Hating Your Own
What makes Hinduphobia acceptable at home and abroad
Minhaz Merchant
|
15 Sep, 2023
(Illustration: Saurabh Singh)
IT IS DIFFICULT to tell haters from the hated.
When Sonia Gandhi, then Congress president, called Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, “Maut Ka Saudagar”, was she the hater and Modi, the hated?
When Modi taunts opposition leaders, is he the hater?
When Mani Shankar Aiyar called Modi “neech”, was he the hater?
None of the three will accept that they resort to hate speech.
Politics and religion bring out the worst in people. When the two come together, the mix is combustible.
DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin, son of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin, took hate speech to a new level. The cases filed against Stalin Jr will wend their way through India’s clogged legal labyrinth. They will soon be forgotten just as Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s taunt that all thieves have the surname Modi has been largely buried in public memory after the Supreme Court stayed his conviction.
As the 2024 Lok Sabha election nears, hate speech will receive a steroid boost. Since Modi is the principal target of the united opposition, Hinduphobia will deepen.
India is the only country in the world where an 80 per cent majority community is the relentless recipient of hate. Hinduphobia has still not achieved immunity from hate that, for example, Islam and Judaism have acquired.
Anti-Semitism became unacceptable after the Holocaust. Jews are protected legally and morally from hate speech. There are specific laws in several countries, including Germany, against anti-Semitism.
What about Islam? It is well on its way to acquiring immunity from hate speech. Unlike Jews, Muslims have never suffered a Holocaust.
In contrast, in Muslim countries ranging from Afghanistan to Iran, unspeakable atrocities are inflicted on, especially, women.
In Pakistan, the medieval blasphemy law continues to trigger lynchings and targeted assassinations.
How has a religion, in whose name casual violence is inflicted, received protection from global censure? Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, is today unacceptable in academia, in media, and in polite society.
The reason is a combination of fear and pity. No one has forgotten the fatal attack on the editorial staff of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In 2015, Islamist gunmen burst into the magazine’s editorial office and killed 12 editors and cartoonists.
Most European publications now have a strict policy banning even a hint of blasphemous editorial content on Islam (though there are no laws against blasphemy across Europe). Nobody wants to be the next Charlie Hebdo.
Islam has achieved with fear what Judaism achieved through suffering.
But matters are more complex than they seem at first sight.
Fear may have made Islamophobia unacceptable. But for the West, that is an unsatisfactory explanation. Why admit to fear?
So, a new narrative is manufactured. It says that ordinary Muslims are as much victims of terrorism as anyone else. They must be protected from discrimination. Defending Islam from Islamophobia is the West’s version of the Stockholm syndrome.
Hinduism doesn’t evoke either fear as Islam does or empathy as Judaism does. The Western narrative on Hinduism is that it oppresses India’s minorities
Fear is the key. Co-option is the justification. It preserves the West’s sense of honour. But the line between co-option and complicity is thin.
What about Hinduphobia? Hinduism doesn’t evoke either fear as Islam does or empathy as Judaism does. The Western narrative on Hinduism is that it oppresses India’s minorities.
Western media is far too sophisticated to not recognise that Hinduism is in fact a tolerant, open-minded religion. If it wasn’t, there would be ceaseless riots between Muslims (numbering 210 million), Christians (30 million), and the majority Hindus (1,100 million).
It is safe to target Hinduism. Hindus don’t behead their critics.
They only protest, file legal cases and then get back to normal life.
There are no blasphemy laws in India. Hindus can pray whenever they want, wherever they want, however they want—and if they so feel, not pray at all and be non-believers or agnostics or atheists. They’ll still be Hindu.
Other religions are not so kind to non-believers.
Just as Islamopobia and anti-Semitism are unacceptable for different reasons, Hinduphobia is perfectly acceptable. Hindutva, a proxy for Hindu nationalism, is seen by the West as more dangerous than Islamist extremism and more condemnable than Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza.
In India, since emulating the best practices of the West is a step up the social ladder, Hinduphobia is seen as an upper-class accoutrement.
It of course is not. But hating your own is an old Indian affliction. It will take a little longer, as India regains its intellectual and cultural self-confidence, to erase the affliction.
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