Aurangzeb is not an Indian hero. He was a tyrant and a brute in the eyes of most Indians and certainly in the eyes of this columnist. But I found myself horrified and alarmed when I heard it Devendra Fadnavis says to television reporters last week that “many children of Aurangzeb” had suddenly been born in Maharashtra. When a supposedly responsible political leader puts it this way, it is so clearly a dog whistle that Fadnavis should be publicly censured. His comment came amid riots in Kolhapur that were sparked by some Muslim teenagers posting high praise of Aurangzeb on social media.
As soon as word of this message spread, the foot soldiers of Hindutva swung into action and took to the streets to cause mayhem and communal tension in a city that had previously remained peaceful in times of intense Hindu friction – Muslim He has strongly resisted attempts by militant factions of the BJP to create trouble with alleged cases of “love jihad”. But Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister seems determined to tear apart the city’s social fabric in the hope of electoral gains next year.
The Prime Minister is known to have personally chosen Fadnavis to be the Chief Minister, so why isn’t he doing more to keep him tied down? Narendra Modi is very sensitive to international opinion because he sees himself as a member of that small group of statesmen who control world affairs. Whenever there is the slightest criticism in the Western media, the BJP unleashes its attack dogs on social media to declare that there is a conspiracy to malign India in the West. Among the newspapers and television channels they accuse of being the main conspirators The New York Times and the BBC. The result is usually that more damage is done to India’s image than to the Western media.
The main reason Modi attracts criticism in the West is because he is seen as a majoritarian leader. Sometimes the charges are baseless, but often they are valid, as anyone who talks to the average Indian Muslim knows. All liberal-minded Indians, among whom I am, are unhappy that Muslims have had to deal with having their houses demolished on unproven charges, being lynched in public on unproven charges, and ending up in jail for unproven charges. These are things that somehow never seem to happen to Hindus, as evidenced by the arrests made after a riot.
That said, I would like to add a caveat. Part of the hatred and discrimination India’s Muslims have faced in Modi’s “new India” is because they seem to be going backwards. And he seems completely immune to the changes taking place in the Islamic world. In Iran, women are burning their headscarves as a form of protest against the murderous mullahs who have controlled this hapless country for too long. In Saudi Arabia, women are now freer than ever. A female Saudi astronaut has just returned from a trip to the International Space Station. In a country where until the other day women were not allowed to drive a car the changes that are taking place are miraculous.
In India, Muslim women are marching firmly back. In Srinagar last week there was trouble at a girls’ school because the principal said girls should not be covered in Arab-style robes and hats when coming to school. There was so much resistance to this that the poor principal backed down and asked his students to at least wear burqas and hijabs in the colors of the school uniform. For this to happen in a state where women could pray in mosques and where a burqa was almost never seen before the advent of jihadism is truly sad.
My liberal friends like to say that these things are happening because Muslims have faced so much intolerance in the last nine years. To them I would like to say that if they were liberals in the fullest sense of the word, they would be opposed to religious fanaticism of all kinds. There is no point in blaming the Hindutva crowd for bad behavior if we are prepared to put up with the bad behavior of Muslims or Sikhs. Speaking of which, as a proud Sikh I was embarrassed last week to watch that parade in Canada celebrating the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Canadian Sikhs who dream of Khalistan should try to build it in the vast wildernesses of this country. It will never happen in India.
Every religion has some lunatics in its fold and every religion nurtures stupid, semi-literate priests who interpret religion with nonsensical rigidity. But they must never be allowed to take over the faith because that is when you get the madness that prevails in Iran and Afghanistan today. This does not mean that in India we should allow political leaders to get away with religious dog whistles of the kind we heard from Fadnavis last week. He should be publicly shamed for what he said. And, according to the rules of the ‘new India’, maybe a few bulldozers should be sent to demolish his house for adding fuel to the fire in Kolhapur. In any case, shame on him.
