Had social empathy been the cultural norm of communities across ‘new’ India, democracy’s fate would not have witnessed the saffronisation of Indian youth with such impunity!
Yes, sadly, we’re here to have seen an increment of hate crimes by 300% in a span of 7 years, followed by NCRB data of 2019–20 and 2020–21 confirming that India is unsafe for Dalit and Tribal girls. Dystopia at its peak!
What’s rudimentarily happening?
Helplessly, we saw — with impunity — an unfortunate crescendo of cases like Sulli deals, Bulli bai, and hate chat on the Clubhouse app. That, on Twitter, to harass voices that do not agree with the current political dispensation is almost a ‘new normalcy’. The Wire broke the story about how BJP has used Tek Fog software to troll and aggregately bully the dissents on social media platforms is not staggering anymore, amid the saffronized epoch of melancholy, apathy, and cacophony of the abhorrent views.
The horrible episodes of Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, wherein pics of Muslim girls were doxed and auctioned off, is existentially stemmed from the grievance against educated Muslim women’s assertive tone against the current saffronized stream. Whereas in this hate chat “Muslim girls are more beautiful than Hindu girls” on the Clubhouse app, I whistleblowed, the audio conversation has made me culminate that India’s social fabric has gone for a big toss. Beyond repair, beyond hope.
This hijab issue in Karnataka state, like Love Jihad Law, is another foundation to express stiffness against democratic rights and volition of Muslim women. Such cases are merely not the manifestation of what legislators think anymore. It’s also a social outcome of people’s cognition against the agencies of Muslim women and their very existence.
Similarly, in the past, the oppressor caste had come for breast tax for lower caste women, and then the Mahar community was compelled to wear broom on the back so their footprints were wiped and a pot tied to the neck for collecting spittle so it does not impure the ground, is the nauseating and nostalgic episodes that can help us fully decode how minorities in India are ‘designed to experience’ exploitation, intimidation and nevertheless systemic oppression.
With all the above context said, here the pattern to suppress the Muslims, or Dalits, or Tribals, tell us the story that ‘embedded hate’ is not suddenly a contemporary case. In fact, it has been socially genetic and thus the brouhaha over ‘India’s democracy is a republic’ is gradually becoming a farce premise.
The Resume of today’s social nature
The infatuation for establishing Hindu Rashtra, a nation-state where the upper-caste shall enjoy more rights than the Hindu Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Tribals, or others, and even Women, is not altogether a newer concept. It has been running parallel with the so-called Independence period of the 1940s but it did not receive the opportunity to replace Constitution with Manusmriti. However, the recalls are now being made in some meso or meta forms and thus it’s anticipated that post-2024, if the ruling dispensation at the centre receives a third chance (the first in 2014 and the second in 2019), followed by the same inflationary genre of gravity and quantum to otherize minorities, India shall proselyte into Hindu Rashtra for once and all. Can say, the dunning-kruger effect and xenophobia are adding more fuel to the fire.
“In the eyes of the RSS, the Hindu Rashtra is a brahminical nation. The RSS wants to run the nation on this very base. In Hindu Rashtra, shudras will be slaves, & Muslims, heretics, women or foreigners, will be given second-class status.” — Bhanwar Meghwanshi, author of “I could not be a Hindu: a story of Dalit in RSS”
The health of India’s social capital is heading towards an ICU-like situation because it is being unchecked. The culture of accountability, dearth of judicial activism, crony capitalism, jingoism, casteist slurs, misogyny, and the mainstream media’s (aka godi media) vulturism is turning out to be the best-cum-worst recipe(s) to sustain the attitude of degrading the constitution’s preamble, decent node, and moral conversations, netiquettes, brotherhood, exogamy, and the spirit of patriotism.
The youth that comprises of huge demography, amid the challenges posed in last two years due to pandemic, have not only lost their jobs (as of December 2021, 53 million Indians are unemployed) and mental health but have become too prone to saffronisation. As we have seen in the cases of Sulli deals, Bulli bai, and Clubhouse hate chat, the accused/criminals are as old as 15 years and in between 18 years to 22 years, in which one admitted that watching one of the Godi media TV channels crooked his cognition. Holistically, this ‘manufacturing of hate’ proportionally benefits the oppressor and this ‘construction of otherization’ is being administered to proliferate and disseminate social apathy at the structure’s bottom.
Where do we head from here?
Nowhere. Perhaps, using a dictionary, I ratiocinate ‘dystopia’. The so-called collective conscience seems beyond repair or psychological healing. No scope for spiritual quotient, no basis for affirmation. Call me a cynic; when I see schools and education centers lacking the podium for sex education, I doubt to make a coherent case for deradicalization. Although the step by the govt. of Maharashtra and Kerala has been contextually undertaken to do so, but it can’t function on the top horizontal spaces. De-radicalisation can stop the ongoing imbecility and idiocy but it must come from the ground, from the responsible institutions, from social canvassing, and also from switching off toxic TV news channels or incoherent social media influencers.
And, never to forget, the family ‘WhatsApp’ groups that saffronize or poison the youth are majorly holding the onus to let their texts and contexts suit the ruling party’s agenda. It’s verily dawdling to reason with the ones who have made up their minds, but if we continue with the same dimension to let the youth stay saffronized, I and you can only feel pity, helpless, and rationally hopeless.
Note: This article was first published in Indian Periodical.
