Almost 100 years ago in Young India, Mahatma Gandhi presciently wrote that “in spite of a multitude of separate jurisdictions, our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our civilization.”
Looking at 75 years after India’s independence, the results are far from desirable. The country is lurching into election season (five states go to the polls this month, with two more later in the year) amidst an ugly conflagration of the politics of division, exclusion, and bigotry. Whatever emerges from this toxic cauldron of resentments will be very far from the aspirations of the “father of the nation.”
The latest incident dominating headlines took place earlier this week in and around Udupi, the bustling district on Karnataka’s coastline famous for its delicious food, where there have been weeks of stalemate between students who wear the hijab, and their government-run women’s college which suddenly declared the head covering was “not part of the uniform.”
Riding her scooter into her own college on February 8, the 19-year-old aspiring lawyer Muskan Khan could never have anticipated what would happen next. In the video that went viral within hours of the incident, she was filmed parking her vehicle and striding to the college entrance to -- as she told the media later -- hand in her assignment for the day.
Khan walks with confidence, but glances warily to her left. In a trice, the camera shows her mobbed by an unending stream of men wearing saffron scarves, and shouting “Jai Shri Ram” (or “victory to Lord Ram”). Anger flashes unmistakably in her eyes, but the young woman is visibly undaunted, and then -- in an indelibly powerful image -- she lifts her arm in defiance to shout “Allahu Akbar.”
That footage set social media on fire. Veteran news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai responded quickly: “A new video from [Karnataka] shows a young student in a hijab being chased by Jai Shri Ram slogan shouting men. This is what bigotry does to a nation: Divides us on dress, food, and religion. When we should be worries[sic] about jobs for [the] young, we focus on their dress! Shameful. #HijabRow”
A couple of hours later, Sardesai tweeted again with an important insight: “The harassed girl in [the] video shout Allah u Akbar as boys continue to scream Jai Shri Ram and follow her. Other videos show stone pelting between 2 groups. Simple Qs: [W]here are [the Karnataka] cops in all this? Unless ahead of UP elections, someone wants religious divide to escalate?”
This is an essential point. The first phase of elections began yesterday in Uttar Pradesh, the giant polity of over 200 million citizens at the heart of Indian democracy. It is widely perceived that whoever rules UP will inevitably control New Delhi, and it’s also generally understood that the current chief minister Ajay Bisht of the BJP (this monk-turned-politician is usually referred to by his religious title as Yogi Adityanath) is at severe risk of losing this campaign.
“We are seeing today that the UP elections have become extraordinarily important for the BJP,” said Dushyant Dave, the former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, to news anchor Faye D’Souza on February 8. “The feeling that is coming from UP is [that] the tide is turning against the BJP. It knows that if it loses then it is likely to lose the [national] elections in 2024. Karnataka is a laboratory for UP. These footages of what is happening in Karnataka are actually meant for the crowds in Uttar Pradesh. I have no doubt that social media across the state is circulating them with a vengeance.”
Nonetheless, even if the proximate cause of this week’s flare-up is cynical political expediency, what is happening in Udupi also illustrates deeply worrisome broader trends.
“These events show us how deep the radicalization has spread in Hindu society,” says Samar Halarnkar, the editor of Article 14, a website focused on research and reportage on issues related to the rule of law in India.
Halarnkar is based in the capital of Karnataka in Bengaluru. He told me he’s especially worried by how radicalized young people seem to have become by fundamentalist organizations “nurtured and empowered by the entire ecosystem around India’s ruling party and its spiritual mentor, the RSS.”
Pointing out that “coastal Karnataka has been ground zero for their experimentation over many years,” Halarnkar says, “it is a very highly literate area, with literacy well over 90%, and one of India’s most well-educated regions, so whenever people say that fundamentalism tends to decrease with literacy, I think this is clear evidence that it does not.”
That last fact is particularly telling, because Karnataka has come to symbolize Indian aspirations, with its booming multinational information technology industries touted as perhaps the country’s greatest achievement since 1947. The logic is inexorable: If society can fall apart so thoroughly there, what hope is there anywhere else? Even more to the point, what has happened to rule of law in India, let alone the ostensibly sacred guarantees that are enshrined in the country’s founding documents?
“As a mother, I would be incredibly proud of [Muskan Khan’s] extraordinary and spontaneous act of courage,” says Rakhshanda Jalil, the distinguished writer, critic, translator, and literary historian, whose brilliant 2019 book But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim is an invaluable explainer of India’s contemporary cultural politics.
Jalil told me, “I don’t wear the hijab and am not in favour of it. But I respect the right of those who choose to wear it. Personally, I don’t think the wearing of hijab is part of Islam. But what’s happening in Karnataka is not about the hijab. It’s about demonizing, heckling, shaming a community, pushing it into a corner. I find that deeply problematic at many levels, chief among them being that it violates the right to education and the essential freedom of choice enshrined in the constitution of India.”
Vivek Menezes is a writer based in Goa, India.
