[India is a diverse nation, crisscrossed by religious, ethnic,
caste, regional and political fault lines. Prime Minister Modis
government has torn those asunder seeking to remake India’s secular
republic into a majoritarian Hindu state.]
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INDIA IS ON THE BRINK  
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Debasish Roy Chowdhury
August 9, 2023
New York Times
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_ India is a diverse nation, crisscrossed by religious, ethnic,
caste, regional and political fault lines. Prime Minister Modi's
government has torn those asunder seeking to remake India’s secular
republic into a majoritarian Hindu state. _

At a memorial in the Churachandpur district of the northeastern
Indian state of Manipur, portraits of victims who died during recent
ethnic clashes between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the
mainly Christian Kuki minority., Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse

 

Indian social media is a brutal place, a window on the everyday hatred
and violence that has come to colonize the country in the nine years
since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government came to power. But
the images from the northeastern state of Manipur that began
circulating in July were shocking even by those low standards.

A video clip
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two women being sexually assaulted as they were paraded, naked, by a
crowd of men who later gang-raped one of them, according to a police
complaint. The horrific scene was part of an explosion of ethnic
violence
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May that has turned the small state into a war zone
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killing more than 150 people and displacing tens of thousands.

The state has a long history of ethnic animosities that predate Mr.
Modi’s rise. But the fuse for the current unrest in Manipur was lit
by the politics of Hindu supremacy, xenophobia and religious
polarization championed by his Bharatiya Janata Party.

India is a diverse nation, crisscrossed by religious, ethnic, caste,
regional and political fault lines. Since Mr. Modi took office in
2014, his ruling party has torn those asunder with dangerous
exclusionary politics intended to charge up the party’s base and
advance its goal of remaking India’s secular republic into a
majoritarian Hindu state. The repugnant nature of this brand of
politics has been clear for some time, but the situation in Manipur
shows what’s ahead for India: The world’s most populous country is
slowly degenerating into a conflict zone of sectarian violence.

[A crowd of women hold protest signs, white wooden crosses and tall
white candles during a nighttime protest.]

Christian activists take part in a candlelight vigil in protest over
sexual violence against women and the ongoing ethnic violence in
India’s northeastern state of Manipur, during a demonstration in
Amritsar, India.Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images

Under Mr. Modi’s government, the state monopoly on violence is being
surrendered to extremists and vigilantes
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Those targeted by the kind of mob violence that we are seeing in India
may conclude that equal rights are no longer guaranteed, that
political differences can no longer be peacefully reconciled or fairly
mediated and that violence is the only way for them to resist.

The targeting of minorities — particularly Muslims — by right-wing
Hindu extremists is now a way of life in many states. Vigilante mobs,
which often assemble provocatively in front of mosques
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regularly assault
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understaffed and underequipped police forces fail to
intervene. Lynchings
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open calls for genocide
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common. India now ranks among the 10 countries at the highest risk
of mass killings
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Early Warning Project, which assesses such risks around the world.

In Manipur, Christians are bearing the brunt as the state’s B.J.P.
government stokes the insecurities of the majority ethnic Meitei, who
are predominantly Hindu. State leaders have branded the Kuki who
populate the hill districts and who are mostly Christian as
infiltrators from Myanmar, blamed them for poppy cultivation
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for the drug trade and evicted some of them from their forest
habitats. The specific trigger for the current violence was a court
ruling in the state in favor of granting the Meitei affirmative action
provisions and other benefits that have long been enjoyed by the Kuki
and other tribes, which sparked a protest by tribal communities
opposed to the ruling. The Manipur government this year also began
a citizenship verification drive
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infringes on the privacy of Kuki. A similar drive in neighboring Assam
state targeting Muslims has already reportedly disenfranchised
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two million people.

Emboldened by the state government’s rhetoric, Meitei militias in
Manipur have gone on a rampage of raping, pillaging, looting police
armories and burning villages. More than 250 churches
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been burned down. Those were Meitei men
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the horrific 26-second video, sexually assaulting two Kuki women. (The
video was shot in early May but came to light only in July, possibly
delayed by a government internet ban imposed in the state in response
to the violence.) Many similar attacks
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Kuki women have been reported. Mr. Modi has called the rape incident
“shameful” but has otherwise said little about the chaos in
Manipur

The violent impact of his party’s polarizing politics is acutely
felt in India’s heartland, too. The area near a tech and finance hub
on the outskirts of New Delhi was rocked by violence
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week as Hindu supremacists staging a religious procession clashed with
Muslims. Mosques were attacked
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an imam was killed, businesses were burned and looted, and hundreds of
Muslims have fled
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In tandem with the B.J.P.’s demonizing of India’s nearly 200
million Muslims, television
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media [[link removed]] are
deployed to radicalize the Hindu majority, pumping out a steady
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vile dog whistles. Extremist groups, at least one of which appears to
have received the public support
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the prime minister, run amok. Muslims have been arrested for praying
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had their livelihoods and businesses
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their homes razed
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Bulldozers, used to demolish homes
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have become an anti-Muslim symbol, proudly paraded by B.J.P.
supporters at political rallies
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As John Keane and I argue in our book “To Kill a Democracy:
India’s Passage to Despotism,” it’s a signature tactic of
modern-day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who
belongs to the polity and ostracizing others. In the ultimate
subversion of democracy, the government chooses the people, rather
than the people choosing the government.

India is already a complex federation of regional identities, many of
which consider themselves distinct from Hindi-speaking north India,
the power base of Mr. Modi’s party. This federal structure is held
together by delicate bonds of social and political accommodation. But
they are fraying fast under Mr. Modi, who has no appetite for either,
shrinking the space for nonviolent political contestation. Some
regional political parties see the Bharatiya Janata Party’s
centralizing and homogenizing Hindu-first thrust as a cultural
imposition from outside
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are assailing it with the same divisive us-versus-them vocabulary.

_Debasish Roy Chowdhury (@Planet_Deb)
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journalist and the author, with John Keane, of “To Kill a Democracy
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India’s Passage to Despotism.”_

 

* India
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* Narendra Modi
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* Hindu Nationalism
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* Violence
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