I will start with a reminder from a friend for 62 years, a Naga who, as another old friend aptly put it, has remained ‘ever-green’.
At a recent reunion, when we were recalling the title of Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel speech, One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World, the ever-green Naga repeated another sentence from that 1970 speech:
‘Let the lie enter the world, let it even reign in the world – but not with my help.’
We can offer this simple response when the lie and its deadlier twin, the half-truth, are pushed across on TV channels and social chats. It may be beyond us to dissipate paranoia in, for example, the US about Mexican immigrants, or in India about Pakistan, or about Muslims. Yet we can withhold our help when the half-truth, the wild exaggeration, or the pure lie travel past us.
Much of the time we can do more. We can pronounce facts before relatives, colleagues and neighbours. Or express our solidarity with victims of persecution. Or, where possible, share our opinions with a larger public.
Before our eyes, India is becoming a Hindu state. As the historian and social scientist Partha Chatterjee says while commenting in The Wire on the Ayodhya verdict: ‘Even the judges of the Supreme Court agreed to lend their jurisprudential talents to proclaim what is essentially a realist political resolution …with an intricately woven judgment of thoroughly dubious legal merit. They bowed to what they felt was the dominant public sentiment.’
Four-and-a-half months after Kashmir was taken over, the Supreme Court is yet to take up the constitutionality of what was done early in August.
How – and when -- the top Court responds to the brazen and probably unconstitutional installation, via the new Citizenship Amendment Act, of a religious criterion for citizenship remains to be seen.
Jealous of their region’s delicate ethnic balance, Assam and other states in the Northeast are up in arms against the Citizenship Amendment Act’s apparent invitation to Bangladesh’s Hindus to make India their home.
Elsewhere in India, on the other hand, the Act’s bar against Muslims from neighbouring countries from any path to Indian citizenship has been celebrated by excited voices as an overdue rejection of pluralism. For them, India is finally becoming a Hindu state where Muslims cannot claim rights, though they may be tolerated.
Even in Assam and the Northeast – and in the equally critical state of West Bengal – the calculation of the Hindu Right is that projecting the Muslim, whether of Indian or Bangladeshi origin, as the Hindus’ and tribals’ enemy will keep the BJP in office or bring it to power.
The meaning of all this is plain. The India for all that many were proud of -- the India bequeathed to us by persons like Gandhi, Tagore, Nehru, Patel, Subhas Bose, Azad and Ambedkar -- an India where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and agnostics were equal citizens -- the India that existed all these 70-plus years from 1947 --, is disappearing.
A Hindu India seems to be on the horizon, but a different one from what Savarkar had in mind. While arguing, along with the Jinnah of 1939-47, that Hindus and Muslims were two different nations, Savarkar wanted Hindus to rule all of the subcontinent.
Both Gandhi and Savarkar were against partition, the former wanting Indians of all kinds to look after, together, a single nation and state, and Savarkar wanting Hindus to control all of what he called an akhand or unbroken Bharat.
Of the Modi-Shah duo that seems to be reshaping India, Modi had no qualms writing fulsomely about Gandhi in the New York Times on October 2 this year. His partner, Amit Shah, far more reticent about Gandhi, usually keeps a Savarkar portrait behind him when speaking to the media.
The Modi-Shah thrust, of which the Citizenship Amendment Act is the latest manifestation, may bring loud acclaim from sections of India’s population, even from large sections. But the thrust has added to the fears of hundreds of millions in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.