What about 2019?

We need an Opposition with a clear vision

(Published on September 23, 2017 in Business Standard)

In the merry storm of democracy, political winners and losers trade places constantly by design. It’s such a busy two-way street that it’s creepy when traffic suddenly goes one way. Seeing the country one-sidedly in Bharatiya Janata Party hands makes you miss the annoying days of coalition politics, not so long ago, when decision-making was fraught, but then again, nobody got too big for their boots. 

The thrust and parry of gaining and retaining power takes up so much national headspace that we often forget about the power of vision. In 2014 the United Progressive Alliance failed to articulate a vision, or no longer had one. The BJP has vision in spades. It is of a Hindu chauvinist nation that privileges religion, reactionary cultural values, and national pride via material prosperity and loud Hindu cheering. While many voters related to this and still do, many others flocked to its promises of development and no corruption, thinking that these could be cherry-picked from the larger vision. 

They can’t. Buy one BJP development, get one RSS control freak problem free. Development mainly spends its time inspecting our underwear and censoring art, breathing down our data, lecturing us about lifestyles and morals, reducing education and media to propaganda, destroying the economy, glorifying anti-intellectualism, propping up shabby right-wing icons to erase established national figures, sacralising tradition and military to replace debate with nervous compliance, throwing individual rights under a homogenous social bus, and forcing all this with legislation—or force, if need be.

Some promises were insincere ploys; others, like jobs and economic growth, are unravelling scarily. Corruption has disappeared only from the front pages of newspapers. Hatred and fake news run high. Disillusioned voters are now waking up to the toxicity of the BJP vision. But the question is, understandably, Who else? There is no articulated alternative out there today, just shades of same-same.

Many regional parties hold their ground, but the only pan-Indian opposition party is stuck in the quicksand of public opinion as a dinosaur steered by a loser. The BJP wiped any memory of any good the UPA government did, by relentlessly reminding us of its infuriating second-term record of inefficiency and corruption. It so successfully mainstreamed a portrait of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi as a debauch and idiot that, between noise and peer pressure, it’s now uncool to point out that he is neither.

(The BJP itself is aware that he is neither. When Rahul made a smart move recently by speaking to less brainwashed audiences and media in the US, and got positive press and social media feedback for it, the Indian government reacted by sending an army of spokespeople into television studios to freshen up the paint on the duffer-loser cutout. If he’s a joke to them, it’s not a funny one.)

Today, social media is savaging the once unassailable Prime Minister and his pushy, incompetent government. There has never been a greater opportunity, and need, for an Opposition to go on the offensive. Yet the Congress has failed to step up, and Rahul is still seen as a malingerer in political purgatory, mocked for his presence and pilloried for his absences. If the party is to fight back, it has to rectify three great weaknesses: It needs to rethink, rebuild, and recommit to a coherent, articulate vision; find a leader who can and wants to lead with the energy of a startup captain; and fix its crappy communications strategy. It cannot look like the Congress of 2013.

But forget the Congress. Whichever the party, whatever the coalition, whoever its head, India needs a viable opposition. Voters deserve one. Democracy requires one. We need an alternative that people want, not just an anti-vote.

As a citizen I know the vision I want to vote for. I want a party that overtly stands for the Constitution of India—that emulsifier that holds together all our various differences and stands by each individual Indian. Today, it’s just a piece of paper they use to swear in bigots. I want an Opposition that isn’t BJP Lite, that will make the Constitution their mission, and run a countrywide campaign to publicise it and remind Indians of their rights and responsibilities. I want a party that will weave into every specific promise, the democratic, egalitarian, just, humanistic, inclusive, pluralistic, secular values that we give to ourselves in that document. I want a party that puts health, education, jobs, and law enforcement at the top of its agenda. A party that takes on corruption like it means it, builds itself through merit and expertise, thinks out of the box, and never forgets that it is in power to serve, not rule. That party would stand strongly and clearly in opposition to what we’ve got now. 

That party would give the BJP a scare in 2019.

