By Avner Pariat
With all this loud noise (O, Arnab Goswami) about Muslim infiltration, Bangladeshi invasion and the failure of the Centre to ensure peace and equality we forget that below the surface is an undercurrent. I urge you to be very suspicious of simplistic understanding of situations. Some of my politically correct friends insist on the view that the problem of illegal Bangladeshi immigration is not a problem with an anti-Islamic dimension. I do not agree with them. The notion of the “invading” Bangladeshi national is closely tied in with the fact that they are not “national” and which for certain powerful organisations is inseparable from the fact that they are Muslims as well. Religion is one of those underplayed (but nonetheless convenient) cards that a number of Liberal-minded people shy away from. Rather than take the hard line of actually being secular, Centric forces have actually been content to project false tolerance. Such as when we saw ”tribal” leader PA Sangma jump at the opportunity to offer prayers at the Golden Temple, Amritsar. Most “educated” people would never discuss religious faith openly in “polite” society. But to simply condemn and not analyse is very dangerous for us. We are not draining fundamentalism of elan by dismissing it from our thoughts, we are actually strengthening it. We can see plainly that India vs. Pakistan is really Hindu vs. Muslim.
Everyone seems eager to voice out their take on why thousands of people from our part of the country were forced to flee homewards. The exact motivations, for people inciting these events, are impossible to unearth but what is really interesting is how this has all panned out in favour of the Hindu Right. What I have been watching, with bated breath, is how being a Bangladeshi is automatically equivalent to being anti-India. But it is easy to hate Bangladeshis because firstly, they have no rights in our country and secondly, they are poorer than us. For the Hindu and Christian alike, there is now this common enemy –Muslim, of course – that allows some unity and some cooperation. It is little surprise that our mistrust and hatred find their targets in the dispossessed poor, after all wealthy Bangladeshis have no reason to leave. In their quest for a livelihood, the Bangladeshis have become the much maligned enemy of both local and Bharat nationalists. It is a telling sign when Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar start to talk about such things openly. It is a tragic-comedy.
Coming on the back of the troubles at Kokrajhar, the problems that led to the Bangalore Exodus could not have been at a worse time for the Muslim community. At Kokrajhar, the camera crews ran after the elusive enemies without success. We could not see who these people really were. It was very easy for fabrications to be borne out based on the large number of Bangladeshis there. It would have been harder to admit that Assam is a hotbed of cultural tensions. Compound this with the struggle for diminishing resources and you have a pressure cooker of violence waiting to burst in the face of external authority. The Muslim community in Karnataka foresaw what the implications would be for Muslims in the country. They were quick to dispatch messages calling for peace and condoning violence. They were quick to offer help to the fleeing population. However, they were not quite as fast as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP). In what seemed like a carefully planned manoeuvre, the VHP had in a matter of hours, set up a helpline to help their North Eastern “brothers and sisters” and had also managed in a cunning way to implicate its hated Muslim targets. On the faceBOOK page of the group “Stop Discriminating People from the North East” there were a few who immediately suspected the gesture and heated arguments ensued. The troubling sign, however, is that most were content to assume that the VHP were sweet Samaritans. We cannot assume such innocence. I say troubling, and I mince no words here, because the Hindu Right is a great threat in this country. They are as manipulative and conniving as we refuse to believe they are. To think simply that the Hindu Right is busy pottering in its own little back-garden and has no grand designs for the rest of the rest is an illusion. Unlike Bangladeshi labourers, they have money, power and the will to implement their schemes.
It has become apparent that just as policymakers are shifting gaze eastwards, another set of (saffron) eyes is looking this way too. This is not to say that the Hindutva household hadn’t been thinking about the North East before but now it seems to have reassessed the glimmer of the region. In this regard, one of the shrewdest operators in cross-cultural politics has got to be the so-called non-political Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They have adopted many stock means of penetration in the North East such as funding schools, building dispensaries etc, and crucially, have allied themselves with the indigenous religious institutions, which were adversely affected by the introduction of Christianity in the region, some 200 years ago. The indigenous religions have had to strike an alliance in order to survive Christianisation, much to the glee of the Sangh. The Sangh and company are experts at indoctrinating tribals in underdeveloped areas. The mutable nature of Hinduism allows for a convenient reinterpretation of what the definition of Hindu implies. This is how it has become an all-encompassing and over-arching grand narrative for the Hindu Right, which includes within its schema the local indigenous ways of being and even religions. These all become aspects of Hinduism, not complete, beautiful systems in their own right but mere parts.
There is another third, more indirect reason why the RSS and co. have gained ascendency in the NER in the last decade. Again it is owing to a neighbour, not a fellow Paki nation though (let’s be honest, we’re all Pakis outside the Subcontinent). It is the emergence of China as the puissant Asian overlord that has abetted this interest in North East India. To many Bharat nationalists, the thought of losing the North East to China must seem a clear and present possibility. It would seem like a further insult if the Chinese managed to defeat India again in open conflict. On this I think both the Right and Centre are in agreement over. Arunachal Pradesh, even touristy Sikkim for that matter, are heavily militarised zones. China is now viewed as a nasty expansionist human rights abusing tyrant and must be kept at bay. This fuels nationalism further among the members of the Hindu Right. Hand-in-hand with the militarisation of the North East is fear mongering and speculation. It does not help that both sides are equally suspicious and inept at defusing. This is why the North East is now such a nice round gem for the Hindu Right parliament or think-tank. The region is important as a buffer zone, crucial at containment.
For a while, it seemed that the idea of a truly successful North East campaign for the RSS and co. was a laughable pipedream. This is not so in our current time. Part of the reasoning that helps the RSS is of course dictated by current affairs today. The very real, though perhaps not biblical, issue of immigration is one that is sensitive and draws the nationalist RSS into the fray. By raising the anti-Muslim banner they can even win support from otherwise suspicious Christians from the North Eastern states. By touting border disputes and accusing non-nationals they can win over the undecided political set and perhaps some from the Liberal camp. By sounding the alarm against the Chinese, they can envelope the North East in trepidation and uncertainty. The wonderful thing for the RSS is that these banners need not even be flagged in specific geographical areas but can gain currency among people who would unknowingly carry the parasite messages homewards. Recently, we saw this in real life as a number of Shillong youth came back home having favourable things to say about the charity of the Sangh and the Parishad. Through their brilliant PR campaigns the totalitarian dreams of the Sangh are slowly seeing the light of day. Like at any theatrical show I cannot help but sit upright and clap my hands when I see good acting.