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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremacists-nationalism-tearing-india-apart-modi-bjp-rss-jnu-attacks?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">How Hindu supremacists are tearing
India apart</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Samanth Subramanian -
February 20, 2020<br>
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<p><span><span>S</span></span>oon 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.</p>
<p>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. <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/hinduism"
data-link-name="auto-linked-tag"
data-component="auto-linked-tag">Hinduism</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/historical-record-expose-lie-godse-left-rss"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">by an RSS man</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/aishe-ghosh-on-jnu-mob-attack"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">received</a> a
deep gash to her head and her arm was broken. The rooms
of ABVP allies, though, were spared.</p>
<p>Later, it emerged that the university’s own cadre of
ABVP had been bolstered by students from other
universities – and <a
href="https://liveupdates.hindustantimes.com/india/jnu-violence-protests-across-country-live-updates-21578277893284.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">perhaps by
people</a> 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.</p>
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caption" itemprop="description"><span><svg
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="11"
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<p><a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/06/students-injured-in-india-after-masked-attackers-raid-top-university"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Videos of the
attacks</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/abvp-volunteers-were-part-of-masked-mob-that-attacked-jnu-students-tv-sting/article30537640.ece"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">on television</a>
members <a
href="https://scroll.in/latest/949945/jnu-violence-police-name-masked-woman-in-video-abvp-admits-she-is-its-member"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">admitted</a>
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.”</p>
<hr>
<p><span><span>T</span></span>he 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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/islam"
data-link-name="auto-linked-tag"
data-component="auto-linked-tag">Islam</a>. The act
was both a loud signal of that ambition and a handy tool
to help achieve it.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/dozens-injured-india-police-storm-universities-191216033648272.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">teargas</a> and
<a
href="https://thewire.in/rights/jamia-millia-islamia-caa-protest-police-firing"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">live rounds</a>,
<a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/india-footage-appears-show-police-attack-jamia-students-200216053500418.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">assaulted
students</a> and <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Lxevq2iCw"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">trashed the
library</a>. As demonstrations spread across the state
of Uttar Pradesh, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/asia/india-protests-police-muslims.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">police raided</a>
and <a
href="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"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">vandalised</a>
<a
href="https://scroll.in/latest/947926/caa-protests-muzaffarnagars-muslim-families-accuse-police-of-looting-cash-vandalising-houses"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Muslim homes</a>
by way of reprisal. Detainees in custody were beaten;
one man <a
href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/caa-protests-detained-in-police-facility-i-heard-screams-all-night-it-was-horrific-6180163/"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">reported</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/india"
data-link-name="auto-linked-tag"
data-component="auto-linked-tag">India</a> 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.</p>
<hr>
<p><span><span>T</span></span>he 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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/28/ayodhya-mosque-india-guardian-report"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">were killed</a>.
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><span><span>W</span></span>hen 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?<strong>
</strong>Had they simply chosen to disregard the fact
that he <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/mar/14/new-india-gujarat-massacre"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">had allowed</a>
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?</p>
<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/02/18/violent-cow-protection-india/vigilante-groups-attack-minorities"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">44 people</a>
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, <a
href="https://scroll.in/latest/883618/up-police-apologise-for-photo-of-personnel-escorting-people-dragging-a-lynching-victim-in-hapur"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">beaten so badly</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="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"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">been doctored</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/jnu-student-kanhaiya-kumar-dragged-kicked-by-lawyers-at-delhi-court-1278385"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">claimed</a>
with satisfaction: “Our job is done.”</p>
<p>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.’”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On the evening of 5 January, as the attacks on campus
escalated, Kumar messaged the police via WhatsApp,
according to a police enquiry <a
href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/as-masked-men-ran-riot-on-jnu-campus-v-c-told-police-be-stationed-at-gates-of-jnu-6207129/"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">report</a>.
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.</p>
<hr>
<p><span><span>E</span></span>ven 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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, <a
href="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"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">said that</a>
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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In 2019, a Vice News <a
href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/3k33qy/worse-than-a-death-sentence-inside-indias-sham-trials-that-could-strip-millions-of-citizenship"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">examination</a>
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.</p>
<p>Assam’s register was made public last August, and 1.9
million people, finding themselves <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/aug/31/india-almost-2m-people-left-off-assam-register-of-citizens"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">omitted</a>,
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
<a
href="https://scroll.in/latest/949007/nationwide-nrc-in-pipeline-says-bjps-bengali-booklet-on-citizenship-law"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">BJP booklet</a>
assures readers, “will find their name in the D-voter
list.” Muslims, again, are conspicuous by their absence.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<hr>
<p><span><span>M</span></span>odi’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 <a
href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/hc-has-suspended-sentence-was-honouring-the-law-jayant-sinha-on-garlanding-ramgarh-lynching-convicts/story-oawPKViVZHsVcPAK84zN6N.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">draped floral
garlands</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/15/internet-partially-restored-kashmir-social-media-ban-stays"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">properly
restored</a>; 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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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,” <a
href="https://www.firstpost.com/politics/modi-in-up-others-are-misleading-bjp-is-the-real-secular-party-1415523.html"
title="" data-link-name="in body link">Modi said</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span>•</span> Follow the Long Read on Twitter at <a
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