The vast desert of hopelessness that faces India now

How much hatred can a society tolerate until it implodes?

In the last century, under the pretence of modern governance Nazi Germany managed until the world went to war and in Stalinist Russia, the erstwhile Soviet Union, fear, violence and loathing ruled for decades until they managed a bit of perestroika and glasnost. In several governments today, one way or another, the exoskeleton of modernity covers a range of atrocities.

What hope for India then?

The Modi government has tactfully used the charade of democracy itself to subvert democracy, with brazen determination. And the edifice of the mighty Indian state with all its safeguards and checks and balances has just fallen apart, eaten from the inside.

How dramatic you might say to yourself as you read this: what total hyperbole. After all, the country is still running, people are waking up, going to work, school and so on.

Really? Are they?

Employment is down, and not just because of Covid. Small and medium businesses are struggling to stay afloat. Conflicting confusion on school and college policies has meant that the pandemic has affected everyone in the education chain. Healthcare, already a mess, has been stretched and broken even as public money has dried up and we are being relentlessly pushed into private insurance schemes.

Who has benefitted from the past seven years of Narendra Modi’s rule? A couple of billionaires and any number of scamsters. The list of scams has not stopped growing, under the watchful eye of a Union government and a prime minister who bombastically promised that he would “not eat and not allow anyone else to eat”. Tears to the left of me, jeering laughter to the right.

Add to the long list of bank defaulters who magically managed to flee the country in the first years of Modi’s rule, and an endless stream of bank and GST scams.

In the past week, we have been enlightened about wholescale corruption and chicanery at the top level of the National Stock Exchange, of a massive Rs.23,000 crore loan fraud involving a good number of private and public banks at Surat’s ABG Shipyard and fake GST transactions worth over Rs.32,000 crore in Gujarat over the last four to five years.

And because the BJP has more money than any other party – even as India’s national debt mounts and the government’s coffers are empty – the elections it cannot win, it just buys into and forms a government anyway, without any democratic sanction. All our laws are toothless and our institutions are conscience-less.

The most successful experiment of the Modi government, in keeping with the larger plans of the RSS and BJP, has been the increase of hatred and violence against religious minorities especially Muslims but including Christians and Sikhs, against Dalits, against women and in a larger arc against anyone who stands for civil liberties and the rights of the under-privileged, marginalised and forgotten.

From every single Indian law “enforcement” agency to foreign military-grade infiltrating spyware, those who speak for democracy or criticise the Modi government have been targeted, arrested, locked up illegally, humiliated and destroyed.

The power that was handed to the mob in the murder of Mohammed Akhlaq all those years ago on a bogus charge of keeping beef in his home has now spread to all aspects of Indian life.

The assaults, physical, verbal, educational on young women in Karnataka for wearing hijabs are an integral part of the RSS plan to destroy the democratic rights of Muslims in India and make them second or third-class citizens.

Every single voice which supports the BJP and RSS in this scheme, whether unwittingly or using the voice of “reason”, is culpable. The hate-mongers of course know what they’re doing and do not care if they are called out. Scratch that. The more hatred they spread, the happier they are.

The media has played its most despicable and ignoble role here as it consistently misrepresents and fans the flames of sectarian violence. As the media played in Nazi Germany and as the media was manipulated in the Soviet Union and as it continues to be a Party mouthpiece in China.

These are the RSS’s role models: totalitarian states where democracy exists in name if at all while the democratic rights of the people are trampled upon.

A personal loss kept me away from life for the past three weeks. I come back full of grief, for my own emptiness and the vast desert of hopelessness that faces India now.

Who dares to hope that we have reached that tipping point?

(Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist. Views are personal)