about being 
rendered stateless, spent their money on lawyers and documents. Some 
committed suicide. The so-called foreigners’ tribunals, set up to hear 
appeals, were incentivised to strike people off the register; the more 
foreigners you identified, the better your chances of staying on the 
tribunal.

In 2019, a Vice News examination 
<https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/3k33qy/worse-than-a-death-sentence-inside-indias-sham-trials-that-could-strip-millions-of-citizenship> 
of five of these tribunals found that nine out of 10 cases involved 
Muslims. Of the Muslims who appealed, 90% were declared illegal 
immigrants; for Hindus, the figure was 40%. The government plans to 
round up all these “foreigners” and transport them to fill nearly a 
dozen internment camps in the state. (One is already being built: a 
28,000 sq metre, double-walled complex for 3,000 people, not far from 
the border with Bhutan. The centre has six watchtowers and a 
100-metre-high light tower.) The BJP is so pleased with this process 
that it wants to compile a pan-Indian register of citizens, extending 
the exclusionary power of the process across a population of 1.3 billion.

Assam’s register was made public last August, and 1.9 million people, 
finding themselves omitted 
<https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/aug/31/india-almost-2m-people-left-off-assam-register-of-citizens>, 
had to hurry to file appeals. Four months later, the government passed 
the citizenship act. In this grand mechanism to determine “Indianness”, 
there will be one further component: a population register, hoovering up 
demographic data on the “usual residents” of India. But even this 
seemingly passive count of the population can transmute into yet another 
sieve for citizenship. After the population register is updated in 
September, lists of residents will be posted in each locality. Then 
anyone in the locality – officials, neighbours, vigilantes, RSS 
informers – can lodge an objection to your name’s inclusion. In such 
cases, you will be marked out as a “doubtful” citizen – a “D-voter” – 
with the prospect of being interned endlessly or thrown out of India. In 
this fug of paranoia, anyone might theoretically find themselves tagged 
“doubtful”: Muslims, dissidents, journalists and opposition political 
workers. The BJP knows its priorities. “No Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, 
Christian or Parsi,” a new BJP booklet 
<https://scroll.in/latest/949007/nationwide-nrc-in-pipeline-says-bjps-bengali-booklet-on-citizenship-law> 
assures readers, “will find their name in the D-voter list.” Muslims, 
again, are conspicuous by their absence.

The end game isn’t to rinse 180 million Muslims out of India. It can’t 
be, for practical reasons. Where would they go? Even those speculatively 
identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants cannot be sent back home 
unless Bangladesh accepts them. What the BJP is aiming for is what its 
founders have always wanted: a country that is Hindu before anything 
else. In the 1940s, both Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, 
and Vinayak Savarkar, a leading RSS ideologue, were proponents of a 
two-nation theory. “The only difference,” says Niraja Jayal, a political 
scientist who studies Indian democracy, “was that Jinnah wanted the 
territory of undivided India to be cut into two, with one part for 
Muslims. Whereas Savarkar wanted Hindus and Muslims in the same land, 
but with the Muslim living in a subordinate position to the Hindu.” That 
unequal citizenship was what the RSS considered – and still considers – 
right and proper, Jayal said. “So you get a graded citizenship, a 
citizenship with hierarchies. You don’t need genocide, you don’t need 
ethnic cleansing. This does the job well enough.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Modi’s first and second terms have now come to feel distinctly 
different. After 2014, the BJP consolidated its success by winning a 
series of state elections. The government began its citizenship registry 
in Assam, but its other prominent policies affected every Indian 
uniformly: a new tax on goods and services, chaotically implemented; a 
cancellation of high-value currency notes, intended to curb corruption 
but melting the economy down instead; and an Orwellian biometric 
identification scheme. The worst acts of rightwing violence – the beef 
lynchings – were committed by vigilantes emboldened by the BJP’s rise, 
and often supported by party leaders. (Two years ago, after eight 
convicted lynchers were released on bail, one of Modi’s ministers 
invited them to his house and draped floral garlands 
<https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/hc-has-suspended-sentence-was-honouring-the-law-jayant-sinha-on-garlanding-ramgarh-lynching-convicts/story-oawPKViVZHsVcPAK84zN6N.html> 
on them.) But the lynchings were not directly ascribable to the 
government in the way that events since Modi’s re-election last year 
have been.

