Over the last month, there has been a growing movement, led by the political elite of India, mostly from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led government, of aggressive nationalism and patriotism, extending the events surrounding the free speech debate in order to keep the rabble in line—a line set up primarily by the ruling party. On March 3rd 2016, the current chief of the Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Mohan Bhagwat, said, “Now the time has come when we have to tell the new generation to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai [roughly translates to “Hail Mother India” in English]. It should be real, spontaneous and part of all-round development of the youth,” further adding, with an oblique reference to the recent incident at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) leading to student leaders like Kanhaiya Kumar being charged with sedition, that “this is necessary as some forces are telling the youth not to say Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” At a later stage, he further went on to say, “We have to create so great an India that people will themselves say Bharat Mata ki Jai. We don’t need to force it on anybody. We have to give direction to the world with our life. There is no need to force our system and thoughts on anyone; there should be a desire to consider the whole world as ours.”
Following this statement, Asaduiddin Owaisi, the leader of the All India Majlis-e- Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM), said while giving a speech at an event on March 14th 2016, “I don’t chant that slogan. What are you going to do, Bhagwat sahab,” Owaisi said, referencing Mohan Bhagwat of the RSS. “I won’t utter that [slogan] even if you put a knife to my throat…Nowhere in the Constitution it says that one should say Bharat Mata ki Jai,” he added. A response was provided by Kailash Vijayvargiya, the current general secretary of the Bhartiya Janta Partya (BJP), when he said, “I feel that those who don’t want to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai has no right to stay in India. They should go to some other country,” a statement echoed by Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadvanis. Taking it to the extreme end of Stalinist-style silencing of dissent, the militant Hindutva group of the RSS, Shiv Sena, expressed deep interest in revoking Owaisi’s Indian citizenship. They further questioned the Chief Minister of Maharashtra as to how Owaisi could have left the state, where the Sena is part of the ruling BJP government, after “he refused to chant the pro-India slogan.”
On March 16th 2016, a Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) in Maharashtra, Waris Pathan of the AIMIM, was suspended for refusing to chant the nationalist slogan. While the assembly was in session, Pathan had said, “We will say Jai Hind but not Bharat Mata Ki Jai. There cannot be compulsion on saying Bharat Mata ki Jai. The Constitution does not say this.” After the suspension, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Girish Bapat said, “Pathan was suspended from Assembly for showing disrespect to national heroes and refusal to say Bharat Mata ki Jai.” On the same day as Pathan’s suspension, Sai Kumar Goud, a businessman, filed a complaint in the court of 20th Metropolitan Magistrate at Malkajgiri alleging that Owaisi’s 14th March speech was defamatory, and intended to file a police complaint under the Indian Penal Code section 153 A, essentially accusing Owaisi of promoting enmity between different groups on ground of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc. Joining this quagmire, a bench of eight Islamic scholars from the Darul Uloom Deoband issued a statement stating that “chanting Bharat Mata ki jai would be against the tenets of Islam as it is akin to idol-worship…We love our country as we and our generations before us were born here. But we do not consider it our God / Goddess…We received thousands of queries on the issue so Darul Uloom Deoband has issued a ‘fatwa’ saying Bharat Mata ki Jai is not in consonance with Islam and we will not say it. But we love our country immensely as our Madre Vatan [roughly translates to “motherland” in English].” However, the most crude and violent statement was provided by the uber popular yogi Baba Ramdev when he said he respects the Constitution of India or else he would have “cut hundreds of heads for not chanting Bharat Mata Ki Jai”— “I want to say there is a rule of law and we respect the Constitution, otherwise we can cut hundreds and thousands of heads…People should be ashamed of talking such things and should give respect to their motherland,” were his words.
The Kashmir Monitor newspaper published an article in which they traced the roots of the slogan “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. The article mentioned that, “There is one conception of Bharat Mata representing Aryavarta, the motherland of Hinduism and this concept is not linked to the secular republic of India. But the very propagation of Aryavarta takes this claim closer to the Aryan theory of race superiority in India. Aryans, who are reported to have invaded India around 1500 BC, are known to have dispossessed or subjugated the original inhabitants here. So if Aryavarta connects to the upper class Hindus, what representation does other class of Hindus, like Dalits, tribals and non- Aryan groups in India find with Aryavarta?” It further states, “It is a historical fact that Hindu Mahasabha, another extremist Hindu group for whom Nathu Ram Godse, killer of Mahatma Gandhi is a hero, deserving to be worshipped, had at the time of independence demanded that the song written by a Bengali poet and freedom fighter Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1882, be adopted as national anthem. However, their intention to promote it as the national anthem was again rooted in the concept of religious nationalism. Vande Mataram roughly translates to “bending (in respect) towards Mother India.” This quite naturally raises issues with Muslims who believe that bending (in submission) or sajdah should only be made for Allah rather than any other deity. The communal connotations being attached to the otherwise beautiful poem has turned an ordinary Muslim averse to Vande Mataram. It is obvious that such slogans have become the latest test…to judge a person’s patriotism…[RSS] undoubtedly believe that it can be used to corner their political opponents and bring them in line with saffron xenophobia.”
Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade of the National Defence University, USA, defined the rapid dominance doctrine as “an attempt to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe.” The current atmosphere of fanatical patriotism and nationalism carefully designed and engineered by the right-wing political elites of India can only be explained as a program implemented through the “Shock and Awe” doctrine. The Communist Party (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury argued that, “Hindustan Zindabad, Jai Hind and Inquilab Zindabad are nationalism. So, nationalism can be expressed in various forms. Now to insist nationalism means only the slogan [Bharat Mata ki Jai] that they want people to give is very clearly an unfortunate replay of how [Adolf] Hitler used nationalism for the rise of fascism in Germany.” There has been a systematic assault on “the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary,” in this case being the critical and free-thinking public, in order “to fight or respond to strategic policy ends,” through the means of publicly vilifying and condemning even mild criticism of the government’s policies and practices and labelling such critiques as anti- national and tagging the individuals concerned as people unfit to live in India. Across the nation, there has been a consistent effort by the political elites and their associates to curb critical thinking and impose a uniformly militant Hindutva ideology, especially in the minds of the young.
Distorting recent events in JNU to their advantage, the “BJP politburo” has been waging an ideological war against individuals and groups that are concerned with basic freedom of speech rights, minority rights, and other freedoms that are enshrined in the Indian Constitution. These elites have been using Kanhaiya Kumar and those involved in setting up an event in solidarity with the oppressed people of Jammu and Kashmir, and to question the legal basis for state-sponsored execution of Afzal Guru, as examples of anti-national individuals and using the organized event at JNU as an example of unpatriotic events—something that is of a grave threat to India’s unity and security. They have furthermore used these events as a launchpad to creating a sharp divide between the Hindus and other faiths present in India, especially the Muslims. These elites are spreading hate propaganda and simultaneously tapping into the socially engineered fear within the Indian public—a scene that is very familiar in the U.S. at the moment. As mentioned in the Indian Express newspaper, “When Hindutva ideologues argued that Muslim and Christian faiths were different because they, unlike the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Jain faiths, did not have their origins in India, the insinuation was also that these faiths were less loyal to India. In this context, the cry of Bharat Mata ki Jai often served as a taunt of sorts and ended up creating schisms, rather than uniting Indians, as
it was supposed to do.” However, the Indian media and the elites do not want people to know the truth, as that would result in raging debate and call of action against them and their comfort in power. Therefore, they have concocted a ludicrous story in order to instill a sense of fear with regards to the security of India as a nation, and simultaneously have used their story as a wand to rile up jingoistic nationalist and patriotic emotions in people in order to demonstrate their allegiance to the land that is India. In other words, the BJP and its allies have, through the imposition of social shock techniques, broken down the will and perception of a vast majority of the Indian public in order to fight their adversary: the free-thinking critical individuals across the nation. Classic “Shock and Awe.”
Aakar Patel, a reputed columnist, commented, “In today’s India…our nationalism is not against another nation. It is against other Indians. This is why it is different. Our great Indian nationalists are rousing passions against their own people, not against another nation. Our fraud nationalists go after their own citizens for their religion, or for their views. Their concern and their passion is the enemy within. That is not love of nation or love of anything else. It is hatred and it is bitterness.” We humans tend to forget our own histories, it seems. I can only wonder what the reaction of Nehru, Tito, Nasser, and many more who were crucial in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement would be to the increasingly authoritarian imposition of Hindutva doctrine, testing one’s allegiance with a slogan like “Bharat Mata ki Jai,” and curbing of fundamental freedoms that every Indian is entitled to under the Indian Constitution. We need to realize the truth from the false concoctions provided by the subservient media and their bosses, and we need to expose them for who they are and what they have done to our nation. The British have surely left India, but it seems that their colonial-oppressor mindset has found a new residence in the minds of the “BJP politburo” and their allies—the corporations, RSS, and the media.
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