Gauri Lankesh and the culture of impunity

The hallmark of this Rashtra is, and will be, impunity, from top to bottom

(Published on September 09, 2017 in Business Standard)

Last Tuesday was a terrible, difficult night, when news broke that outspoken Kannadiga journalist Gauri Lankesh had been murdered in Bengaluru. Lankesh was not in a conflict zone, or a riot, or a hostage crisis, or in any of the other dangerous situations that journalists often encounter. She was doing what working people do—coming home in the evening, parking, maybe fiddling with keys, maybe looking forward to some food and rest. It was in this most banal of urban commuter moments that she was executed at point blank range.

The impunity of the act is shocking. Should it have been so easy?

Everyone is at pains to stress that we do not know, yet, who killed this fiercely anti-RSS, anti-Hindutva, secular, liberal journalist-activist and publisher. This is true.

But we do know that on social media, the people who howled with glee and gloated over her death seemed to belong entirely to one side of the political spectrum. We do know that the BJP has not issued a clear, strong condemnation of it, saying instead that liberals are entitled to be upset, but what about RSS workers in Kerala? We do know that there is a concerted effort to float the idea that the comrades themselves did it. BJP MLA Jeevaraj has gone so far as to say that if Lankesh hadn’t written about the RSS, she might have been alive today—a pretzel of a statement that both openly threatens dissidence, and takes credit for what the RSS and the BJP are assiduously denying. We do know that Lankesh’s brother Indrajit, who claims both that she was never threatened, and that it was Naxalites who threatened her, aspires to join the BJP.

We do know that this woman fit, to a tee, the description of those who are constantly vilified by right wing forces, including by self-declared journalists and media channels who serve as government public relations retainers.

I was grief-stricken and sleepless for much of Tuesday night, and enraged thereafter—and I didn’t even know Gauri Lankesh. Her family, friends, and colleagues will bear this trauma forever. Whether they knew her or not, many journalists and writers, also struggling with shock and grief, feel a coldness on their own necks. Yet, nothing disperses the chill of fear like the warmth of anger, and Lankesh’s murder has infuriated the press corps, sparking protests all over the country, and spurring many journalists to rededicate themselves to the integrity and courage that the profession demands. One can only hope that this anger will translate into the kind of united effort that is increasingly going to be necessary to defend freedom of expression and democracy.

There has been much heated argument on the question of ‘balance’ in these polarised times. Should firebrand activist Shehla Rashid have asked the Republic reporter to ‘get out’ at the Press Club protest? Are protests over Lankesh’s death meaningless unless protesters have also spoken for slain RSS workers? Should the debate be focused on the Karnataka government’s pursuit of justice, and not on the long-standing and far-reaching effects of social engineering? Is shutting down hate-mongering social media handles compatible with free speech?

I submit that this is now a smokescreen of hair-splitting, and that we are long past splitting hairs. We will, in time, see justice for Gauri Lankesh—or we won’t, as we didn’t in the similar execution-style murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and MM Kalburgi. There will be more fear, more executions. There will be endless sickening finessing and justification and deflection to so-called liberal hypocrisy. There will be more discrediting of media and more lies popularised on Whatsapp.

I submit that we are not ‘in danger of becoming’ a Hindu Rashtra, the dearest dream of the RSS-BJP combine. We are there. Today, right now, we are a baby Hindu Rashtra taking its first messy, unsteady steps. This is what it looks like. Nurtured by hard-core supporters, but also by fence-sitters, the naive, and the wilfully blind, it will very soon lose its baby dimples to become much bigger, much stronger, and much, much uglier.

The hallmark of this Rashtra is, and will be, impunity—from top to bottom, from government policy to street murder. You see it already in the clumsy attempt to force-feed us Aadhaar; in demonetisation; in lynchings; in interference into cultural and personal freedoms. You see it already in the vilification of minorities, in the brazen rubbish being fed to children as history, in the unabashed propaganda sent out as ‘general knowledge’, and in the welding together of state and religion. Here’s a prediction: You will see it in changes to the Constitution of India.

Indian democracy is in the fight of its life. And if you think this is alarmist nonsense, you are helping it happen.