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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Arundhati Roy on Religious Nationalism, Dissent, and the Battle Between Myth and History</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">By Arundhati Roy
April 21, 2022</div>
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<p><span></span></p><p><em>This lecture was delivered by Arundhati Roy, author of the recently published </em><a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1876-azadi" target="_blank">Azadi: Fascism, Fiction, and Freedom in the Time of the Virus</a><em> (Haymarket Books), at the University of Texas at Austin on April 19.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to deliver the Sissy
Farenthold lecture. Before I begin, I would like to say a few words
about the war in Ukraine. I unequivocally condemn Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and applaud the Ukrainian peoples’ courageous resistance. I
applaud the courage shown by Russian dissenters at enormous cost to
themselves.</p>
<p>I say this while being acutely and painfully aware of the hypocrisy
of the United States and Europe, which together have waged similar wars
on other countries in the world. Together they have led the nuclear race
and have stockpiled enough weapons to destroy our planet many times
over. What an irony it is that the very fact that they possess these
weapons, now forces them to helplessly watch as a country they consider
to be an ally is decimated—a country whose people and territory, whose
very existence, imperial powers have jeopardized with their war games
and ceaseless quest for domination.</p>
<p>And now, I turn to India. I dedicate this talk to the increasing
numbers of prisoners of conscience in India. I ask us to remember
Professor G. N. Saibaba, the scholars, activists, singers, and lawyers
who are known as the Bhima Koregaon 16, the activists jailed for
protesting against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), and Khurram
Parvez, who was arrested five months ago in Kashmir. Khurram is one of
the most remarkable people that I know. He and the organization he works
for, the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), have for
years meticulously documented the saga of torture, enforced
disappearances, and death visited upon the people of Kashmir. So, what I
say today is dedicated to all of them.</p>
<p>All dissent has been criminalized in India. Until recently,
dissenters were called anti-national. Now we are openly labelled
intellectual terrorists. The dreaded Unlawful Activities Prevention Act,
under which people are being held for years without trial, has been
amended to accommodate the current regime’s obsession with intellectual
terrorism. We have all been branded Maoists—the colloquial term for us
is <em>Urban-Naxals</em>—or <em>jehadis</em>, and have had targets drawn on our backs, making us fair game for mobs or legal harassment.</p>
<p>It has only been a few days since I left New Delhi. In these few days
alone, the momentum of the events unfolding there makes it clear that
we have crossed some kind of threshold. We cannot return to the shores
we once recognized as our own.</p>
<p>In March 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an unprecedented
second term to govern India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh. The UP
elections are usually read as the “semi-finals” for the general election
expected in May 2024. The election campaign was marked by saffron-robed
godmen openly calling for mass killing and a social and economic
boycott of the Muslim community.</p>
<span>We are currently in that dangerous place where there is no set of
facts or histories that we can agree upon, or even argue with. </span>
<p>While the BJP’s victory in the elections appeared to be robust, on
the ground the contest was closer than the number of seats they won
suggest. The result seems to have generated in BJP workers and leaders a
peculiar, untenable mix of anxiety and over-confidence. Very soon after
the election results were announced, Hindus celebrated the festival of
Ram Navami, which coincided with Ramzan this year. To mark Ram Navami,
violent Hindu mobs armed with swords and staffs rampaged through as many
as eleven cities. Led by swamis and BJP activists, they entered Muslim
settlements, dog-whistling outside mosques, chanting obscene insults,
openly calling for the rape and impregnation of Muslim women and the <em>narsinghar</em>—genocide—of Muslim men.</p>
<p>Any response by Muslims has led to the bulldozing of their property
by the government or burning by mobs. Those arrested, almost all
Muslims, are accused of conspiracy and rioting, and will likely spend
years in jail. One of those charged was in jail on a different charge
long before Ram Navami. Another, Wasim Sheikh, accused of pelting stones
at the Hindu procession, is a double amputee and has no forearms. Their
homes and shops were bulldozed by the government. In some cities crazed
TV anchors rode inside the bulldozers.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, BJP leaders who openly provoked Hindu rioters in the run
up to the 2020 Delhi massacre were recently acquitted by the Delhi High
Court, which held that there is no criminality when provocative things
are said with a smile. Some of them are back on the streets of other
cities, stoking similar violence. Yet the young Muslim scholar Umar
Khalid is in prison. His speech about brotherhood, love and nonviolence
upholding the Indian Constitution and delivered during the anti-CAA
protests, is, according to a police charge-sheet, a smokescreen for a
conspiracy that led to the 2020 Delhi massacre. Apparently, Muslims
conspired to riot and kill themselves during Donald Trump’s state visit
in order to besmirch India’s good name.</p>
<p>Through all of this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose own
political career was jump-started by the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in
Gujarat when he was chief minister, remains an inspirational figure.
