When One Group Spreads Hatred, And The Rest Just Engage In Their Everyday Work, We Know We’ve Matured

As media platforms fall over one another, to showcase ugly, frenzied episodes of open hatred, following the Citizenship Act’s amendment, it is perhaps time we took a moment to study the ongoing protests objectively.

Consider the buildup first:

When the 2019 general election results were announced, it was said that the people’s mandate was betrayed. Don’t ask by whom, or how, or why, but subtle, insidious efforts were nevertheless initiated, to depict the mandate as Hindu-majoritarian (whatever that meant).

With summer on, and schools reopening, it didn’t gather much traction, by which, the only meritorious achievement was that a brief, initial honeymoon period, traditionally accorded by convention to freshly-elected governments, was denied to Narendra Modi. Big deal.

When Articles 370 and 35-A were abrogated, subtlety evolved into ressentiment (meaning hostility generated by an inability to change a prevailing situation; in this case, a pathetic lack of the popular mandate). Voices grew more strident.

The move was contested. But domestic accusations of it being anti-Muslim were sadly drowned by the protestations of Pakistan. That was an unexpected setback to the kings and queens of cavil, because sounding like the enemy is never a winning ticket.

By the time the Supreme Court awarded the entire disputed site at Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya to Hindu parties, the masks were in full slip. Ressentiment was replaced with open acrimony.

Indeed, a leading political scientist execrably accused the court of mendacity (deliberate untruthfulness), while a politician petulantly asked for his mosque back. But the momentum of that effort couldn’t be sustained either, because the court rejected all review pleas in one go!

Then came a chance for a fourth attempt – the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Evidently, practice also makes perfect, because this time, acrimony was successfully supplanted by hatred. It was riots, riots, glorious riots everywhere.

Arson, vandalism, loot, clips of apparent police brutality; we got all that and more in high definition wide screen fury. We even got a pair of Malayalee Jamia ‘Sheroes’ (don’t gag; they’ll stick feminism into anything these days!).

But strangely, while we progressed from subtlety to ressentiment to acrimony to hatred, what we didn’t get in four major attempts was a communal riot. Now why is that?

Consider the situation:

Take Ahmedabad for example: television channels were filled with clips of a crazed mob pelting stones at a tiny clutch of luckless policemen in the city’s predominantly-Muslim Shah Alam area.

Twenty years ago, the city would have been locked under tight curfew. Fearing arsonists and looters, traders would have moved costly goods from their shops to their homes. The army would have been called out. Armed columns would have marched through the narrow streets of the old city area.

But this time, there was no response from any civilian quarter. Instead, the city merely continued with its humdrum bustle. Children went to school. People went to work. A famous ice-cream brand announced a new flavour. The point is that Ahmedabad had moved on, leaving the rioters and their instigators looking (and probably feeling) rather foolish.

In Bangalore, ॐ, the sacred symbol ‘Om’, was redrawn on a protest poster to look like a Nazi symbol. Without doubt, it was deeply offensive. It was also doubtlessly creative, but counter-productive, because again, there was no communal violence.

Instead, the image was circulated widely as a mark of left-liberal perfidy, and a larger number of disparate Hindus were gifted a reason to bond over.

Till not too long ago, communal riots in Uttar Pradesh had started for reasons as absurd as a drunk falling into a gutter and cracking his skull. On the contrary, today, the press has reported repeated instances of violent conflagrations across the state – but not one whiff of a communal incident.

Regarding our two ladies from Malabar, instead of showering our ‘sheroes’ with choice expletives, good old-fashioned journalism unearthed that they were, in fact, fairly rabid fanatics, and serial protesters, with a knack of being at the right riot in the right light, for the right image of unquenchable anguish.

To add insult to our valiant ladies’ moral injuries, these investigations were greatly aided by acerbic, wit-laden crowd-sources online.

Now this is a genuine problem for our neo-Guevaras. One may be a revolutionary. One may advocate serious causes. One may agitate relentlessly. But to be rendered inconsequential by one’s own sententiousness, and that too by intellectually inferior youngsters who can’t stop laughing?

Too much, because, one does not protest to be jeered at. One can take the blow of a lathi, but not guffaws! Yet, this is the reductio ad absurdum of their arguments, for if anger and hatred are being fuelled across digital platforms, so is the sparkling wit of heady, youthful cynicism.

And there is no escape from this new generation, who, having understood that interlocution is futile, also learnt that jesting trivializations are better for neutralizing obdurate opponents.

What is the story here, then? Believe it or not, it is that India has matured, and grown more confident of her multiple, overlapping, sometimes-contradictory, collective, civilisational identities.

We’ve reached a stage where a display of hatred is actually seen as something useful, because it cuts through the miasmic veils of hypocrisy, and hackneyed sugar-coated platitudes.

Hatred clarifies, leaving little place for ambiguity. Hatred is a message without grammatical errors. And best of all, hatred is honest. You don’t need to play ‘twenty questions’ or Botticelli, when the answer is screaming itself in your face!

So, let the television screens replay scenes of judiciously-orchestrated violent protests, over and over again. It makes no difference. Let the forked tongues hiss their mesmerizing spells. They have no effect.

Of course, people would undoubtedly worry that the ongoing vandalism might hurt society, because there are hotheads everywhere. Their fears are not entirely misplaced, and administrations nation-wide are expected to be on their guard, to prevent an outbreak of communal clashes.

Yet, in reality, the actual outcome of the current protests will be to divide a relatively small section of society further into two: the privileged few, who can afford to express hatred, and, the underprivileged many, who have simply too much goodness within to ever feel that way.

And from that division will emerge a divergence, which will be reflected electorally – a section which finally accepts an India of ideas, and a smaller rump which never will. That is democracy.