Why so intemperate?

 

Comparisons are not always odious. They can be instructive. How does the British press, for example, cover its problems as compared with some of India’s commentators? Take the 85,000 rapes that take place in England and Wales every year. It’s an absolutely terrifying figure – about 10 rapes every hour - yet no British journalist or columnist has branded Britain the ‘rape capital’ of the world the way the Indian media dubbed Delhi the ‘rape capital’ of India after Nirbhaya and other rapes.    

Or consider the way the top echelons of the British establishment have been exposed as crawling –almost teeming - with paedophiles from the 1960s onwards. Along with the crimes against children, a culture of secrecy and cover-up at the highest levels was revealed. No British columnist has tarnished his country by calling Britain a ‘paedophile nation’ or condemned it for having a disgusting culture that can produce not just so many paedophiles but so many people in powerful positions prepared to protect them?  

As a third example, the sexual predators and rapists who formed a depraved sex ring in the Yorkshire town of Rotherham to groom and brutalized 1,400 young white girls over 15 terrible years were all of Pakistani origin. Despite their horror and revulsion at these crimes, did any British commentator extrapolate from this crime the crude conclusion that British Asians of Pakistani origin are rapists?

For that matter, did European women label the continent a misogynistic hellhole after a 2014 EU survey of 42,000 women revealed that one in three had suffered some form of physical or sexual abuse from the age of 15?      

No, because it is silly to make sweeping generalizations based on a few cases. But that is precisely what Indian writers and artists have been doing for weeks now - branding the country as fascist, intolerant, ruled by lynch mobs, and run by a hate-filled demagogue who instigates violence and is leading India to the apocalypse. 

 

This narrative has been peddled both in India and in Britain by people like Arundhati Roy, Mirza Waheed, Pankja Mishra and Anish Kapoor to unsuspecting readers of The Guardian. Waheed  wrote of the recent tragic deaths of two dalit children as though dalits had only started having a rough time under Modi and not for the previous 2,000 years.

Kapoor, who doesn’t normally weigh in on politics, starts off (again in The Guardian) with: ‘In the UK, people might perhaps be familiar with India’s cricket prowess, atrocities in Kashmir or the recent horrific rape cases’. Nothing else? Just cricket and crime? He goes on to accuse Modi of ‘systematic thuggery’ and ‘human rights abuses’ and claims that a Hindu Taliban is ruling India. 

Why are Indian intellectuals, here and abroad, exaggerating recent events to a point where they diverge so prodigiously from the reality that they border on falsehood, making their descriptions barely recognizable to some of us living here?  

It is undeniable that disturbing events have taken place. A Muslim man was dragged out of his house and lynched by a frenzied mob on suspicion of having beef in his fridge. Scholar and writer M. M. Kalburgi was murdered. Public debate has been dominated of late by Stone Age talk of beef, the charm of cows and how anyone eating beef deserves to die.

A senior BJP state leader says Muslims can live in India but only if they respect the cow. Numerous BJP ministers are unable to utter a simple condemnation of the lynching, wriggling around instead with disgusting justifications, extenuations and obfuscations.  

These events are shameful. Equally shameful has been Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence. Instead of reassuring the Indian public that he has no truck with these hate-filled bigots, he has kept quiet, provoking much legitimate consternation.

As a liberal myself, I am disturbed.  I loathe right wing Hindu political groups and their moronic ideology, filled with hate for the Muslim invaders of yore, a pathetic sense of inferiority, cranky obsessions with cow urine and cowdung, and insane fantasies of a mythical and glorious Hindu past which in its brilliance envisioned everything from aeroplanes to I-pads.  

Not only are such beliefs repugnant, Modi too is not appealing as someone who, even if he had nothing to do with the Gujarat massacre, was unable to do the simple, normal, human thing of saying he felt sorry at the deaths.    

Even so, even so, it is hard to stomach the relish with which writers and artists have distorted the reality to make it appear far worse than it already is. This is a disservice to the truth and a perfect case of trahison des clercs (a betrayal of intellectual or moral standards by writers, academics, or artists). These intellectuals are exaggerating the problems in Indian society. Their intellectual dishonesty renders them incapable of admitting that they loathe Modi with a visceral hatred and this inability compels them to mask their ideological (and in some cases class) dislike of him and his party as moral condemnation.   

I thought being a liberal meant the ability to examine matters reasonably dispassionately and to consider facts that do not necessarily fit into one’s preconceptions or worldview. Yet the dogmatism of Roy and Mishra and others merely mirrors the failings of both Hindu reactionaries and left wing extremists.

