KUNAL PUROHIT
For a long time, my home state, Maharashtra, has taken pride in being a “progressive state.”
I have grown up hearing it and take mild pride in it, too.
The description often carries various connotations—sometimes implying a subdued conservatism against, say, northern states or the relative lack of caste tensions and politics.
In the last couple of decades, after the 1993 riots, it has also come to mean the absence of communally-charged politics that preys on religion and faith, despite surrounding states like Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka seeing a virulent rise in such politics.
That assumption, especially in the last two years, has now been reduced to a delusion many in the state continue harbouring.
Since mid-2022, across the state, massive rallies, sometimes consisting of tens of thousands of people, have been held where Muslims have been openly abused, threatened, mocked and warned of brutal violence, dispossession and social ostracisation. They have openly called for mosques to be demolished, for Muslims to be pushed out of certain areas, and for the police to be openly partisan against them.
These rallies haven’t just been taking place in the hinterlands—they have been held in some of the state's biggest cities, often reported on and telecast live by news channels.
Multiple rallies have been held in Mumbai alone, including in the famed Shivaji Park, the intellectual heartland of the Marathi-speaking people.
Yet, apart from a small clutch of civil society activists, this rhetoric, ringing through the state’s cities and towns, has been met not with alarm, outrage, or criticism. Instead, it has been met with a shrug of shoulders, apathy, and indifference.
This indifference was on display last month when the BJP appointed its three-time MLA Nitesh Rane as a cabinet minister.
As I have reported, Rane owes his political visibility to hate speeches that he has delivered against Muslims, offering everything from abuses to graphically violent threats.
Yet, his elevation has elicited barely a whimper from the people of Maharashtra. Hate now flows freely in Maharashtra, with rallies and congregations openly spouting it. Discrimination is no longer shied upon but commended.
The BJP rewarded Rane because it knew it could do so and get away with it.
They were right. This indifference will grow, and the delusion will be sustained.
Even the state’s media outlets have reported on these rallies and the rhetoric as if it were business as usual as if they were reporting on any other political event. Meanwhile, the state’s “secular” opposition parties have mostly looked the other way.
This apathy displays itself in numerous ways.
For months, at a busy intersection in one of the plushest stretches of Mumbai connecting Juhu and Andheri West, a flagpole saw the Indian tricolour being sandwiched and rendered unrecognisable between two Hindu religious flags. It remained untouched for months, with thousands of some of Mumbai’s wealthiest people driving past.
Not many flinched. Nobody protested.
I tweeted about it because it violated the national flag code. A few days later, it was quietly taken down.
Similarly, a massive banner stretching across four lanes hung for many months not far from the airport, proclaiming ‘Hindu Rashtra’.
A few months ago, a viral video from outside Mumbai’s landmark Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital showed a Hindu man distributing free food to patients and relatives and asking a Muslim woman to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ if she wanted free food. The video was a mirror to just how deeply communal the state had become.
As a journalist who recently became the author of a book that delves into the spread of hate, I encounter this apathy with alarming frequency.
At a recent event where I spoke about my book in the context of rising hate, I met with a young man, maybe in his late 20s, who “wanted to sympathise with Muslims”, but he could not because he had just never heard that Muslims in India were facing such discrimination and hate. His indifference towards his surroundings had allowed him to live carefree till that evening. A week later, I met another person, this time an upwardly mobile woman in her 50s who runs an NGO and insisted that “it wasn’t so bad after all” for Muslims.
The activist Harsh Mander reminded me recently of the words of Holocaust survivor Elie Weasel, which ring true in today’s Mumbai and this New India we inhabit. Weasel had said that the opposite of love was not hate. “It is indifference.”
Read Kunal Purohit’s full story here.
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