When Operation Sindoor exposed the dysfunction of Hindutva

When India needed to project national unity and women’s empowerment as a token of democratic modernity, the government embraced what Hindutva hates

When Operation Sindoor exposed the dysfunction of Hindutva

T K Arun

When the government deployed Colonel Sofia Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh to brief the media on Operation Sindoor, the choice involved gender as well as faith, and sent out two unstated messages. The first was that India is a country in which women play important roles in public life, including in the armed forces that punish perpetrators of terrorist attacks. The other was that India stands united in confronting threats to the nation, the unity transcending religious and other divides.

These are wholesome messages that need to be amplified internally within the polity. Sectarian politics is not just bad optics but self-destructive as well.

Choice of a Muslim officer and a Hindu officer to brief the world on India’s attack on terror infrastructure in Pakistan was also, simultaneously, an admission that the politics of Hindutva, is not fit to be displayed before the world. Hindutva pits Hindus against Muslims, and portrays Muslims as anti-national elements constituting a Pakistani Fifth Column.

The politics of Hindutva seeks to redefine Indian nationhood as being Hindu, moving away from non-denominational democratic unity for a better life in the world’s most diverse polity, as conceived in the Constitution. If being Hindu is the essence of Indian nationhood, then non-Hindus must be less than full citizens.

In seminar halls and coffee houses, Hindutva’s denial of equality to non-Hindu minorities is allowed to remain a logical implication, to be discussed in anaemic terms such as cultural nationalism and alien ideological bias in the social sciences.

In Parliament, it gets to work embedding the value in law, amending the Waqf Act or the Citizenship Act. On the street, the ruthless political implication of unequal citizenship turns full-blooded, with ringing cries to boycott Muslim business and chase Muslim traders out of localities. Crazed priests in saffron preach ethnic cleansing at so-called religious gatherings. Social media campaigns seek to liberate Hindi movies from enchantment by evil sorcerers, the Khans. Political entrepreneurs divine ancient Hindu idols and temples buried under mosques of their locality, and petition the courts to carry out surveys, while fracturing the populace on religious lines.

Someone in thrall to this politics reacted to the Pahalgam terror attack by shooting dead a Muslim biriyani seller in Uttar Pradesh, giving lethal expression to the Hindutva training that Muslims are enemies, Pakistanis and potential terrorists. A minister in BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh described Col Sofiya Qureshi as a ‘terrorist sister’, while praising Prime Minister Modi for his sagacity and skill in sending Muslim soldiers to attack terrorists.

Hindutva politics also promotes jingoism, irrational disregard for evidence and logic. India invented planes and plastic surgery, not just chess and the concept of zero. India was the most advanced place on earth, milk and honey flowed across the land, till Muslim invaders destroyed everything, and the Europeans colonised a weakened India.

Anyone who disputes this thesis is an anti-national. Hindutva practitioners promote hate speech, and troll those who dare to think mere facts and logic are enough to dispute their claims. The combination of jingoism and vitriolic intolerance promoted by Hindutva practitioners was in full flow in the reaction to foreign secretary Vikram Misri’s announcement of India’s decision to cease fire, following the Pakistani offer to cease fire.

The rise of Hindutva politics had been facilitated by grievous faults in the politics practised by the self-styled champions of secularism, in their pursuit of power. Democracy protects minority rights. In the name of protecting minority rights, the political leadership patronised customs and practices among Muslims that violated core democratic principles.

At the time of Independence, India was a nation mostly of illiterate, malnourished, sickly people chained into deprivation by a highly unequal distribution of assets, chiefly land, and a social structure that debarred social mobility on avowed cosmological principles of karma and rebirth. The social structure and its associated culture and values spread to, and infused, non-Hindu religions of the subcontinent, as well.

Some of these people moved to Pakistan. The Muslims who stayed back in India had a thin layer of the elite exposed to modernity. This elite learned fast that they could present themselves as leaders of the community, and extract concessions from the political process. As the increasingly complex process of pursuing and retaining power pushed all thought of the redemptive mission to which political power was originally conceived as the means, Indian democracy degraded into politics of patronage.

As self-styled champions of secular politics patronised and reinforced pre-modern values and practices in return for vote bank support, it provided room for Hindutva forces to portray protection of minority rights as minority appeasement, pure and simple. Ineffective governance and policies that outlived their utility thwarted broad-based growth.

When India embraced globalised growth, it opened the doors to new possibilities of advance. The proportion of the population empowered, however imperfectly, to make use of new opportunities was far greater in India, thanks to relatively more functional democracy here, than in Pakistan. India prospered far more than Pakistan could.

Sections of India, already privileged in terms of wealth, and cultural and social capital, advanced far more than the rest. Aspirations outstripped the capacity – individual as well as systemic -- to achieve them. Discontent and frustration form a combustible mixture that skilled politicians can ignite to propel their rise. Hindutva politics has tapped this source better than anyone else, and its practitioners paint past politics, with its minority appeasement, as the enemy.

They are in power. But when crisis strikes, and the nation has to respond to an external threat, they are forced to accept that the divisive politics of Hindutva is not what the nation requires, or will draw world support.

The press briefings by Col Qureshi and Wing Commander Singh offer a moment of clarity. May we have the sense to grasp it, and stop viewing the world and our location in it through the distorting diffracting prism of Hindutva, and regain India’s cultural genius for acceptance of diversity, transcending mere tolerance.