On October 13, a large jewellery company launches its advertisement, in which a Muslim woman is carrying a Hindu woman out of the house. The ad is depicted as if all the family members are Muslims and the woman whose baby shower is happening is a Hindu. The whole family is decorating the house and making food items according to the traditional religious trends of the girl.
But this ad took the form of a controversy when it was trolled for encouraging “love jihad”. #BoycottTanishq started trending on Twitter and all social media. Some even went as far as to ban Tanishq in India, who is at the forefront of maintaining “Indian culture”.
Now we have some questions finding answers to which are necessary. Will we now run #SaveTanishq in response to this? Or will Hindu Muslims fight for unity? Or will we intensify the struggle against Brahmanical Hindutva extreme ideology? Or will you oppose such a troll by considering love above all religions?
Historically, there has been a direct cultural dialogue between the Hindu Muslim public on the geographical background of India, in which the development of shared culture can be seen with the first Muslim settlement of Arabia settled in the Sindh region. The parallel development of the Sufi and Bhakti movement in those times served to challenge the feudal Brahminical system rooted in medieval society. A major example of this is the development of Urdu language in India, in which many compositions were done at that time, apart from this, evidence of the finest blend of the Trabiet and Arquette style in the field of structural science and art stands on the walls.
Getting married in a bourgeois-democratic country, accepting religion, adopting cultural instincts are always questions of personal decisions. But if it is a question in India that the border of this thing is being pulled by the ruling class itself, then it also raises questions on the system of democratic India and at the same time, there is a threat to India’s problematic secularism. The “problematic secularism” here refers to the Indian type of secularism in which the state has retained the right to direct intervention in religious matters to maintain its original character.
Whereas in bourgeois democracy, religion has been considered separate from the system of the state. But a widespread fascist trend can be clearly seen on a global scale, where France imposed a complete ban on Muslims wearing burqas, while an imperialist country like China has forced Uyghur Muslims to act as cheap labour. Since 1990, when an image of Muslims all over the world has been established that it is a terrorist, Hindutva reactionary forces within India started to raise their heads firmly. At the same time, it continued to work to further strengthen a rigid cultural divide in which the propaganda of Love Jihad came out very strongly which exposed the Brahmanical Hindutva character of the Indian state in a more explicit way.
“Love Jihad”, Islam being portrayed as terror, Islamic costumes viewed with suspicion, Gulf War in Central Asia starting, changing nationalist view of Kashmir issue to just terrorism. If we look at it separately, it can be very difficult to understand this reactionary system inside India.
While opposition to the spread of the US imperialist powers in the Gulf War and earlier from the Arab region was intensifying, on the other hand, the American army, with more vigour, tried to suppress Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. All imperialist alliances together weakened the new oppressed nations only in the name of “war on terror” while also paving the way for their market expansion. This wave gave an opportunity to transform the Indian Hindutva state into a heavy military zone in Jammu and Kashmir and limited the national identity of Kashmir to religion.
But he got the benefit of all this process by creating cultural distance between the masses. Which has also served to bring religious minorities inside India with fear, but also on the margins. But for the last few years, this trend has seen an increase, which includes cow slaughter, mob lynching, hurting religious sentiments.
The ad shows that a woman has chosen her life partner on her own free will, where her religious views in her family have been shown to be new to people who do all the work in her cultural way. I think that there is a clear message that love can only work on the bitterness between the two communities, which can further strengthen a common culture. But people of extreme Brahmanical tendencies are finding it a bit difficult to digest that a woman is marrying of her own free will as well as to a Muslim.
Brahminism has always been the idea of establishing paternalistic domination by keeping women under control. A rigid feudal system can be implemented in an institution like family only by controlling the sexuality of the woman. In order to establish this in Manu Smriti, the character of the woman was consistently said to be inherently immoral so that a non-physical falsehood could be used to discipline the woman.
This kind of mass hatred which is being propagated by the reactionary masses is directly proportional to fear. Through fear, ruling classes are trying to create havoc and muzzle dissenting voices, which are suffering under the garb of Brahmanical forces. Rape, targeting minority culture, private militarisation create a psychological fear inside the toiling masses in India. Intensifying atrocities against Dalits, Adivasis, women, labour class, the landless peasantry are examples that these people will not all tolerate any sort of dissent.
UNITE ORGANIZE RESIST.