Communalism Was Never The Dominant Voice In Our Country. Why Now?

India Is Choking On Its Very Strength- Diversity, Here’s Why:

BJP played one of its saffronest card by fielding Ajay Singh Bisht (Yogi Adityanath) as the CM of the most politically volatile state of India, Uttar Pradesh. UP accounts for 20.42 crore, which is almost 15% of the total population. Ajay has made his name as a radical Hindu nationalist who has vowed to make India a Hindu state (Rashtra), his hatred for the Muslim community is hard to ignore, his hate speeches against the community has pushed millions of Indian Muslims in a state of fear. Recently, men accused of lynching a Muslim ironsmith, attended his rally while sitting in the front row.

Ajay’s promotion from being a head priest at Gorakhpur math to being the CM of UP has launched a thick saffron cloud which is waiting to choke our country, which used to breathe on a secular ideology. It was clearly warming us up to a point where candidature of a radical Hindu sadhavi, who is facing serious terror charges becomes the new normal. Communalism was never the dominant voice in our country until 1992 when Babri Masjid was demolished. After that leaders like LK Advani launched our country into serious communalism which is waiting to suffocate the so-called “infiltrators” out of the country.

India is being thrusted into a black and white game of ideology. We have two groups in our country who have a completely different vision for our future, one wants India to be a radical and probably a theocratic Hindu state and the other wants to hold up our constitution for a secular state. BJP, who came in power in 2014 has a clear underlying agenda to form a Hindu state. Narendra Modi, our prime minister himself argues in favour of the candidature of Pragya Singh Thakur.  He argues that Pragya’s candidature is a fight against the idea of Hindu terrorism, which through his glass of perspective doesn’t exist at all!

Pragya has issued many ‘controversial’ and ‘offensive’ statements, two of them being very important, the statement against a national hero, Hemant Karkare and one where she calls the terrorist Nathuram Godse to be a national hero. Both these statements created a tsunami of reactions. But these reactions, if observed carefully, would reflect some of the very frightening and absurd conclusions. A remark on Karkare enraged a lot of people, Pragya had to apologize for the same, but that apology was clearly insincere and was issued just because of political loyalty. Narendra Modi seemed to have no reaction on the statement, nor there was any serious bashing towards Pragya from senior party leaders. Maybe our country was in a way saffronised enough to take that statement in.

The second statement where Pragya said that Nathuram Godse is a national hero again enraged a lot of anger and this time, Narendra Modi came out to bash and to express serious discontentment towards that awful remark. But the question that arises in my mind it was this so-called ‘discontentment’ against Pragya’s statement sincere or was it because our country is not yet ready to hear something ill against Mahatma Gandhi?

The idea of having Pragya in the parliament as a BJP MP is very strong, that’s why they fielded her from Bhopal, which is a BJP stronghold and has been for decades. So why this hypocrisy? Shouldn’t she be evicted from the Bhartiya Janta Party, for making ‘anti-national’ comments? A party which seems to have monopolized the idea of nationalism finds it completely okay to have a candidate who is facing terror charges.

The bigger picture from the perspective of BJP seems pretty clear, a Hindu state with MPs like Ajay Singh Bisht and Pragya Thakur sitting in the temple of democracy if we continue to remain so. Sakshi Maharaj’s claim to declare 2019 as the last election seems to point the other way. Iran, Afghanistan, here we come, a radical ‘Hindu’ state where terrorism and communalism is the new normal.