Often silent, but more often leading the dog-whistling, he is the
messiah of these mobs and their holy men who, fed on a steady drip of
spurious history delivered by WhatsApp, portray themselves as <em>victims </em>of historic oppression and genocide perpetrated by Muslims, which must be avenged here and now.</p>
<p>We are currently in that dangerous place where there is no set of
facts or histories that we can agree upon, or even argue with. The
narratives do not overlap or even intersect with each other. It’s myth
versus history. The myth is backed by state machinery, corporate money,
and countless 24/7 television news channels. Its reach and power is
unmatchable. The world has been here before, and we know by now that
when debate and argument end, a war of attrition begins.</p>
<p>Imagine what it must be like to be marked for death or incarceration.
As a community, Muslims are already being ghettoized, ostracized, and
socially and economically boycotted. Muslims are routinely accused of
Love Jehad (conspiring to make Hindu women fall in love with them in
order to increase the Muslim population), Corona Jehad (conspiring to
deliberately spread Covid, a replay of how the Nazis accused the Jews of
deliberately spreading typhus), Job Jehad (conspiring to get jobs in
the civil services and rule over the Hindu population)—to say nothing of
food jehad, dress jehad, thought jehad, laughter jehad. (Munnawer
Farooqui, a young Muslim comedian, spent months in jail for a joke he
never made but was accused of <em>planning</em> to make.)</p>
<p>Any argument, any tiny misstep can get a Muslim lynched and the
lynchers garlanded, rewarded, and assured of a bright political future.
Even the most hard-bitten and cynical among us find ourselves whispering
to each other <em>are they still posturing, or</em> <em>has it begun? Is it organized or out of control? Will it happen at scale?</em></p>
<p>India as a country, as a modern nation-state, exists only and solely
as a social compact between a multitude of religions, languages, castes,
ethnicities, and sub-nationalities legally bound together by a
constitution. Every Indian citizen belongs, in one way or another, to a
minority. Our country is a social compact between its minorities. In the
process of trying to create a political majority, that social compact
is being undone by an artificially constructed “aggrieved Hindu
majority” that is being tutored to believe that they are the only
deserving citizens, the First People, of the putative Hindu Nation, a
majority that defines itself against the “anti-national other.” India is
being undone.</p>
<p>Few of us who make up this nation of minorities can put forward a
neat, unblemished history of ourselves in which we are blameless victims
of aggression. Our histories intersect, interlock, and aggregate.
Together they make us who we are. Other than the over-arching hierarchy
of caste, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity, our society is
hierarchical at a molecular level. There is micro-colonialism,
micro-exploitation, micro-interdependence. Every thread of this tapestry
is an epic that calls for scholarship, study, argument, debate,
reflection. But to isolate a single thread from this weave and use it to
call for mass rape? For genocide? Is that something to be countenanced?</p>
<p>When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned and hundreds of
independent princely kingdoms were assimilated, some of them forcibly,
into either India or Pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people—Hindu,
Muslim, and Sikh—turned on each other. A million people were killed.
Tens of millions displaced. Any single story of individual or community
catastrophe and misfortune, however true it may be, is false when it is
told in ways that erase the other stories. A dangerous lie. To flatten a
messy history, to rob it of nuance, to weaponize it, will have dire
consequences.</p>
<p>All of us in the subcontinent have the choice of either working
toward a shared notion of justice, toward exorcising the pain and hate
that gnaws away at our collective memory, or enhancing it. The Indian
prime minister, the political party which he heads, and its mothership,
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the fascist organization of which
he is a member—have chosen to enhance it. They are calling up something
deeply wicked from the bowels of our blood-soaked earth. The fire they
have lit will not burn along a designated path. It may well burn the
country down. The blaze has begun. Alongside the Muslims of India and
Kashmir, Christians, too, are on the frontline of their assault. In this
last year alone, there have been hundreds of attacks on churches,
statues of Christ have been desecrated, priests and nuns physically
assaulted.</p>
<p>We’re on our own. No help will come. It didn’t come to Yemen, to Sri
Lanka, to Rwanda. Why should we hope otherwise in India? In
international politics, only profit, power, race, class, and geopolitics
determine morality. Everything else is merely a posture, a shadow
dance.</p>
<span>This battle will have to be waged by every single one of us. The blaze is at our door.</span>
<p>India is ruled by men who have ridden to power on the daylight mass
murder of thousands of Muslims, on a series of false flag attacks and
hysteria manufactured by phantom assassination plots. Certainly, there
