Few bad apples can crook the health and scope of many other good apples. The onus, in the first place, is on these good apples who tacitly paid obeisance to the development of these bad apples. Later on, at the final end, the consumers do not spot a greater distinction between the qualities of these apples. On the other hand, the sellers of these apples are in such an oligarchic relationship that they would not want other fruits’ sellers to exist in any form and thus the consumers come to a conclusion believing that their buying decision is satisfactorily ‘rational’.
Actually, these ‘irrational’ consumers are helpless or maybe parochial enough to come to the acceptance of the fact that there can’t be any other substitute for these apples. The sellers, then, dump whatever they want to since these consumers have been incentivized to accept whatever quality of apples is sold in the market. This whole analogy is simply the current manifestation of the Hindutva movement in ‘new’ India.
Hindutva took its organized form in the 1930s with the establishment of Hindu Mahasabha and then the RSS, without contributing anything to India’s Independence movement.
https://twitter.com/jaiminism/status/1352842440424751105
It is no more a religious philosophy or any ideology, as commonly believed. In fact, it has promoted itself beyond these ‘conventional’ concepts. Hindutva, today, like never before, has become India’s ‘new’ way of life and civility, although intolerable and apathetic. This new ‘dimension’ i.e. Hindutva is a historic aggregation of years of the systemic intolerance towards Buddhists, Jainism, Sikhism and lately Islam.
It is an ongoing process of downsizing the empathetic intelligence at the cost of scientific temperament too, followed by the Brahminical establishment of a nation (Hindu Rashtra). It is not a movement anymore; in fact, it has also emerged as a ‘new market’ which influences even non-RSS Brahminical parties like Congress, SP, TMC, BSP, AAP, etc. who approved the gradual breeding of Hindutva and then had to appease the newer vote bank (since 2014).
All these apples are experiencing the ‘bandwagon effect’, isn’t it? The health of this new market is dependent upon the production and proliferation of baits like Islam, Christianity, or Ambedkar, so as to ‘integrate’ the ‘casteist’ Hindu communities towards one nation, one culture, and then disown the Bahujan society (SC/ST and OBCs) once they’re done with Muslims, Christians and others. Or else the consumers would unsubscribe from the sellers of these apples and would impudently prefer starving to death than vote for non-Hindutva ideas et al.
Such is the radical state of these ‘modified’ addicts that nobody is batting an eye over the increase in caste-based crimes (NCRB data of 2019 suggesting India is unsafe for Dalit and tribal girls) and hate crimes against minorities (up by 300%). But, exceptionally, for how long can one continue to fool all the people all the time? Here, the case of former RSS worker Bhanwar Meghwanshi, a Dalit, should help one cause cognitive dissonance to the confidence of those who think otherwise.
Hindutva is here to stay, not because there are not any alternatives. Because, the so-called opposition parties have not courageously trained themselves to refute and smash ‘Hindu nationalism’; the most important spirit of Hindutva’s conscience that determines the society’s aptitude, economic altitude and nation’s attitude, verily in immoral ways, through the open establishment of sedition charges, doxxing, trolling, lynching, rioting, abhorrence and fake news, too.
In this political circus of whatabouteries and other logical fallacies, the development-oriented debates on ecological environment, health, social capital, mental health, freedom of speech, hunger, poverty, corruption, happiness, caste-based crimes, gender equity, economic freedom, etc are systematically procrastinated, shunned and demoted, and the only obsession is otherization of Muslims and other non-Hindus in India’s Potemkin democracy.
Taking a cue from Vivek Agnihotri, a film director, “facts are not facts and they do not matter”, it is vociferously simple to understand that the contemporary ecosystem fully reckons with the spatial existence of saffronized emotions, irrationality and unscientific temperament.
Whatever he has horrendously manifested in an interview (August 2019) to Newslaundry clearly tells us that any iota of intellectual discourse would not matter and it does not, even if you had experienced this by being a dissident to any Bhakt or a Hindutva troller. Thankfully, unlike Kangana Ranaut, he was honest there.