BEHIND COERCION’S APPEAL
The demise, during the final days of 2024, of the former U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, and the former prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, elicited many thoughtful tributes. Among the pieces that struck me were Sushil Aaron’s “The Indisputable Greatness of Jimmy Carter” in the Indian portal, TheWire.in, and Harish Khare’s article about Dr. Singh in Kolkata’s Telegraph, “Meritocrat of Shining Decency, Steely Resolve.”
But the column I’m writing on this last day of 2024 is about an incident that occurred six days ago (on Christmas day) in the city of Patna in eastern India. The capital of Bihar (one of India’s most crowded states, holding about 130 million people), Patna was known in ancient times as Pataliputra. It was from Pataliputra that Ashoka ruled his great empire two centuries or so before the start of the common era, and it was from there, i.e. from Patna, that Ashoka caused his unique edicts to be chiseled on rocks and pillars across his subcontinental territories.
A great complex named after Ashoka that has come up in Patna within the last few years contains, among other features, a mammoth Bapu auditorium (capacity 5,000), its name borrowed from the informal and popular moniker Indians have long used for Mahatma Gandhi. As anyone can guess, “Bapu” means “father”. On the day of Christmas that has just passed, a meeting was held in that auditorium to remember a former Indian prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who died in 2018 but whose birth had taken place exactly one hundred years earlier, i.e. on the day of Christmas in 1924.
A captivating orator in Hindi and a poet as well, Vajpayee belonged to the BJP, the party of Narendra Modi, who has been India’s prime minister from 2014. Between 1998 and 2004, Vajpayee headed a coalition government of which the BJP was the largest component. Compared with Modi, Vajpayee was a good deal more liberal, tolerant, and democratic.
ISHWAR AND ALLAH
At the Bapu Auditorium event for celebrating Vajpayee’s birth centenary, Devi, one of Bihar’s greatly loved singers, was invited to present a couple of numbers. She sang one of Gandhi’s favorites, the prayer-song Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram. When she started rendering the song’s second stanza, with its opening line, Ishwar Allah Tero Naam (“Ishwar and Allah are your names”), a section of the crowd angrily shouted their hostility.
No one asked the shouters to calm down. Instead, BJP activists came to the stage and asked Devi to terminate her prayer-song and say “sorry” to the audience.
As jeers from the angry section continued, Devi said: “See, I have sung this song for Lord Ram and all of you know that our Indian culture – please give me two minutes, and you will see my heart is very big – only we Hindus assimilate everyone within us. And I think there is no need for you to be hurt by this song, but if you have been hurt, I would like to say sorry for that. But I want to say that in our Hindu religion it is said, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam [the world is a family] ...”
INTIMIDATION & COERCION
Thus it was that in Patna’s Bapu Auditorium, part of a grand complex named after the great king Ashoka, whose call for tolerating varied beliefs may still be seen on ancient rocks, one of contemporary Bihar’s most loved singers was silenced, humiliated, and in effect pushed out for daring to say that, like Ram and Ishwar, Allah too is God’s name.
Strong criticisms of the verbal attack on Devi were later voiced, including by a few BJP leaders in Bihar, and sharper ones by opposition leaders, including Lalu Prasad Yadav, a former chief minister of Bihar, and the Congress Party’s Priyanka Gandhi, who has been freshly elected to the Indian parliament. Devi herself also spoke out. But Narendra Modi said nothing. Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, whose Bihar-centric party, earlier opposed to the BJP, is currently in alliance with it, also remained silent. Intolerance, intimidation, and coercion are permissible exercises in today’s India.
Noting this, we should also ask why two syllables, Al-lah, provoke in some Indians a hostility so fierce that it refuses to spare today’s loved singer Devi. Or yesterday’s popular leader Vajpayee. Or Bapu Gandhi, who was killed in 1948 for wanting Hindu-Muslim friendship, whose life and work launched India’s journey as an independent democracy, and who is still called the father of the nation. Or Emperor Ashoka, who lived more than two millennia ago. Yes, these angry Indians dislike Muslims. They cannot bear to see a Muslim name for a road, town, or monument. They cannot bear to hear any sound in India’s most-spoken language, Hindi, that may recall, because of the sound’s association with Persian or Arabic, unpleasant realities from long-ago history. Including the fact that Muslims from neighbouring lands had once or twice defeated native kings and managed to rule India. Or the fact that some Muslim rulers had been oppressive.
“It may be a name for God, but Allah too is a ‘foreign’ name and a reminder of past defeats. Our ears will refuse to hear it. And of course we hate Gandhi, and all his associates, Nehru especially, and we hate Ambedkar, the architect of India’s Constitution. Why did they accept Muslims as India’s citizens? Not only citizens but equal citizens!!”
Unfortunately for these angry men and women, signs or sounds that bring a reminder of Muslim existence today, or of Muslim influence yesterday, are ubiquitous. Being part of India’s DNA, these syllables and signs are also irremovable. After all the very names of some of India’s best-known Hindu nationalists are of “foreign” or “Muslim” origin. After all, moreover, Muslims have made India their home for more than 1,200 years.
BEHIND THE HATRED
Two conclusions seem inescapable. One is that the past, no matter how unpleasant, cannot be wished away. It has to be accepted, with all its pluses and minuses. The second conclusion is that behind the hatred of Muslims, and of supposedly “Muslim” sounds and signs, there exists a kind of self-loathing. “Why did we or our ancestors allow outsiders to defeat us, rule over us, influence us?”
“After Ashoka (ca. 200 BCE), in all of India’s long history, why did only outsiders, not Indians, manage to establish large and durable all-India states – the Mughals from 1526 to 1803, and the British from 1757 to 1947?”
The feeling of disappointment, regret, or shame that prompts such questions is also what makes the childlike notion of being gurus to the world so attractive to Hindu nationalists, and what turns that notion into a subject for serious discussion. If we are Hindu nationalists, we love being told that we possess what the world needs. We exaggerate the qualified praise that foreigners sometimes offer to India or Indians. We also think that a sentence such as “this is not an era for war”, which Modi uttered eighteen months after Russia had attacked Ukraine, was proof of some kind of global leadership. When by rotation the chairmanship of a group like G-20 came to us, as it came or will come to all the 20 nations, we swallowed the pleasing illusion that our global leadership had been recognized.
THE FLAW IS GLOBAL
India will one day recognize the silliness of the hostility that was manifested on December 25 against the singer Devi, against Gandhi, against Ashoka, and against the Muslims of India and of other lands. Meanwhile let us recognize that there are counterparts of this silliness or sickness in virtually every country. Identifying one group of people -- migrants, Blacks, Asians, Africans, Muslims, Hindus, whatever -- as the major cause or source of today’s serious problems carries wide appeal. It offers a neat explanation and it exculpates “us”.
As far as India is concerned, the flaw of which I have written is only a small part of the country’s reality. The people of India, including the Hindus, who form 80 percent of the population, possess fine qualities and gifts. The success of Indians in the tech world and in the world of medical care is known across the globe. Within India, the helpfulness of the everyday Indian can be noticed almost every minute -- helpfulness towards the elderly, of course, helping with bags when a shelf is too high, and in other ways, but to the non-elderly as well, and to strangers when they turn up unexpectedly in a village.
Is it crazy to think that helpfulness will defeat silliness?
