Who and What is Indian? |
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Like with any deeply divided society, no sentiment is more contentious and polarising than our sense of who or what is Indian. The worst among us have arrogated the right to decide who belongs and who does not, by weaponising religious identity to segregate ‘us’ from ‘them’. It has now become an everyday disputation that has wrecked social harmony.
A few days back, the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma engaged in the most scurrilous attack on Bengali-speaking “Miya Muslims”, branding them Bangladeshi intruders and not Indian, urging people to give them hell and drive them out. He even made the diabolical suggestion that the poorest among them – the rickshaw pullers – should be intentionally short-changed.
If that was not shocking enough, the BJP released a devilishly suggestive video of Sarma aiming a rifle at two men in skullcaps with hate-filled posts, such as “No mercy to Bangladeshis”, as backdrop. Time and again, he has demonstrated that human depravity has no limits. But what’s terrifying is that such wickedness is electorally productive in today’s India.
Even the saints, long dead, have not been spared the malign wrath of the bigots. On January 24, the century-old shrine of mystic poet and reformer Baba Bulleh Shah in Mussoorie was vandalised and completely destroyed along with two nearby shrines. The leader of the vandals, Pinky Chaudhary was brazenly candid: “My Hindu Raksha Dal team today sent Bulleh Shah, who was in Devbhoomi for 70 years, back to Pakistan.”
In their reckoning, the Devbhoomi has no place for the non-Hindu, past or present!
In this benighted time, there have been a string of cases of Kashmiri shawl hawkers in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Haryana being harassed and brutally beaten by right-wing goons for the simple ‘crime’ of being Muslim. The perpetrators act with impunity because they feel protected by the state which, at best, registers FIRs against ‘unknown........