Tag: Hindutva Hardline

Hindutva Propaganda Machinery At Work

By Amit Sengupta

As young journalists we learnt our basic lesson that when a dog bites a man it is not news, when a man bites a dog, it is. We also learnt that if a lie is told a thousand times, repeatedly and incessantly, as practiced by the Guderian Nazi propaganda machinery, it might indeed become an absolute truth. A lie becomes a truth. An organized web of lies, hence, turns into a grand bouquet of established legitimacy.

In contemporary India, this could truly be called the phenomena of post-truth of the new normal, though it might look like a theatre of the absurd at times. Or how fake news, pure propaganda, camouflaged as breaking news, or news repeated many times as partisan opinion, in a shrill, one-dimensional repeat-narrative on TV, sometimes with doctored videos, becomes the chronicle of a media prophecy foretold. Witness the demonization of JNU, its inherited intellectual, academic and progressive tradition, and the character assassination of its scholars and student leaders. (Ironically, this does not stop the huge rush of new students to the beautiful campus every new admission year.)

There is no dark irony here. This is exactly like in the Nazi times. That is the original template. It’s just that this entire mainline and fringe media apparatus, often operating as rabble-rousers, actually operate 24×7 to legitimize and reinforce the current power structure, its policies and programmes, its corporate lobbies and vested interests.

In the process, it reinforces the politics of a polarizing ideology and entrenched xenophobia, sectarian, anti-secular and hate rhetoric, and the hounding of dissenters, intellectuals, scholars, writers and journalists. So much so, the police version is most often the most sacrosanct and absolute version and status quo journalism is the only form they know and practice.

ALSO READ: JNU Will Not Crawl, Nor Bend

Witness the demonization and hounding of the Tablighis, finally proved null and void by a court. So much so, it was viciously circulated that Muslims actually spread Corona in India. Thus, a large mass of people in India can be quickly condemned as anti-nationals, urban Naxals, Maoists, Pakistani agents, and tukde-tukde gang, often even before the Indian State led by the BJP, has just about given an ambiguous signal.

This is the role the Rightwing and assorted media plays in India these days. Thereby, it unabashedly backs the State apparatus, benefits from the economic and profit linkages, is backed by the corporates who are backing the BJP openly, and thereby legitimizes the dominant discourse of the ruling regime.

This was the standard tactic used against the mothers and sisters of Shaheen Bagh not only in Jamia but all over the country before and during the nation-wide anti-NRC-CAA protests. It became integral to the repeated branding of a huge mass of unidentified people as “termites” in Northeast India and in Bengal, once again, with no evidence or documentation. Like the Jews in Europe reduced to third class citizens with no rights by the Nazis, one community was yet again targeted in India.

However, once the final data came out of the official NRC survey, it was found that lakhs of Hindus were missing too, and other indigenous communities, from the final register of Indian citizens. That put the termite theory to rest for the time being, though, let us not forget that Jews too were branded as pests, cockroaches, termites, dirty, diabolical, anti-Christ, so that the denial of citizenship, or the Holocaust, was accepted by the ‘pure races’ for ‘national purification’. This was also the American propaganda during the Vietnam War against the ‘unwashed masses and peasants’ who were fighting a protracted and victorious guerilla war against the most powerful militarized nation in the world.

In India, it all seems to be following a predictable pattern. The Rightwing media and other media propaganda outfits working openly or tacitly for the cult glorification of Narendra Modi as a messiah, prophet and demi-god, propagates the ideology of hard Hindutva (which is different from Hinduism), and thereby debunks or demonizes individuals and ideologies which are in opposition, which stand for the values of the Indian freedom struggle, or, the pluralist, secular Indian Constitution.

The Shahen Bagh movement wanted the reassertion of the Indian Constitution. Its symbols enshrined on their public platforms were icons of the freedom movement and secular India: Ambedkar, Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel, Subhash Chandra Bose, Khan Abdul Gaffer Khan, Sarojini Naidu, Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqullah Khan, Chandrashekhar Azad, Rabindranath Tagore, among others. However, they were constantly reduced to hate objects, implying that they are pro-Pakistan, jihadis, anti-nationals, and ‘gaddaars’, as a Union minister openly declared, asking them to be shot. This did not, however, help the BJP to win the Delhi state polls.

ALSO READ: When The Farmer Fights Back

This is the pattern they have again chosen, and abysmally failed, in handling the farmers’ protests. The sheer resilience of the farmers’ movement right now in lakhs from across several states in north and western India (and not only from Punjab and Haryana) on the various borders of Delhi, preparing for a Republic Day showdown, has debunked the BJP propaganda machinery. Even while one Union minister joined in the branding of farmers as Khalistanis, Maoists, Leftists and Urban (Turban!) Naxals, it just did not work.

