In Mangalore, they beat women for drinking. In Pune, they tear priceless manuscripts because they feel a historian has insulted Shivaji. In Delhi, they spit on a man at a podium because they feel he is a traitor to the nation. In Bhopal, they break a school because they feel the principal has violated the national anthem. In Bombay, they raid and pillage because they feel outsiders are stealing jobs and thwarting their mother tongue. In Orissa, they burn houses and kill people because they feel their faith is in danger of dwindling. In Gujarat, they rape and kill thousands because they want to teach a community a lesson. They pull artists’ hair, threaten writers, slap women, hit men, burn paintings, ban films, tear posters, pulp, burn, rape, kill, beat. As a matter of routine, they spill into the street.
This is not an army of beasts in some futuristic film. These are contemporary ‘keepers of tradition’, ‘protectors of society’. Zealots driven by such fierce rage and selfrighteousness, they see no irony in cannibalising the very culture, religion and nation they claim they defend.
It is tempting to dismiss these goons as some looney fringe outside of ourselves, as just emanations of some hallucinogenic dystopia. But in truth, the angry men of Mangalore — and vendors of anarchy elsewhere — have many urgent lessons for Indians.
First among these lessons is a recognition that such armies can emanate from any religion, society, or political dispensation. There is nothing to distinguish the mobs rampaging on the streets of Calcutta claiming Taslima Nasreen and Salman Rushdie’s head and those who burnt down the sets of Water in Varanasi. The anatomy of the zealot — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh — is always the same: the brain-maps are identical; the disregard for law is uniform. And political capitulation to them is almost instant.
Indian public life is increasingly being disrupted by vigilante mobs dispensing quick and brutal ‘justice’. Political parties beholden to them — often guilty of nursing them with money and rhetoric — are forced to toe the line. Emboldened, buoyed by a widening pool of political collusion, media attention and public silence, such mobs are striking with greater and greater impunity. Today, even as India casts itself as one of the leading democracies in the world, all its big questions about self and society seem to be playing themselves out on a burnt-down stage. Argument has been replaced by war.
Given this, HNN has picked 10 rabble-rousers from across the country for its 'top story' on this edition. Men and women who lead mobs either through practice or precept. We could have included mafia dons and other criminal or para-military forces used by political parties, but those have their own logic of use and run less deep. Here, we have focused on men and women who mobilise masses on a diet of hate, fear and injury, amplifying those subterranean emotions in society that can find volcanic release.
The mechanics of hate and anarchy inevitably are similar: the political framework that gives it birth, the rhetoric of purity that fires it, the collusion that gives it continuing life. Equally inevitably, these strands are most visible in mobs born out of the majority community. The capacity for maximum damage too is theirs. Telling the story of the majority, then, is akin to recounting a parable. The characters, the place, even the time might change: the story would remain the same.
One of the key lessons of Mangalore, then, is to recognise the damage years of Hindutva resurgence has done to the Hindu — and by extension, Indian — mindscape. In nurturing its project of turning a plural, playful, impossibly diverse religion into an organising principle for a majoritarian nation-state, Hindutva ideologues have not only unleashed the poison of heightened communal politics into our bloodstream, but a deeper and, in the long run, much more dangerous and wounding disease: self-disgust. In homes, schools and public rallies across the country, young and old Hindus are constantly being told — you are effete, you are effeminate, you have let others invade and subjugate you, you have let yourself and your temples be desecrated.
From this humiliating, brainwashing story of emasculation and injury has arisen not a productive desire for renewal but a new, almost psychopathic desire for “masculinity”: an appetite for brute domination. Not the modern desire to live by the rule of law, but a crude desire for reprisal. This belated project of asserting “Hum bhi mard hain” explains much of the anarchy spilling around us. As long as you can display how strong you are, all is kosher — you can count on the sneaking admiration of your neighbours. And your mentors.
The ironies, of course, are laughable. Both classical Hinduism and its many tribal and pagan versions have traditionally placed the female principle, Shakti, with all its complex attributes — its capacity to be accommodating, absorbent, argumentative, anarchic, both compassionate and capable of brutal action — as its organising genius. Rejecting this, Hindutva “defenders of tradition” now want to remould Hindu society along much more prudish and homogenising lines, imitating aspects of Protestant Christianity and Islam — cultures it, ironically, professes to hate.
A further irony: much of Hindutva inspiration comes from the reformist Hindu visionary, Swami Vivekananda. As sociologist Ashis Nandy says, seeking to revitalise the moribund culture Hindu society had become in the 19th century, Vivekananda had called for a fusion of the “Vedantic mind with the Islamic body”, urging Hindus to reinvent themselves based on three Bs — beef, biceps and the Bhagvad Gita. The only injunction the Hindutva brigade seems to have focused on is the bicep.
With all these contortions, from a flawed but self-confident civilisation — capable of absorbing languages, religions, people, cultures — Hindus are being turned into a people driven by fear and a false sense of besiegement. As Tarun Vijay, a well-known RSS ideologue, said without a trace of self-mockery, “If we can have Save Panda campaigns and Save Tiger campaigns, why can’t we have a Save Hindus campaign?” The Sri Ram Sene of Mangalore is a weapon born in the psychological crucible of that campaign.
Set aside the Hindutva experiment and you have the equally damaging contemporary Islamist project — mobilised around a desire for purity and a loathing of other cultures. Replace the Islamist project, and you have the Christian proselytiser urging straying sheep to the one true God. The props might change, the brain-map wouldn’t.
