The majority is not always right and majoritarianism can be dangerous for the nation

The election results of 2019 have had a sort of benumbing effect on at least 50% of the population because half the electorate did not vote for Modi.

The most scared are the Muslims who will have 27 MPs (4 more than last time but none from BJP again). Even some of the most educated, bold and confident liberal Muslim colleagues that I have worked with have started tweeting their fears.

Says one of them, a chirpy young topper of AMU in whose selection I had a small role, who was so happy to have completed her LLM only the other day is now writing on her Facebook account “To please a few a majority is being frightened”.

That for me sums up one dimension of the current scene of hatred and some of the worst personal threats against those who raise their voice. It does not have to be a Muslim or a Dalit it could be an Anurag Basu whose daughter has been subjected to the worst kind of threats because Basu has his own views about Modi. Whether Twinkle Khanna be spared remains to be seen.

Barkha Dutt who was another victim of such threats managed to get the offenders arrested by Delhi Police but does every victim have that kind of privilege which should normally be his/her right under the constitution.

We were taught in our classrooms “majority is authority” and till only a few months ago I was praising the Indian democratic system which has been alive for 72 years because we have had free and fair elections compared to our neighbouring countries.

Not any more. Today, this concept of government “of the people” has become a government of the ‘majority’ where everyone else is a spectator when a victim is lynched or publicly humiliated or threatened or terminated.

This election has demolished a number of myths. One of them is that an educated person is necessarily a civilised person who will never hurt another human by words or physically.

But the fact remains that the Narendra Modi led new government has been voted in because of massive support from the first time voters, younger generation, women and the middle class, appears to be a reality. But it is also a grim reality that these first time voters, at least many of them, have little interest in History and are not even aware of what the country was like even 30 years ago. Thanks to our broken education system, we have produced a generation of impatient and aspirational lot which believe in short cuts and have no patience for liberal values.

When I read a book in college 50 years back that an educated person is more communal than others, I dismissed this as sophistry. But those Orwellian fears have started haunting us. A degree is no guarantee that the literate person would not be tempted by the Devil and I am not just talking of Osama bin Laden, who was a qualified engineer and there are many who have followed in his footsteps since.

In fact countries fighting terrorism across the world are finding it difficult to wean out the educated and qualified terrorists to give up their mission because they have historical, mythological, economic and sociological arguments to justify that they are on the Right path. But this logic applies to both the rightists on the ‘Right’ who are actually Leftists and the Left ‘rightists’ who are extremists like our own Naxalite movement.

In recent times a dangerous narrative has grown in circulation that equates all Muslims as Pakistanis which by implication also meant that the Congress which spoke up for them got tagged not just as appeaser of Muslims but as supporter of Pakistan which cost the party considerable support among the so-called nationalists and patriots.

In this selective amnesia the new generation of voters did not do a google check to find that it was the Congress which had split up its neighbour into two in 1971 with a well planned strategy drawn up by Indira Gandhi.

I was recently reading a scary write up by Harsh Mander who visited a number of places where mob lynching of Muslims was carried out in the last 5 years. He notes that he was shocked by the total brutality of the lynchings and lack of any remorse by the perpetrators or attempt by neighbours to save them. I guess they were convinced that they were doing their God ordained duty because they were killing some Pakistanis.

This was not so earlier. In the much talked about 1984 riots in Delhi I know personally how Hindu neighbours were actually saving their Sikh neighbours and friends by putting their own name plates on their homes because mobs were choosing their victims by their addresses on ration cards.

Khushwant Singh, who never forgave Indira Gandhi for the Operation Blue Star also wrote later that had Hindus not saved the lives of Sikhs the casualty in Delhi would have been much higher than 3000. I personally carried one of my Sikh friends from Model Town to Patel Nagar via the market around Filmistan where tyre shops had been set on fire. I never felt that my religion wanted me to kill Sikhs because they had assassinated Indira Gandhi.

That is the difference between 1984 and 2019. In the last five years, every brute action had been justified as if it was a populist demand.

I remember how hard Prayas, where I worked in 2015, had worked for a presentation to be made before a Standing Committee of Parliament to protest against the proposed reduction of age of juveniles from 18 to 16.

The Standing Committee in its 70 page report unanimously agreed with our point of view. But all that was of no avail because a GoM of four ministers created a law to reduce the age of juveniles justifying it on the ground that “There is a popular perception in the country that people want the age of juveniles to be reduced”.

This so-called popular perception over-ruled two judgements of the Supreme Court and a Standing Committee report of the parliament when the BJP had 278 MPs in Lok Sabha.

Today, with 303 (Section 302 means murder) elected MPs to follow Mosi's Diktat one wonders if the BJP even needs parliament at all.