Communalism

Ashis Nandy gave a talk on hate regimes. Without saying even a word on Indian politics  https://theprint.in/feature/around-town/ashis-nandy-gave-a-talk-on-hate-regimes-without-saying-even-a-word-on-indian-politics/1682551/ Rama Lakshmi 24 July, 2023  Nandy has done groundbreaking scholarship and written dozens of books and essays on Partition violence, State and hate, memory and cinema. As a former head of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, he shaped much of critical political and cultural thinking in the 1980s and 1990s.
'Mobilising hate has become a game in large parts of the world,' Nandy said at Nelson Mandela's 105th birthday memorial lecture at New Delh's India International Centre.

Obituary of a culture https://www.india-seminar.com/2002/513/513%20ashis%20nandy.htm  Seminar Issue 513 in 2002.  In the early 1960s, when I first went to Gujarat as an adolescent student, it was difficult to believe that Gujarat could ever have a major riot. People talked of riots that had taken place in the past and the state did have a history of small riots and skirmishes. Many Ahmedabadi Hindus seemed afraid and suspicious of the Muslims, but they were afraid and suspicious mostly of non-Gujarati Muslims, many of them labourers in the huge textile industry of Ahmedabad. They took the Gujarati Muslims, a large proportion of them business castes, as a part of Gujarat’s landscape, though there was clear social distance.

The 1969 riots began to change the city radically, though at the time the changes were not that obvious.. The violence paid rich dividends. So did the imaginative hate campaigns unleashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS. Together they gave a kick-start to the process of ghettoisation of the Muslims and the growth in the power of Mafia-like bodies in both communities, always itching for a fight and acting like protectors of the Hindus and the Muslims at times of rioting...

. In the ongoing riots, women and children have not only been attacked but also often killed with a sadistic glee that will be inconceivable in a civilised society. Even in the attack on karsevaks at Godhra, the one that precipitated the riots, it now transpires that the main victims were women and children...Modi, it gives me no pleasure to tell the readers, met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence – all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist. I came out of the interview shaken and told Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-nandy-affair

In India, the rise of an apartheid state  https://scroll.in/article/1080379/in-india-the-rise-of-an-apartheid-state  India’s festivals now squarely reflect the ever-deepening radicalisation of the majority, the protection and empowerment of Hindutva goons trying to terrorise Muslims and other minorities and separate Hindu and Muslim, and the abandonment of the rule of law... he pressure on the police from down below and up high, from the masses and the people they elect, to follow a bullying, majoritarian agenda that effectively discards the requirements of the law and the Constitution and intends to cleave Hindu from Muslim.

It was unclear why the mob was allowed near the mosque. Perhaps I said that wrong: most Hindu festival processions these days, whether to celebrate Lord Ram’s birthday or Dushera, are somehow allowed to march past mosques, often stopping before them to play pounding music, hurl abuses, throw crackers or colours and generally offer provocation.

 The line blurs between police and vigilante   https://scroll.in/article/1080132/the-line-between-police-and-vigilante-blurs  “Gai hamari mata hai, police hamari baap hai,” the two frightened men shout, wincing in pain in the viral video. The cow is our mother, police is our father. They stumble, fall and limp along as officers flog the two Muslims and parade them through the streets of Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh on March 3. the police had no authority to parade and flog them. As it happened, Hindu vigilantes in Ujjain merely found them to be driving a pick-up truck with a cow – and that in new India, especially if you are Muslim, is justification for random violence.

 In Maharashtra, a Gram Sabha Has Illegally Passed a Resolution to Boycott Muslim Traders
Sukanya Shantha
Sukanya Shantha https://thewire.in/communalism/maharashtra-kanifnath-madhi-gram-sabha-muslims-resolution  

a few attendees who could be present signed the day’s agenda.

These signatures were later allegedly misused for another resolution – this one, to “boycott” Muslim traders who would soon be gathering in the village for the grand annual Madhi fair at the ancient Kanifnath shrine...

 Many individuals whose signatures appeared on the resolution have now accused Markad of using their signatures without their knowledge. But a few claim that they were aware of the move and support the resolution.

The Karnataka IAS Officers’ Association strongly condemned the remarks on a senior Muslim officer by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and chief whip of the Opposition in the state legislative council, N. Ravikumar, who had said that she “may have come from Pakistan”. https://theprint.in/india/karnataka-bjp-mlc-booked-for-pakistan-remark-on-muslim-dm-state-ias-association-demands-apology/2638455/

The remarks were made against Fouzia Taranum, the deputy commissioner and district magistrate of Kalaburagi district.

by Sanya Dhingra

27/05/2025