The theory that the Sangh Parivar operates in multiple synthesis in a smooth orchestra like a hydra-headed octopus of a joint family, is true. Though, it sometimes gets jarring.

At one time, it was the symphony between the moderate and hard line of Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani. Journalists would then claim that the Hindutva fringe is different from mainstream, political BJP — so let’s not blur the lines. However, clearly, this theory has all but collapsed in the current one-dimensional scenario with Modi as the one and only supremo commanding over the entire Hindutva machinery, and the power structure of the partisan State apparatus, with Amit Shah as his trouble-shooter, and the RSS as his ally.

So much so, the line between the fringe and mainstream in the party and Sangh Parivar has totally merged. This has been witnessed by the rise of an extreme hardliner like Yogi Adityanath, who is now being followed as a role model by ‘moderates’ like Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh.

This paradigm shift in power has been lucidly translated between the fringe and mainstream media backing Modi like an eternal and only monarch of all that he surveys. One of these portals actually calls itself liberal and right of center. Others post stories which are like regular stories in a mainline English daily. However, it is the content, or the opinion between the lines, which is often insidious and tells us who is actually biting — the man or the dog!

For instance, one of them dug out other critical tweets of the former Group Captain of the Indian Air Force flying Go Air lines, who has been suspended for calling an anonymous PM ‘an idiot’. The portal is tacitly saying, look, this man has a bad record, etc!

In a spoofy irony, these pro-BJP portals are now going full blast against what they call the ‘Big Tech’ conspiracy, especially in America. They claim that these global, big money conglomerates are basically Left flunkeys. Why – because Donald Trump has been banned by Twitter and Facebook! This is censorship, not acceptable!

Their lament is heartbreaking. Suddenly, it seems that the Hindutva media has now opened yet another front against Big Tech American Capitalism, even while Modi has been called as the best buddy of two big Gujarati capitalists in India by the protesting farmers. Trump, surely, has his Proud Boys, even in India.

Love Jihad Lab: Isloate, Terrorise, Ghettoise Muslims

By Amit Sengupta

Love jihad was always a fringe phenomenon for hardline Hindutva. It was in the shadows. Since 2014, it has become mainstream, like mob-lynching. And in the current scenario, amazingly, it is becoming law.

The love jihad law, or the politics behind the law, is yet again brazenly transparent. The central theme and the hyperbolic pitch are to corner, isolate, ghettoise and terrorise the Muslim community, yet again, polarize the bitter ground reality across the caste system in the Hindi heartland and the cowbell derived from the basic principles of dominant Hindutva. It is also to divert public attention from basic issues on the ground: mass unemployment, economic collapse across the organized and unorganized sectors, the massive farmers’ struggle at the various borders of the national capital, and that there is no clear guarantee when the vaccine against the deadly virus will reach India effectively, even while it is being administered in millions across the UK and USA.

Besides, there is another favorite diversionary tactic of the BJP, which also consolidates its fringe and mainstream support base: First, it was the Ram Janmabhoomi temple complex in Ajodhya. Now, it is the mythical new Parliament complex of ‘New India’: you can call it the mythical Hindu rashtra, a work in progress under the patron saints positioned strategically in the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.

Despite the love jihad law being pushed in some BJP-ruled states, the laboratory is yet again Uttar Pradesh, which has brought in BJP overwhelming at the hustings with a radical Hindutva icon who celebrates authoritarian actions as a virtue, at the helm. UP is also the state which provides the largest number of Members of Parliament in the Lok Sabha polls.

ALSO READ: ‘After Love Jihad, BJP Will Rake Up Uniform Code’

Of late, it has moved away from the ‘social engineering’ of the post-Mandal wave, with the rise of the OBCs and the minorities as a consolidated vote bank, and has decisively turned towards the heady concoction of united Hindutva. The repeated victory of Narendra Modi from a holy place like Varanasi, revered by Hindus across India, is more than symbolic.

Indeed, the caste polarization of the post-Mandal era, in UP, for instance, where Dalits would align with the Savarnas and the upper castes, but refuse to have alliances with the powerful section of the OBCs, like the Yadavs, is all but over. Landed Yadavs, also politically powerful, were always seen as oppressors in UP by the Dalits, even while Brahmins chose to align with the power apparatus, from the Congress, to BSP, to BJP.

Now, with a Thakur calling the shots, and calling it loud and clear across the layers of the power structure, a section of the Brahmins, deprived of power, seems to be in a dilemma. So are the others in the other backward castes.