is opposition to this hatefulness from ordinary people of every caste
and creed, from those who rose against the anti-Muslim Citizenship
Amendment Act, from the historic farmers’ movement last year, and from
regional political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and
Maharashtra that have gone toe-to-toe with the BJP and defeated it. It
would be fair to say that the majority of Indians do not approve of what
is happening.</p>
<p>But their disapproval is manifested for the most part by distaste, by
a karmic shrug and a turning away that is entirely ineffectual before
the burning ideological fervor of a well-paid fascist cadre. The Indian
National Congress, the sole national opposition party, only offers us
weakness and the inability to take a moral position—to even say the word
<em>Muslim</em> in public speeches. Modi’s rallying call for a
“Congress mukt Bharat”—an India free of the Congress Party, is really a
call for a government without an opposition. Whatever else we may wish
to call this, <em>democracy</em> is not the word that comes to mind.</p>
<p>While India exhibits all the trappings of an electoral democracy—a
constitution that calls us a secular, socialist republic, free and fair
elections, a parliament run by a democratically elected ruling party and
opposition, an independent judiciary and a free media—in truth this
state machinery (including to an increasing extent, the judiciary, the
civil services, the security forces, the intelligence services, the
police, and the election apparatus) is being, if not outright taken
over, then deeply influenced and often overwhelmed by the most powerful
organization in India, the overtly fascist, Hindu nationalist RSS. The
RSS, founded in 1925, has long campaigned to have the constitution set
aside and for India to be declared a Hindu Rashtra—a Hindu Nation. RSS
ideologues have openly admired Hitler and equated the Muslims of India
with the Jews of Germany.</p>
<p>Aryan supremacy, the idea that some humans are divine and godlike,
while others are sub-human, polluted, and untouchable, is, after all,
the very basis of Brahminism, the Hindu caste system, which is the
organizing principle of Hindu society even today. Tragically, many among
even the most oppressed have rallied to the cause of the RSS, swept up
by the tsunami of propaganda that has left them voting for their own
subjugation. In 2025, the RSS will mark its hundredth year. One hundred
years of evangelical dedication has made it a nation within a nation.
Historically the RSS has been tightly controlled by a coterie of west
coast Brahmins.</p>
<p>Today it has fifteen million members, among them Modi, several of his
cabinet ministers, chief ministers, and governors. It is a parallel
universe now, with tens of thousands of primary schools, its own farmer,
worker, and student organizations, its own publishing wing, an
evangelical wing that works among forest-dwelling tribes to “purify”
them and “return” them to Hinduism, a range of women’s organizations, a
several-million-strong armed militia inspired by Mussolini’s black
shirts, and a plethora of unimaginably violent Hindu nationalist
organizations that perform the role of shell companies and provide what
is known as plausible deniability.</p>
<p>As India hemorrhages jobs and devolves into economic chaos, the BJP
has grown steadily wealthier and is now the richest political party in
the world, underwritten by a recently introduced system of anonymous
electoral bonds that enable an opaque system of corporate funding. It is
supported by the several hundred corporate-funded TV news channels in
virtually every Indian language that are mass marketed by an army of
social media trolls who specialize in disinformation.</p>
<p>For all this, the BJP still remains merely the front office of the
RSS. Now the nation within the nation is preparing to move out of the
shadows and take its place on the world’s stage. Already foreign
diplomats have begun to troop to the RSS headquarters to submit their
credentials and pay their respects. University campuses in the United
States are the new battleground in this desperate quest for legitimacy.
The danger is that those leading the charge believe that what cannot be
fairly won can perhaps be purchased in an unfettered capitalist economy.</p>
<p>The 2025 RSS centenary celebration will be an important marker in
India’s history. The year before, we will have a general election. This
perhaps explains the sudden acceleration of violent activity.</p>
<p>Meanwhile Modi the Messiah is omnipresent. His face is on our Covid
vaccine certificates. And on the bags of flour and salt delivered in
lieu of jobs to the millions of newly unemployed. How can people not be
grateful?</p>
<p>How can they, who witnessed the mass cremations and shallow graves
and saw the holy Ganges flow thick with bodies, its banks lined with
shallow graves, during the second wave of the pandemic not believe what
they are told to believe—that, if it weren’t for Modi, things would have
been worse?</p>
<p>Our hopes have been cauterized, our imaginations infected.</p>
<p>If the RSS wins this battle, its victory will be pyrrhic. Because
India will cease to exist. Elections will not reverse the tide. It’s too
late for that. This battle will have to be waged by every single one of
us. The blaze is at our door.</p>
<p></p>
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