In August 2019, three months into its second term, the government 
suspended a constitutional provision that has long granted special 
autonomies to the disputed border state of Jammu and Kashmir. Further, 
the state was split in two, and the halves brought under federal 
control. To forestall resistance, troops poured into the already heavily 
militarised Kashmir valley, and internet services across the state were 
shut down. They haven’t yet been properly restored 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/internet-partially-restored-kashmir-social-media-ban-stays>; 
each passing day sets a new record for the longest shutdown of the 
internet by a government anywhere in the world. Kashmir’s leading 
opposition politicians were arrested; they haven’t been heard from 
since. Justifying a draconian detention order, the government argued 
that one of these politicians deserved to be held because of his ability 
“to convince his electorate to come out and vote in huge numbers”.

The RSS got the solution it wanted in Ayodhya as well. Since 1992, a 
legal battle has raged to determine what should be done with the site of 
the flattened mosque. In November, the supreme court – which appears 
increasingly pliant to the government’s needs – ruled that the mosque 
had been destroyed illegally, but that the land should nevertheless host 
a temple. It was as if a burglar, having been dressed down, was then 
invited to move into the house he’d robbed. The citizenship act was 
passed in December. Within half a year, with a speed and brazenness that 
left India dazed, the government had fulfilled some of the chief items 
on the RSS wishlist.

Given the ferocity and stamina of the anti-government protests since 
December, it seems bewildering that no similar mobilisations met any of 
the government’s previous moves. From the 2019 election onwards, for 
several months, it seemed as if most Indians were implicitly in favour 
of this galloping onset of Hindutva. Why was it the citizenship act that 
electrified the public into protest? It may have partly been “the straw 
that broke the camel’s back”, Jayal said, but it also induced a broader, 
more primal kind of insecurity.

“With Kashmir, large segments of India have been persuaded over time 
that it’s a troubled region – which is an unfair stereotype, but maybe 
that made it harder for people to respond to its change in status,” she 
said. “With the Babri Masjid, it was fatigue over an issue that has 
dragged on for decades.” The citizenship act, though, “promises a whole 
range of unpleasant possibilities”. Despite the government’s assurances 
to Hindus and other non-Muslims, “everyone is anxious to be told they 
have to search for papers, although of course it’s worse for Muslims”, 
she said. “There’s the prospect of harassment. There’s the fear of being 
declared illegal. There’s the fear of the unknown.”

This sense of personal peril is matched by a sense of national peril. 
India can appear to be inured to injustices – the miscarriages of law, 
the iniquities of wealth and caste, the venality, the wounds and bruises 
to the body politic. What it still resists is any attempt to claw into 
the body and rearrange its very bones – its constitution. Nehru, 
Ambedkar and the other framers of India’s constitution engineered the 
country to be a liberal, secular democracy. Until recently, that idea 
had come to seem so impossible to dislodge that even patently unsecular 
politicians feel compelled to pay lip service to it. “Secularism is an 
article of faith for us,” Modi said 
<https://www.firstpost.com/politics/modi-in-up-others-are-misleading-bjp-is-the-real-secular-party-1415523.html> 
during his 2014 campaign. By then, as an RSS member, he’d already been 
committed to the concept of a Hindu nation for 43 years.

When governments have threatened to split away from this constitutional 
foundation, they’ve met widespread popular opposition. After the prime 
minister Indira Gandhi suspended civic freedoms – of speech, of 
assembly, of due process – in 1975, she had to suppress waves of protest 
for the next 18 months, until she called off her declared state of 
emergency. The recent agitations against the citizenship act are 
similar: defiance of a law that meddles with the fundamental design of 
India.

For the first time since 1947, when the subcontinent went through its 
bloody partition into India and Pakistan, a politics is being 
constructed entirely around the premise of exclusion – of deciding who 
can’t be Indian, or calibrating how Indian anyone can be. The rabid 
focus on identity is a piece of a global pattern, of course, but it is 
especially dangerous in a country that is as tenuous a construct as 
India. This is still, as it was in 1947, a land teeming with so many 
identities – plotted multi-dimensionally along the axes of caste, 
gender, class, religion, language and ethnicity – that the only way to 
make it work is to accept that everyone belongs equally to India.

This egalitarian principle, therefore, has not been just an ideal; it 
has been a compact necessary for India’s survival. When a government 
starts to make the case for some to be considered less Indian than 
others, subtracting first one identity and then another as if they were 
Jenga blocks, the structure turns unsteady. Either the union dissolves, 
or it is kept together only by an iron-fisted, authoritarian regime – 
the kind that unleashes violence through the police, as in Uttar 
Pradesh, or through party auxiliaries under police protection, as at 
JNU. The danger posed by the BJP is that it is both preparing itself to 
be that regime and guiding India into an instability from which it may 
never recover.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread 
<https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread>, and sign up to the long read weekly 
email here 
<https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2017/may/05/sign-up-for-the-long-read-email>.


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