Mangalore has other lessons. Lessons of dangerous political opportunism and sponsorship. The BJP is finding out to its dismay that the old truism is true. Frankensteins are notoriously hard to leash. After the shameful debacle at the pub, BJP leaders were unusually quick to denounce the brute attack. “We do not support such hooliganism,” said BJP national spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy. “We were not the perpetrators of these attacks,” said Yogesh Bhat, BJP spokesperson in Karnataka. (He could not resist the codicil — “But what were those women doing dancing at the pub till 3.45 in the morning?”) These are heartening, if momentary, denials. Within days, the inevitable cop-outs of course began to play themselves out. Sri Ram Sene activists were arrested and promptly released; Karnataka Chief Minister Yedurappa has consistently refused to ban them.
But this confused tango points to a growing crisis within the BJP. Party insiders say many leaders at the centre are becoming impatient with the fringe groups on whose backs they have clambered to political prominence. Commentators are predicting that virulent communal politics has played out its term in India. The lawlessness and atavistic morality of the VHP, Bajrang Dal, Durga Vahini, Shiv Sena, Abhinav Bharat, Sambhaji Brigade, Sri Ram Sene — perhaps even the RSS itself — no longer suits the BJP’s pursuit of power at the centre. “We have to rid ourselves of this retrograde cowbelt politics,” one BJP man says sarcastically. Easier said than done.
The angry men of Mangalore — and their ilk across the country — are not mercenaries that can be disbanded once the contract is done; they are products of a psychological laboratory, a cynical social mobilisation. They are a generation bred on a language of an injured Bharat Mata, an enemy race, and a castrated masculinity. Bred on an idea of nation not based on the rule of law, but on angry sentiment. An idea of religion not gloriously playful and plural but terminally pure. An idea of women not equally human but a species to be subjugated (either through excessive worship or force). How is this generation to be disbanded? If their mentors will not feed them their prey, they will start to feed on their mentors. It is no coincidence that one of the thwarted targets of Colonel Purohit was a moderate RSS ideologue.
The thing about vendors of anarchy is that they are never sui generis. They have sliver-tongued mentors, “iron men” wielding dexterous words. The LK Advanis and Narendra Modis, the Bal Thackerays and Rajnath Singhs. Men who madden their listeners with self-loathing and hate, and empower them with a call to duty and domination. After the recent carnage against Christians in Orissa, the BJP leaders in Delhi refused to act against the Bajrang Dal cadres, calling them “nationalists”. Later though, when new worms began to flood out of the woodwork and Hindu extremists were suspected of engineering blasts across the country, their mentors began to hide behind leaves more flimsy than the fig: Sadhvi Pragya was not the BJP’s responsibility because she had left the Durga Vahini 10 years earlier.
The men who died making bombs in Bhopal were not their responsibility either, because they had left the Bajrang Dal five years earlier. And so on. Then caught in the torque of their denials, a new round of assertions followed: Sadhvi Pragya was an asset to the Hindutva cause, the BJP would fund her defence, Uma Bharati would give her a ticket.
The classic cleft. To apologise for the rabid fringe is to be trapped in a logic of your own making: become LK Advani after the Jinnah controversy: risk the perception of emasculation. To not apologise is to be an international pariah and be denied the highest seat in national politics: be a Narendra Modi, live in-waiting, dogged by misdoings.
Frankensteins, the BJP is finding out belatedly, are notoriously hard to leash. It’s not just the BJP though. Every political party in India has its own equivalent nursery. We saw the CPM unleash its gun-wielding motorcade in Nandigram — Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s triumphant “payback”. And the Congress, they say, sponsored the rise of Raj Thackeray. How would those maps read?
There are still other lessons from Mangalore. Some of these are to do with nuancing our ideas of tradition and modernity. The right to individual freedom is a no-brainer: individual liberty, exercised within the framework of the law of the land, is the obvious cornerstone on which all democracies are founded. But there are proprieties within which freedoms are exercised. These are subjects for complex conversations. Conversations we must insist will no longer be played on a burned-out stage.
It can be no one’s argument that people who frequent high-end bars are necessarily liberal and modern — no more or less so than those who do not drink or those who frequent gritty thekas and lower-class country bars across the land. Drinking, kissing in public, holding hands, wearing noodle straps or tight vests — none of this is about being modern or liberal. It is just about having the right to choose. Salman Khan, for instance, might bare his body a lot, but he has an uncomfortable reputation for beating women. Would that make him modern? Any more than the mob beating women in the pub is traditional?
We are living in a complex, anxious age. Tougher laws cannot fix those anxieties, only conversations will. In a vulgar display of bicep a couple of days ago, National Commission for Women Chairperson Girija Vyas told mediamen, “Who is Renuka Chowdhury to intervene? I am the head of the National Commission for Women.” In that moment, Vyas brought herself down to the level of the mob she is investigating. The real crisis of the mobs sprouting across India is the language of confrontation that has bred them. To reverse this course, we have to find a lost language. A language of dignified public discourse. We have to reach for the culture within.
• RAM RAHIM • PRAMOD MUTHALIK
• RAJ THACKERAY • LAKHAN SETH
• ASIYA ANDRABI • ASADUDDIN OWAISI
• YOGI ADITYANATH • RABINDRA PAL SINGH
• LAMBODAR KANHAR • NARAYAN GOWDA
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