Daily Times

Beyond optics, Indian secularism devolved into political pandering over the years as the country edges towards becoming the poster child of fundamentalism under the label of hindutva-extremism.

The Indian history is being shaped by the likes of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his supporters who have resorted to coarsest rhetoric the international community has ever seen. The Indian polity elected BJP politician Pragya Singh Thakur – who is accused of participating in a 2008 terrorist attack in which at least six people, all Muslims, were killed – and has defended the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. She called Nathuram Godse a “deshbhakt,” or “patriot.

Indian Prime Minister has craftily wedded populist nationalism with Hindu majoritarianism. In modern India the space for minorities is squeezing lest constructing a fabricated sense of injustice in India’s Hindu community.Given that Hindus make up close to 80 percent of the country’s population, and it is in fact the country’s nearly 200 million muslims who have been pushed to the margins-which is nothing but a post-truth appropriation of victimhood. Earlier this year India’s lower house of parliament approved a bill that would grant residency and citizenship rights to non-Muslim immigrants, sparking protests that brought the country’s populous northeast state of Assam to a near standstill, a grim example of India’s obsession with Muslim minorities

Nehruvian India may have fallen practically the day Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, however, the abrogation of article 370 hammered an additional nail in the coffin. India sent thousands of additional troops to the disputed region, imposed a crippling curfew, shut down telecommunications and internet, and arrested political leaders.Ultimately, the assault on J&K’s special status and statehood is an assault on the idea of India as a secular, plural, federal polity. It reveals the much larger project of the BJP-led regime, which is to render India into a unitary, Hindu nation-state. The gambit is what Kashmiri Muslims have feared for a long time, which is to circumscribe the Kashmiri Muslim population itself.Article 37A prevented non-permanent residents from owning property in the state. With this article now gone, the prospect of the region being overrun by non-Kashmiri Hindus has become a reality. This can now ultimately alter Kashmir’s demographic composition from a Muslim-majority to a Hindu-majority region.

In 1947 India claimed Kashmiras a Muslim-majority state precisely to prove its secularism. And its special relationship to J&K was one of many ways in which it constitutionally integrated regions and their peculiar demands into its federal structure. That consensus is now of the past and has been replaced by the muscular, militaristic idea of India as a centralized Hindu nation.

Last year Harvard-educated senior BJP official Subramanian Swamy tweeted, “Ram Mandir and true Hindu Rashtra are inevitable destiny for Bharat Mata [Mother India]. That will be the renaissance for India.” The so called renaissance of India ignited upon the demolition of a mosque is anathema for any secular society. The resurgence of india at the back december 1992 riots and massacre, when a large group of hindu activists of the vishvahindu parishad and allied organizations demolished the 16th-century Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, resulted in several months of inter-communal rioting between India’s Hindu and Muslim communities, causing the death of at least 2,000 people.

The modern Hindu-India plans to rise on the murders of its minorities, eclipsed by the rise of its Prime Minister which is not much of a veiled truth.On 27 February 2002, a train coach carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire in Godhra station in Gujarat. Fifty-eight people died. Within hours and without a shred of evidence, Modi declared that the Pakistani secret services had been to blame -without any shred of proof or prior investigation; he then had the charred bodies paraded in the main city of Ahmedabad; and let his own party support a state-wide strike for three days. What followed was mass bloodshed: 1,000 dead on official estimates, more than 2,000 by independent tallies. The vast majority of those who died were Muslims. Mobs of men dragged women and young girls out of their homes and raped them.Later, senior IPS officer, Sanjiv Bhat, who was Deputy Commissioner of the State Intelligence Bureau at the time, has filed an affidavit claiming that “The CM… expressed the view that the emotions were running very high amongst the Hindus and it was imperative that they be allowed to vent out their anger.”Modi, indeed was a rising star to strike coup de grace on the secular India.

Since Modiswept to power in 2014, he has retained a vice-like grip over the narrative. Helping him is a largely obsequious Indian media, which faithfully boosts his image of a muscular nationalist. However, trying to control the narrative through bravado can easily backfire.India’s economic power may have earned her many friends but the highest elected office in India excites war mongering with its neighbors and marginalizes its minorities through brute force and fascist forces-occupying official posts. Recalcitrant India may not realize the days of selling its soft image as a secular society is over, however, the dawn of Hindu extremism echoes around the world.