INDIA’S SECULAR ETHOS IS AT STAKE
By Binoy Viswam
This is a moment when every Indian should open his/her eyes and look around with utmost commitment to the nation’s future. Everything possible should be done to safeguard religious harmony and understanding between people. The happenings in the national capital since Sunday last are a big shock for India and a black mark on her face. Those incidents have stolen so many precious human lives and caused serious injuries to hundreds. Houses, shops and vehicles were burned and properties worth crores of rupees were destroyed. Fanatic criminals intoxicated with communal madness and taking law into their hands were ruling Delhi. For four days, the country saw nothing in the Capital that could be called as a ‘government’! That apparatus was undertaking a deep sleep which was a conscious and shameless sleep!
The Supreme Court of India was forced to state that “lives could have been saved and the spiral of communal mob violence stopped had the Delhi police acted on time to halt the people from making inflammatory remarks.” This one sentence from the apex court speaks a lot about the scary situation that has engulfed our country. The question here is quite simple: who prevented the police from acting on time? It is the home ministry under the central government that controls the Delhi Police. The forces that control the government opted to have this position of inaction. The prime minster and home minister are experienced stalwarts in implementing this cruel political strategy of inaction at moments of critical significance. The country does remember them playing the same game of inaction during the frenzy of genocide in Gujarat in 2002. Making political dividends out of this communally-motivated inaction, they want to replicate it in Delhi and elsewhere. That calculated inaction led to massive killings of innocent people, those hundreds of women and men, mainly Muslims. Those wounds, so deep and painful, still haunt the secular conscience of India, of which they are least bothered.
The CAA-NPR-NRC adventure of the Modi government controlled by RSS is designed with a dubious intention. That is to divide the people on religious grounds by making religion as the foundation of citizenship. Naturally, the citizens of India who believe that India should not become the Hindutva version of Pakistan rallied against the move and waves of protest emerged spontaneously across the country. Salutes to the students and women of India that they stood in the forefront of this patriotic movement in defence of the Constitution of India! JNU, Jamia and Shaheen Bagh became the symbols of secular, popular resistance against the communal divisive manipulations of the government. It was so massive and peaceful that they could overcome innumerable attempts of provocation from the fascist camp. The Hindu-Muslim polarisation, which the RSS-BJP aimed at, did not happen. In its place another polarisation took place where RSS-BJP stood isolated against the whole of secular India. Right from Kerala to Bihar, state assemblies adopted resolutions against the draconian CAA.
Fascists become more desperate and aggressive, as they become more isolated and defeated. Delhi underscores this fact. During the last couple of weeks, ‘responsible’ ministers MPs and leaders of BJP were talking repeatedly in terms of bullets and killings. The Delhi High Court had to call the attention of the government to the hate speeches thundered by those ‘learned people’ and the high court judge has been shunted out of Delhi for that. Nobody at the top of the political hierarchy restrained them. The most rhetorical prime minister preferred to lock down his mind for four days, so that his ‘man ki baath’ was silent conspicuously. It was the clear signal for the fascist criminals to unleash fatal attack on the innocent men and women. They were sure that the police would never come on their way. The whole strategy was to imitate the ‘Gujarat model’ of communal mob violence in the streets of Delhi. The political wisdom in timing the cold-blooded killings along with the visit of US President Donald Trump is intriguing. Islamophobia, one of the shared platforms in Modi-Trump relations might have outweighed all other factors in this regard. While innocent children of India were dying in the streets, the modern Neros were signing military pacts with Trump mortgaging national defence at the feet of US masters. Still they boast themselves as the saviours of Bharat Mata!
The RSS-BJP government has proven once again that they are incompetent to protect the lives and property of the citizens of India. They have miserably failed to uphold the basic mandates of the Constitution. Hand in gloves they collide with the criminals and killers, abetting their cruelties on the hapless innocent people. Loyal to the fascist ideology of racial hatred and subservient to the finance capital they have unmasked themselves to become the Indianised version of Hitlerite fascism. Their moral authority to represent this great nation and her Constitution has been eroded. We, the People of India should awake now responding to the new challenges and close our ranks to safeguard secularism, the corner stone of Indian Constitution. Standing as a human fortress cutting across all faiths, we proclaim that we are one and we will be one. We the people, witnessing absolute failure of the police system in Delhi demand the home minister to resign. (IPA Service)
The writer is MP and leader of CPI Group in Parliament