To say, as some have, that, these intellectuals benefited in terms of grants and awards from the earlier Congress Party governments and are now disgruntled that a new dispensation is in place is silly. It’s a crude allegation. What is mystifying is the current refusal to recognize that the so-called current mood of intolerance originated much, much earlier under the Congress Party.  

Let’s go back to when the Congress government banned Rushdie’s Satanic Verses before it was even published in India in an act of total capitulation to the ‘’hurt’ sentiments of Muslims.  Apart from being misguided, this one act undoubtedly emboldened Hindu hardliners later to think that, if they also protested and demanded bans on books or paintings they didn’t like, they were likely to get away with it. This was the mother of all bans in India, giving birth to many more in the years to come. 

 

These days Indian intellectuals are morally tortured but where were they when no Congress politician was indicted for the massacre of 2,000 Sikhs in 1984?  When Hindu extremists forced M. F. Husain, an old man in the twilight of his life, to go into exile in 2006?  

Where were they when Bangladesh author Taslima Nasreen was denied a visa to extend her stay in India because doing so would have angered her Muslim opponents? Where were they when American author James Laine’s book on Shivaji was banned in Maharashtra in 2004 and when the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune was vandalized because it kept a copy of the book? Or when Deepa Mehta’s film on Indian widows, Fire, provoked the Shiv Sena to smash the windows of cinemas showing it in 1988?

And where were they when Muslim lunatics chopped off the hand of Professor T. Joseph in Kerala for allegedly insulting the prophet in an exam paper in 2010?

All these crimes took place under a Congress government in New Delhi. In fact, one could go further and argue that, if the BJP government is allowing acts of intolerance to go unpunished, it is because they were never punished by earlier Congress Party governments. The roots of this disease were allowed to take root and flourish – just as the Gujarat riots of 2002 might never have happened if the Congress had punished the perpetrators of the 1984 pogrom of Sikhs.  Punishment deters others from committing similar crimes but decades and decades of Congress rule allowed crime after crime with impunity. 

During Modi’s visit to the UK, the articles written by Mishra, Roy and Kapoor with their unrelenting denigration of the government, left an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Owing to their status, their words and views matter and their version of what is happening in India is treated by British publications as axiomatic. That, presumably, is why the BBC reporter at Modi’s first press conference in London during his three day visit posed a hostile question about intolerance as his first question. 

Let’s reverse the situation. If David Cameron had come to India soon after the paedophilia scandal had come to light, how many Indian reporters would have used his press conference in New Delhi to ask Cameron an opening  question about it? Of course it’s Modi’s job as politician to defend himself against hostile questioning. He needs no help from anyone. But you can’t help wondering if the BBC reporter – along with another reporter who repeated the view that some thought Modi was unfit’ to be entertained by 10 Downing Street – was not a touch aggressive.

Other articles on Modi in the British media talked of how the press was being ‘muzzled’. And Philip Collins in The Times was not just aggressive, he was rude. The title of his column was ‘Hold your nose and shake Modi by the hand’.  Such headlines are only to be expected when Indian intellectuals engage in projectile vomiting over India. It encourages others to follow suit.

And lest you think that Modi and the government should be able to accept all the projectile vomiting because they should be able to take any amount of criticism, it would be useful to recall how several British publications reacted to criticism of their culture from an outsider. 

In the aftermath of the Delhi gang rape, UN Special Rapporteur Rashida Manjoo, who was investigating violence against women globally, visited the UK and was interviewed about her perceptions. She remarked that the UK had a ‘boy’s club sexist culture’, sexual bullying in schools was ‘routine’ and the portrayal of women was highly ‘sexualised’.

Poor Ms Manjoo – she was buried under an avalanche of racism, misogyny, ageism and xenophobia (she is a middle aged brown foreign woman). Everyone from ministers to columnists took pot shots at her. ”Why can’t she go to a country where women can’t drive cars, or have maternity leave?” asked former minister Edwina Currie. The Daily Mail’s response was: “Sexist? Nonsense. Britain is the best place on earth to be a woman.” The tabloid accused her of ‘bashing the west’ and then hit below the belt with ‘As a native of South Africa, Rashida Manjoo might want to look in her own front yard when it comes to addressing issues of violence against women.’ But it is all right for British columnists to write ‘Hold your nose….’ about the Indian Prime Minister?

It is a relief, finally, to hear that a group of 46 academics have signed a petition accusing recent critics and award-returners of hypocritical attempts to claim the high moral ground when in fact they are politically motivated. They are right. If you hate Modi and the BJP, that’s fine. Say that. Attack him. Pillory him. Denounce him. Ridicule him. Just don’t camouflage your political opposition to him as quivering moral indignation.

 

Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist in New Delhi.