In the nation’s capital spilling over with so-called leaders, it was only 74-year-old Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who showed up on Wednesday to defend the rule of law against bulldozers defying a Supreme Court order to stop demolishing allegedly illegal encroachments in Jahangirpuri.
Four days earlier, the area had experienced some unrest, which was reported as hostilities between Hindus and Muslims. But when 20 arrests were made, all were Muslims, and Deepak Pathak, the commissioner of Police, said only that “more action will be taken later.”
On Wednesday morning, however, after the New Delhi unit chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wrote to the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (which his party controls) to demand that allegedly, illegal constructions of “the rioters” should be demolished, bulldozers were despatched to Jahangirpuri.
That is when the Supreme Court was alerted by senior advocate Dushyant Dave: “Something serious requires your immediate intervention. This is about a completely unconstitutional and illegal demolition which has been ordered in the Jahangirpuri area, where riots took place last week. No notice has been served.”
The bench responded promptly -- “maintain status quo” -- but the destruction kept going until Karat physically placed herself in its path, waving a copy of the court ruling in her hand. “Nobody in the country is safe from the bulldozer,” said the veteran campaigner later. “I don’t think as citizens that we can sit back, because this affects each of us.”
There were similarly alarmed reactions from across the opposition spectrum. Akhilesh Yadav -- whose Samajwadi Party was comprehensively beaten by the BJP in this year’s Uttar Pradesh elections -- tweeted that the party “should make the bulldozer its symbol.”
Yadav said “the BJP has made the bulldozer a symbol of its illegal power. Muslims and other minorities, backward and Dalits are on its target. Now even Hindus are becoming victims of their hysteria. The BJP is actually running this bulldozer on the [c]onstitution itself.”
Speaking in New Delhi, the Aam Admi Party (AAP) leader Atishi Marlena said “bulldozers should be run on the BJP headquarters and on the residence of [home minister] Amit Shah. After this, riots will not happen in this country.”
Marlena rather startlingly contended that “The BJP is saying violence, riots, and hooliganism will stop by running bulldozers and removing encroachments. But actually, the BJP itself is engineering hooliganism, violence, and riots not just in Delhi, but across the country.”
This novel -- and highly dubious -- conspiracy theory was elaborated on by another AAP spokesman, Saurabh Bhardwaj: “The BJP government at the centre got Rohingya and Bangladeshis illegally settled in different parts of the country in the last eight years. The state governments could not have done it as only the [c]entre can bring them inside the country. We believe that the BJP has got them settled at various places with the sole motive of engineering riots, using them.”
AAP’s cynical tack to converge with the ruling party’s bludgeoning majoritarianism has been apparent for years. But even then, these comments set another new low.
As Pratik Sinha, the co-founder of @AltNews, put it on Twitter: “Every prominent AAP leader is using the dog-whistle of “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya” in their choreographed statements. Almost as if the “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingya” belong to a sub-human category. Shameful utterances.”
What hope can there be for a country where the opposition and ruling party are in lockstep in this manner, with the supposedly independent media also nakedly cheerleading for bloodshed? The veteran news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai voiced what was on many people’s minds in this “late night musing” on Twitter: “[T]he glee with which the affluent watch homes of the poor demolished without notice or due process tells us a lot about who we are as a society, or maybe what we have become. Not just in Jahangirpuri but also across more remote corners of the country. THINK.”
Sanjoy Roy -- he is the managing director of Teamwork Arts, which produced the blockbuster Jaipur Literature Festival --tweeted even more pithily: “Being silent is being complicit. #Stopthehatred #JahagirpuriViolence.”
To that message, Roy added a Time Magazine story about Kristallnacht, the 1938 “Night of Broken Glass” that signalled the beginning of the Nazi regime’s deadly campaign against Jews in Germany, which led directly to the murder of millions, effectively extinguishing the previously flourishing Jewish strand of European life and culture.
Can anything remotely like that happen in India, home to over 200 million Muslims (which is 11% of the world’s population)? Certainly not, and it is irresponsible to even suggest as much. Nonetheless, it is of paramount importance to recognize and heed the warnings of experienced observers like Pratap Bhanu Mehta, whose latest Indian Express column makes for very sobering reading.
Mehta writes that “the orgies of hate and prejudice are not aberrations. They are now the norm. They are the norm because the highest levels of political authority, including the prime minister, by silences or dog whistles, condone it. They are the norm because elites openly spout it, without shame. They are the norm because being communal in some ways has become almost a necessary condition of political advancement and is fast becoming the default common sense of civil society.”
An extremely grim scenario is taking shape, says Mehta because “almost all the preconditions for widespread pogrom-type violence are now in place in India. You almost dread the thought that India has reached a point where the question is not “if” but “when.””
Mehta asks, “what else would you call the widespread acceptance of vile prejudice, the dismantling of any semblance of conscience, the alignment of the state with majoritarian power, the complete effacement of the individual by imposed communal identification, the self-justification of the majority that has cloaked itself as the victim, the total contempt for rights, the glorification of violence, the search for the slightest pretext for revenge, and the radical othering of minorities?”
His distressing conclusion: “Even Hanuman Jayanti is not the deliverance from evil but us hurtling into it, with eyes wide open.”
Vivek Menezes is a writer and photographer based in Goa, India.