In that sense, it is quite possible, that the Hindutva agenda is yet again working on its dream sequence by invoking the sectarian and vicious politics of love jihad. The dream sequence rests on the principle that all Hindus, across the caste spectrum, or most of them, would unite under the dominant and polarizing umbrella of Hindutva, whereas the ‘internal enemy number one’, as traditional RSS documents would tell us, should be totally isolated.

Thereby, it serves two purposes: one, the huge population of Muslims cannot forge an alliance with other secular groups among the Hindu communities, and thereby constitute a formidable electoral base. And, second, by uniting most Hindu communities under one umbrella, the so-called ‘internal enemy number one’ and its vote base is rendered vulnerable, almost ineffective.

In other words, this is but the first step towards the consolidation of a strategic Hindu rashtra, very much like using Adivasis against the minorities to polarize and consolidate in states lie Gujarat and Jharkhand, and thereby compel the Adivasis, who are outside the caste system of Hinduism, to join the Hindu varna vyavastha, with all its social, cultural and hegemonic trappings.

This new brand of ‘social engineering’ was first experimented by the BJP in Western UP before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. And what was the heady and hallucinatory slogan used to achieve this successful polarization: yes, love jihad.

The fertile and prosperous green revolution belt of Western UP with its flowing mustard flowers, canal systems, sprawling sugar cane farms, sugar mills, and flourishing mandis, as in Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut, has always been a laid back zone of communal harmony and peace, with landed farmers across the kaleidoscope of religion prospering in the region. The landless Dalits or the poor Muslims and extremely backward castes were surely not so rich, but they were not starving either, or migrating en masse, as from Eastern UP or parts of Bihar.

ALSO READ: ‘Love Jihad Law Kills Beti Bachao Spirit’

Indeed, Dalits even own land in rural areas near Saharanpur, and the emergence of the confident mass of educated, young, modern and confident Dalits in the form of the Bhim Army, led by Chandraskhekar Azad, is a clear pointer about the changing political and social dynamics in Western UP. 

The BJP never really had any base in this region, barring among the traders and shopkeepers, which was politically under the shadow of the late Chaudhury Charan Singh, and his sons, who were the leaders of the dominant Jat community, almost always in alliance with Muslim farmers and other communities. There were no communal fissures, and no animosity against the Muslims, even while sections of Dalits chose to vote for Mayawati’s BSP. This was compulsively and effectively shattered by the violent politics of love jihad by the BJP and its rabble rousers in Western UP in 2014.

Indeed, it was fake, mostly based on rumours, with no evidence on the ground. Muslim boys were not running away with Hindu girls. It was all stage-managed propaganda, propagated by mouth and social media like whatsapp, with fake identities and fake stories, backed by huge Mahapanchayats of the BJP where the Muslims were frontally attacked. The laid-back green expanse had suddenly turned bitter and vicious, and it was yet again hate politics which became the dominant narrative in this peaceful zone.

A lot of violence, bloodshed and dead bodies later, around 60,000-plus Muslims were displaced from their traditional habitats. They took shelter in refugee camps, in collective phobia. Many of them just could not understand what hit them. Later, journalists and fact-finding teams, including women’s groups, also found scores of Muslim women raped. It was terrible and heart-breaking.

Post-2014, the wounds seem to be healing, and the polarization has not sustained. Fake news has dismantled again and again. The politics of hate and violence, camouflaged under the propaganda of love jihad, seems to have subsided. The lost era of peaceful coexistence and harmony seemed to be gradually returning. And love jihad seems as much a figment of imagination, as the ‘acche din’ promised by Modi before 2014.

The united kisan movement in Western UP, post lockdown, has also played a major role in bridging the social fissures. The movement is growing stronger against the three central farm bills, and most factions of the Bharatiya Kisan Union has united in the struggle. Love jihad is not working here on the ground.

Indeed, in the three recent cases in UP, reportedly triggered by Bajrang Dal vigilantes, with the administration predictably following a set pattern, the love jihad propaganda has fallen flat. In contrast, love seems to have won over hate again, despite the angst, the suffering, and the violence, psychological and physical. Indeed, even parents have stood up for the idea of love, and have debunked the claim of love jihad.

Surely, India, and its cowbelt power apparatus, might find it a lucrative enterprise to float such divisive and discriminatory concepts, once seen in Europe when the Nazis came in with Jews targeted in all walks of life. However, the younger generations are not going to buy it anymore. Hopefully so.

Surely, they would want love, and an eternally happy life in togetherness. And they must get it. That will be a true victory of the purity and endurance of love, over the politics of hate.