Crying wolf

When I was an insufferable obstreperous child, like all Indian mothers, my mother too would tell me that if I didn’t behave, she was going to call the policeman from the local chowki to straighten me out. I grew up and then, one day, everything changed. Woe is me. Nirmala Sitharaman was appointed the spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party on TV. She was the wrath of the Old Testament God, Yahweh. Thin-lipped, pitiless and unforgiving, if you were not with her, even the good lord could not help you. She would hound anyone who dared to disagree with her and not rest till vengeance was hers. Then the BJP won the 2014 general elections and she was appointed minister of state for commerce and we could all breathe easy. How wrong could I have been.

Her place was taken by a band of BJP spokespersons, masters of “smug obduracy” starting from Nalin Kohli, Sambit Patra, Meenakshi Lekhi and, recently, the mother of dog-whistle shrillness, Sanju Varma. No terrorist, no member of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria can match the self-righteous superiority, the sheer contempt for lesser souls who fail to fall in line, the infinite pity, the utter humourlessness of these men and women who represent the ruling party in the media. Not once in their lifetime have they ever suffered from a doubt on any subject. They are always right. There’s no middle ground. You are either with them or you are against them. Full stop. If it’s the latter, you are condemned to the eternal fires of hell.

I have a theory. The BJP, or perhaps its the mother institution, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, must run a crash course for its spokespersons. They are indoctrinated and brainwashed: The Opposition is always wrong. Give no quarter, never compromise, never retreat and, yes, defend the indefensible at any cost. Harangue, hector, bully, bludgeon. Remember the BJP and its mother are always right. Tathastu.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has just returned after playing a brilliant diplomatic stroke in Pakistan. Forget the Congress cribbing, congratulations are in order. Needless to say, this is where the slog overs start. As we have learnt from the British negotiations with Ireland, it may take years. The road will be slippery and at times the pursuit of peace may look utterly hopeless, but the important thing is not to lose heart but hang in there till Pakistan and India achieve permanent peace.

Mr Modi has the rare ability to spread light and hope in the country. Who can forget that he fought a terrific electoral battle and won magnificently in June 2014 But this is where the baffling questions start popping up. Why do his sharp mind, insights and diplomatic skills so often fail him at home Oddly enough, since he became Prime Minister, instead of being self-assured and carrying the entire subcontinent with him, he and his partymen have assumed a siege mentality for reasons beyond comprehension. Most of the time he remains behind a metaphorical purdah. He’s available for long, exhausting election campaigns and “veni, vidi, vici” foreign visits, but he’s almost never present in his own Parliament. Very, very rarely does he talk to the media and the populace of the country is supposed to be grateful for his one-sided “Mann ki Baat” radio talks without any Q&A. The conclusion we are forced to draw is that this is a Prime Minister who thinks he is not accountable to his people.

It is well-known that only two persons, Amit Shah and Arun Jaitley, are his confidants. As a consequence, his senior ministers and ministers of state are his spokesmen along with the officially appointed ones. Over the months they have got more and more aggressive and self-destructively hyper-defensive. What is puzzling is that Modiji hasn’t understood what a disservice his perpetually holier-than-thou spokesmen and women are doing him and his cause. More to the point, he hasn’t grasped even after the electoral defeats in Delhi and recently in Bihar that his own negative and divisive tactics in electioneering are self-defeating.

Let’s take just one minor example: the returning of the Sahitya Akademi Awards. There were endless discussions about how misplaced this gesture was. That certainly helped to distract attention from the main issue: the murder in broad daylight of three distinguished authors, one each from Pune, Kolhapur and Bengaluru. The third, M.M. Kalburgi, was a Sahitya Akademi award winner. The violence didn’t stop there. Perumal Murugan, a Tamil novelist with a remarkable body of work, received so many dire threats that he announced his own death, meaning he would cease writing altogether and take all his novels off the market. There was an obvious pattern here: the rabid section of believers in Hindutva were hell-bent on eliminating all those authors who fought the regressive, orthodox Hindu world of superstition and prejudice.

The one institution and the one person along with the governing committee who should have stood up and focused the country’s and especially media’s attention on these murders was the Sahitya Akademi’s president, Dr Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari. After all, the Akademi is the primary keeper and guardian of literature in our country. But Dr Tiwari’s sole response was to ignore the matter. As a fellow-writer, he would have known what a terrible price Murugan had had to pay. For a writer not to write is as good as asking him not to breathe. But oddly enough, it didn’t seem to bother the president of the Akademi.

Mr Modi’s reaction to the murders was the famous — or is the right word, infamous — golden silence. When cornered, he washed his hands off like Pontius Pilate, on the ground that it was a state subject. Indeed it was. But how could he have forgotten that he was the Prime Minister of the whole country and the people looked up to him as their moral compass, especially since the RSS and its many offshoots harbored extremely dark and bellicose superstitious beliefs Was one to believe then that Modiji too shared these dangerous views

A sense of unease had been building up for months in the country. Ghar wapsi, love jihad, the beef ban, the list could go on and on followed by the Dadri murder of Mohammed Akhlaq. For weeks Mr Modi refused to make a statement on this kind of terrifying persecution based on false information. And when he did speak, it was to call the incident “sad” and leave it there.

It was at this point in time that two authors, Ajay Prakash and then Nayantara Sahgal, took it upon themselves to protest the Sahitya Akademi’s unwillingness to highlight and fight for its authors and Mr Modi’s indifference to the plight of minorities. Over a few weeks, 40 authors from different parts of the country, writing in different languages and mostly unacquainted with the other authors, joined the original protest by returning their awards. The response from the Centre was either so cynical as to be insensitive beyond belief or vicious and utterly mendacious. The minister for culture called the Akhlaq murder an accident and later went on to say that if the community of authors was so unhappy, they were welcome to stop writing.

The real surprise was finance minister Arun Jaitley’s shocking accusations on Facebook: “The new strategy of anti-Modi, anti-BJP sections appears to be to resort to ‘politics by other means’. The easiest way is to manufacture a crisis and subsequently manufacture a paper rebellion against the Government in the wake of a manufactured crisis.”

What is one to make of these false accusations blaming authors of a conspiracy What has happened to civilised discourse In the last few months, freedom of speech has indeed gone for a toss. Is the Central government so insecure and paranoid that Mr Modi’s second closest confidant goes public with these risible charges Can Mr Modi not see how much damage these fake accusations are doing him The government sees threats everywhere and the charges of “anti-national” and “harmful to the county’s interest” are bandied about on any and every pretext.

Are we to understand that the country’s existence is threatened by these authors Even our former British masters were careful before accusing our leaders of sedition and treason.

What is alarming is that this government is steadily broadening the scope of censorship. After attacking the constitutional right to freedom of speech, they now want to dictate what we are allowed to eat.

The hypocrisy of this is lethal since the old cows die of hunger and so do the already beleaguered farmers as they can’t sell them nor can they afford to feed them. What do the courts of law have to say about this Can the majority religion dictate our diet If so, why can’t the minority Islamic community insist on banning pork, ham and bacon

The members of the RSS and other Hindutva organisations want Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan to migrate to Pakistan for merely voicing their concerns about the current government’s intolerance. But as we have seen, censorship can take another extreme form. Murder, clear and simple. If someone else’s atheism or agnosticism doesn’t gel with your religious beliefs, all you’ve got to do is bump the person off.

If we Indians don’t stand up and fight every millimeter of the way against every kind of censorship, take the leadership to the courts, one of these days we are going to discover that we are all gagged and the Indian Constitution is defunct.

Kiran Nagarkar, an acclaimed author, won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Cuckold