“This is not the India I grew up in”

 AS WE GET OLDER, many of us are overcome with the belief that the past was golden, compared to the grim present. This is understandable when it comes to music, films and, of course, traffic. However, to extend this wistful nostalgia to politics is problematic. Yet, I vividly recall a survey commissioned by a weekly magazine of repute on the occasion of 50 years of Independence in 1997 where a majority felt that India was better off under British rule.

In the wake of Narendra Modi assuming charge in Delhi, it has become almost obligatory for a section of the beautiful people, usually people whose voice is becoming steadily inconsequential, to say, “This is not the India I grew up in.”

I first encountered this inanity on the evening of Modi’s stunning victory in May 2014. I had been invited to appear on Newsnight—often regarded as the BBC’s most prestigious current affairs programme—to speak on the election results. What seemed relevant to me were two developments: first, that after 25 years, India had voted a party with a clear majority; and second, that there was no second opinion over who would be prime minister.

Instead of debating the news, what I encountered was a documentary of the artist Anish Kapoor twittering on about how the India that voted in Modi wasn’t the India he grew up in. That India had changed from the days Sir Anish left the portals of Doon School (around the same time I finished school in Calcutta) was obvious. It would have been surprising if it had remained the same, living the life of unending shortages. The lament was all about the fact that the assumptions that shaped his Indian experience had been flushed down the toilet. The assertive India that voted in Modi was markedly different from the country the entitled orphans of Macaulay discarded for the West many decades ago.

Last week, I again encountered echoes of Sir Anish’s despondency in a podcast by a person who had once made a mark for himself as a Bengali journalist. During nearly 30 angst-filled minutes, he held forth on how he had never expected his home state of West Bengal to go in the direction it was going. He didn’t quite fall back on the entitled piffle of the expatriate, but his gripe was that the Bengali Enlightenment had been replaced by the state’s darkest hour.

There were two developments that triggered the wave of depression in a Bengali middle-class intellectual who had been exposed to the twists and turns of national life since the 1980s.

First, there was the shilanyas of the new Babri Masjid that one Humayun Kabir—a suspended MLA from the ruling Trinamool Congress—was proposing to be built in Murshidabad district. This initiative, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the December 6, 1992 Kar Seva that brought down the Mughal shrine, drew an ecstatic response from Muslims who make up anything between 32 and 35 per cent of the voting population of West Bengal. Humayun has promised that the mosque building programme will be accompanied by an initiative to ensure that at least 90 Muslim MLAs are elected. There are some who believe that this isn’t an empty boast.

Secondly, on the very next day, there was a gathering of at least five lakh (it could be more, but certainly not less) Hindus in Kolkata’s Maidan for a collective chanting of verses from the Bhagavad Gita. The assembled sadhus and sants made no secret of their unwavering commitment to wage a Dharmayuddha in a state that had wilfully abandoned its Hindu moorings after Independence. The so-called Hindu consolidation that was being spoken about in whispers for some time was clearly in evidence on that Sunday morning. Whether the large turnout was egged on by the Islamic war-cries that resonated in Murshidabad the day before— and widely broadcast on local TV channels—is a matter of conjecture. Many felt one had provoked the other.

What impact this parallel mobilisation of Hindus and Muslims will have on the Assembly election scheduled for April 2026 is still unknown. Going by pure statistics, there is a 10 per cent gap in popular votes between Trinamool and BJP. The saffron party needs to secure almost 65 per cent of all Hindu votes to oust Mamata Banerjee who relies on her ability to secure nearly 90 per cent of all Muslim votes.

What happens if BJP does manage this Hindu consolidation, and Muslim votes get horribly divided after this Babri campaign? This is why the intellectuals are panicky.