Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics by Zoya Hasan

Author:Zoya Hasan [Hasan, Zoya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

The truth is that the Home Ministry rejected the CVB, fearing a Hindu backlash.

Following 2014, the major episodes of mass violence had given way to vigilante violence against individuals. Most of these were not spontaneous acts of violence; systematic planning usually lay behind them. According to a fact-finding report, Lynching Without End, 86 per cent of those killed in lynching incidents in 2017 were Muslims.47 This was not conventional Hindu–Muslim violence but targeted violence, which, given its frequency, could no longer be regarded as episodic but a continuum, with Muslims being lynched on issues ranging from allegations of eating beef or even just transporting cattle for slaughter to love jihad to petty theft. Most of these incidents were perpetrated by vigilante militias and were the direct result of the communal atmosphere that the Hindu Right created, leaving little scope for redressal or recourse to justice against persons who committed these hate crimes.48 The Alwar-Dadri-Latehar incidents are three of several disturbing events of a similar nature witnessed in the past few years in which the government showed an unwillingness to respond adequately and in time.49 Cow vigilantism has prevailed more in BJP-ruled states, especially Uttar Pradesh.50 But it has also spread beyond them. The Congress did not take the lead in mobilizing opposition against it. The muted stand on mob lynchings dismayed many of its own leaders, who believed that the party had allowed itself to be browbeaten by the BJP.

A delegation of opposition parties led by the Congress, which met President Pranab Mukherjee on 12 April 2017, raised issues of mob lynching of citizens, vigilantism, and moral policing, among others. These meetings seemed, however, no more than a mere formality as there was no follow-up with mobilization on the ground. The opposition would be more convincing when the Congress takes on the BJP through concrete actions and mobilization but it didn’t do so against cow vigilantism, perhaps because of the constant fear that BJP would accuse the party of minority appeasement.51

Majority and minority appeasement

Hindu nationalists accused the Congress of playing vote bank politics, but, at the same time, the right-wing played the same card with Hindu voters turning the majority community into a vote bank. From the 1990s onwards, religion became an important political instrument for mobilizing religious majorities and turning the majority community into a vote bank. It challenged the older ideal of political parties attracting votes across different communities to consolidate a legitimate political majority,52 the notion of majority itself beginning to acquire a stronger political force. This approach derives from the belief that India is a Hindu nation and that everyone must recognize the Hindu nature of India’s culture and assimilate into it. Anything short of such majoritarian exhibition of dominance will make the majority feel as though they are victims of less powerful minority groups. Hindus dominate all public institutions, education, politics, and economy in independent India and are economically and culturally powerful. These obvious facts notwithstanding, the narrative of majority victimhood has taken hold of a much larger section of Hindus than ever before.

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