By Aakar Patel
My thesis is that the Indian state under Hindutva is incompletely communal. I have written about this before, but the principal argument is that the inability of Nepal, before 2008, to become a Hindu Rashtra in the full meaning of the term by legislating doctrine as described by the Smritis also applies to us. This is a structural problem and is not resolvable.
This is why the musings of Guru Golwalkar on the ideal state of the nation do not find a place in the BJP’s manifestos.
This also means that the State, meaning the apparatus of government, retains an instinct to be secular and normal.
How can we observe this? We can do so by examining how the government behaves when it engages with the external world. When our Prime Minister and External Affairs Minister travel abroad to lecture the world and receive its medals, they do not use the same rhetoric as they do within India. They speak of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and Sarva Dharma Sambhava. They do not tell the world that their policies at home involve bulldozers, beef lynchings, the CAA, the NRC and love jihad.
They go to the United Nations and other forums under a Nehruvian carapace. There is a creature called the hermit crab. It does not have a shell of its own. It takes the shell of a dead animal and uses it for protection. This is what the BJP does with Nehruvian secularism when it goes out into the world.
The universalism it espouses and pretends to uphold elsewhere clashes with its actions at home, as reflected in the various laws it has enacted over the years: those criminalising beef consumption in 2015, interfaith marriage in 2018, and Muslim divorce in 2019, as well as the exclusion of Muslims from the CAA, among others.
This produces a paradox that makes us vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. It also exposes us to international pressure that would otherwise be muted if we did not boast of values we do not actually uphold.
In August 2019, India imposed an internet shutdown in Kashmir. Four months later, on December 6, a motion was tabled in the United States Congress demanding that India lift it. The author was an Indian-origin Congresswoman. That same month, Jaishankar was in Washington and scheduled to meet legislators on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
On learning that the author of the motion, Democrat Pramila Jayapal, would be present at the meeting, Jaishankar refused to attend. This was during Trump’s first term. Although the bill was tabled, it was not put to a vote. When Trump lost the election and Biden was sworn in in January 2021, India lifted the ban. Why? Likely because our government felt it could not withstand pressure from the Democrats.
Something similar happened in Europe. Five separate groups in the European Parliament tabled a motion on January 28, 2020, strongly condemning the Citizenship Amendment Act. Newspapers here reported that the motion had enough support to be passed.
Jaishankar went to Brussels on February 17 to negotiate some sort of deal. We do not know the details because this is not a transparent government. However, the motion was not put to a vote and, although the law had already been passed in India, the government did not implement it for another four years.
This gap between words and deeds, and the trouble it creates, can be seen elsewhere. Last year, our National Human Rights Commission was downgraded by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions from ‘A’ status to ‘B’. Why? The main reasons were that it was not independent, that it relied on police-led investigations into police atrocities, that it lacked diversity and that it remained silent on systemic violations by the State.
All of these criticisms are indisputably valid. We have appealed against the downgrade, and the hearing is scheduled for the next few days. But rather than merely appealing, we should consider changing our behaviour so that we are not accused of pretending to be something we are not.
Instead, the government becomes prickly and irritated when the world sees the paradox and merely points it out. Its responses to Freedom House’s finding that India was only ‘partly free’ (calling it ‘misleading, incorrect and misplaced’ in 2021), the Economist Intelligence Unit’s conclusion that India was a ‘flawed democracy’ (describing it as ‘misleading and perception-based’ in 2020), and India’s fall in the Global Hunger Index (calling it an ‘unscientific’ measure in 2021, an ‘effort to taint India’ in 2022 and a ‘flawed measure’ in 2023) are examples.
Targeted attacks on minorities are usually the principal reason for India’s poor rankings on global indices. And yet the government sometimes seems baffled that the ‘mother of democracy’ should receive such poor grades on democracy.
The issue is simple: freedom cannot be separated from individual rights and liberties. A government that assumes democracy consists only of free and fair elections — and even on this count we have lost ground recently — will always become defensive when told that it is falling short.
To some extent, this is understandable. The Gulf nations and North Korea do not care if the world calls them undemocratic because they have never claimed to be otherwise. It is those who present themselves as trailblazers who make themselves vulnerable by telling the world they are something they are not.