The Battle to Save India Has to Be Waged By Every Single One of Us Arundhati Roy , Sissy Farenthold lecture https://thewire.in/rights/arundhati-roy-india-democracy-communalism
If the RSS wins this battle, its victory will be pyrrhic. Because India will cease to exist.
India as a country, as a modern nation-state, exists only and solely as a social compact between a multitude of religions, languages, castes, ethnicities, and sub-nationalities legally bound together by a constitution. Every Indian citizen belongs, in one way or another, to a minority. Our country is a social compact between its minorities. In the process of trying to create a political majority, that social compact is being undone by an artificially constructed “aggrieved Hindu majority” that is being tutored to believe that they are the only deserving citizens, the First People, of the putative Hindu Nation, a majority that defines itself against the “anti-national other.” India is being undone.
Few of us who make up this nation of minorities can put forward a neat, unblemished history of ourselves in which we are blameless victims of aggression. Our histories intersect, interlock, and aggregate. Together they make us who we are. Other than the over-arching hierarchy of caste, class, religion, gender, and ethnicity, our society is hierarchical at a molecular level. There is micro-colonialism, micro-exploitation, micro-interdependence. Every thread of this tapestry is an epic that calls for scholarship, study, argument, debate, reflection. But to isolate a single thread from this weave and use it to call for mass rape? For genocide? Is that something to be countenanced?
To flatten a messy history, to rob it of nuance, to weaponise it, will have dire consequences.
All of us in the subcontinent have the choice of either working toward a shared notion of justice, toward exorcising the pain and hate that gnaws away at our collective memory, or enhancing it.
All dissent has been criminalised in India. Until recently, dissenters were called anti-national. Now we are openly labelled intellectual terrorists.
We are currently in that dangerous place where there is no set of facts or histories that we can agree upon, or even argue with. The narratives do not overlap or even intersect with each other. It’s myth versus history. The myth is backed by state machinery, corporate money, and countless 24/7 television news channels. Its reach and power is unmatchable. The world has been here before, and we know by now that when debate and argument end, a war of attrition begins.
there is opposition to this hatefulness from ordinary people of every caste and creed, from those who rose against the anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, from the historic farmers’ movement last year, and from regional political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Maharashtra that have gone toe-to-toe with the BJP and defeated it. It would be fair to say that the majority of Indians do not approve of what is happening. But their disapproval is manifested for the most part by distaste, by a karmic shrug and a turning away that is entirely ineffectual before the burning ideological fervor of a well-paid fascist cadre.