Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | India’s reality & theory amid US supremacism

The incident highlights the challenge which India faces even after 77 years of Independence of reconciling reality with theory. It followed hard on the heels of a more consequential spat between India and the United States on the treatment of Muslims by Narendra Modi’s National Democratic Alliance government, in which his Bharatiya Janata Party remains the dominant voice even though the evidence points to its diminished hold on the loyalty of voters.

The Muslim angle is one element in this story. American supremacism is another. The strident tendency to dictate the rules of a so-called rules-based world order prompted an involuntary spurt of irritation when I read of the adverse comments on religious freedom in India by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an organisation with which New Delhi has crossed swords in the past. It was even more galling to hear Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, criticising the “increase in anti-conversion laws, hate speech, demolitions of homes and places of worship for members of minority faith communities” in India.

Not that I was denying the charges. But does India’s secularism need a foreign certificate? Why should faraway Americans, I asked myself, sit in judgment on our domestic conditions. It’s no secret that Washington invoked the sacred cause of democracy during the Cold War years to arm dictatorships like Pakistan, Iran or the Philippines when the principal purpose of US foreign policy was to upstage the Soviet Union. Or that it wakes up to human rights abuses in Tibet or Xinjiang only when it has a bilateral bone to pick with Beijing. Even now, the US is doing precious little to arrest Israel’s brutal campaign against the Palestinians whom Mr Owaisi supports (as do millions of other Indians, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian alike) even though Washington alone can call a halt to Benjamin Netanyahu’s fanatical murderousness.

But more sobering second thoughts followed my initial rebellious reaction. A military-industrial complex (to use the term that Dwight D. Eisenhower made famous in 1961) like the United States has interests to protect with force as well as diplomatic dexterity. As another American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, supposedly remarked in 1939 of Anastasio Somoza García, the ruthless dictator of Nicaragua from 1936 until his assassination in 1956 and whose family controlled Central America’s largest country as a family bailiwick for 42 years, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.

Such refreshing candour -- unheard of in India’s political dialogue – doesn’t make the practices it describes any more respectable. More to the point, American frailties and foibles are no reason for glossing over evils that are endemic in our society, preventing the social integration that India desperately needs. The communal prejudice that USCIRF and Mr Blinken highlighted may have become more blatant since Mr Modi first took office at the Centre in 2014.

But leaving aside a sorry string of Hindu-Muslim riots in colonial times which we like to think were a product of Britin’s divide-and-rule strategy, who can forget the Jan Sangh stalwart from UP, Om Prakash Tyagi, who introduced a Freedom of Religion Bill in the Lok Sabha in 1978 as a private member’s measure to outlaw conversions through “force”, “fraud” or “inducement”?

That was a precursor to today’s campaigns against so-called “love jihad” and for “gau rakshak” (cow protection). Both are responsible for innumerable lynchings, murders, persecutions and terrorisation in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and elsewhere.

Bishops, priests and even Mother Teresa opposed had Tyagi’s measure. Among its lusty supporters were organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its Pratinidhi Sabha, and even two retired high court judges. The BJP’s recent choice as chief minister of Odisha of Mohan Charan Majhi is a reminder of those times: Mr Majhi has campaigned for the release of the one-time Bajrang Dal activist, Dara Singh, who is serving a life sentence for the gruesome 1999 murder of an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, who ran a home for lepers in Odisha, and his two little sons, aged ten and only six. Singh led a mob that set fire to the vehicle in which the three Staines males were sleeping so that they were all burned to death. Singh was also convicted in two other murder cases -- of another Christian missionary and a Muslim trader.

Christians like the Staines family are too few and too unimportant to matter to the mob. But 200 million Muslims comprising more than 14 per cent of the population are an altogether different matter. They appear to provoke the visceral hatred of some of the seniormost leaders of the ruling establishment who possibly see them as an embodiment of the twelve hundred years of slavery in India’s life on which Mr Modi harps. The TV image of the Prime Minister rejecting a venerable Muslim’s courtesy gift of cap and scarf is not easily forgotten. The mockery of his references to Sonia Gandhi’s former political secretary, the late Ahmedbhai Mohammedbhai Patel, as “Ahmed Mian”, also remains. The Gandhi family was often jeered at as “Mughals”. Now that Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition, is too august a personage to be dismissed as “Pappu”, one wonders whether Mr Modi will also abandon the contemptuously used Islamic nickname of “Shehzada”.

What makes this mockery particularly cruel is that, according to all surveys, India’s Muslims lag behind the rest in all relevant matters like education, employment and earnings. Any actual or perceived concession shown to them at once prompts howls of “appeasement”! It was part of the BJP’s election campaign to claim that the Opposition parties, particularly Mr Gandhi’s Congress, were bent on abolishing places in schools, colleges and employment reserved for Dalits, Adivasis and the various backward categories and diverting them to Muslims. The tactic misfired. That doesn’t mean it won’t be tried again, albeit in some other guise.