There are multiple lessons to be drawn from the conduct and experience of Furqan Ali and his schoolchildren. None perhaps more significant than the need to harness the everyday togetherness of religious communities to counter the Sangh Parivar’s politics of hatred, which seeks to demonise Muslims as anti-national and isolate them.

For those late on the story, here is a recap: Furqan Ali was the headmaster of the Ghayaspur primary school, in Bilaspur block of Pilibhit district, Uttar Pradesh, until he was suspended last week. The order for his suspension was issued after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, claimed that the Ghayaspur primary school’s morning assembly ritual included the recitation of a religious prayer.

In reality, though, Ali would have the schoolchildren recite Lab pe aati hai dua, a poem by Muhammad Iqbal, popularly known as Allama Iqbal, who also wrote the famous Saarey jahaan se achccha. The poem does not qualify as a religious prayer. 

Either out of ignorance or with the purpose of sparking a controversy, the VHP and the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a Hindu militant group founded by Chief Minister Adityanath in 2002, organised protests outside the school and the district collectorate to demand the removal of Ali from the post of headmaster forthwith. A hasty inquiry found that Ali had violated government rules.

Basic Shiksha Adhikari Devendra Swarup’s order suspending Ali said, “As per a viral video on social media, it came to our knowledge that at Primary School, Ghayaspur, students are being made to sing a different prayer other than the commonly accepted one… Furqan Ali prima facie has been found responsible for this and thus has been suspended.” 

The events leading to Ali’s suspension demonstrates the clout that the Hindu Right groups wield over the Uttar Pradesh administration, which is inclined to accept their allegations as true even though they are infamous for concocting lies.

These groups have to be appeased presumably because of the support they enjoy from the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Lucknow.  The Furqan Ali episode underlines how power is employed to establish ideological dominance. 

It also tells us about the change in the method to trigger rage and engineer a social rift. In this endeavour, rumour had always been a deadly tool. However, rumours spread through word by mouth always lacked the quality of evidence. These were often scotched before acquiring the veneer of truth. 

This lacuna has been plugged by videos readily accessible on mobile phones. By his own admission, Swarup and others became aware of Ali’s transgression through a video. It did not occur to him that the video could have been doctored to achieve a nefarious goal. Or was it a case of manufacturing evidence to get rid of a person whom the Hindu Right detested?

However, the Sangh Parivar’s strategy of widening the social chasm failed because it could not penetrate the bulwark of everyday togetherness that bound Ali to the schoolchildren. It was the schoolchildren who told the media that they used to recite Iqbal’s Lab pe.. in the morning assembly and not a religious prayer; that the poem was prescribed in their syllabus; that it was they, Hindu and Muslim students alike, who had requested Ali to include Iqbal’s poem in the morning assembly ritual. 

The counter-narrative of the schoolchildren compelled the administration to revoke the suspension of Ali. But he wasn’t reinstated as the headmaster of the Ghayaspur primary school; he was shifted to another school. This was a face-saver for the Hindu Right groups, for whom the administration scripted a Pyrrhic triumph. 

Yet, in the era of the politics of hate, even the revocation of Ali’s suspension needs to be trumpeted—and credited to the deep bonds forged between the headmaster and his schoolchildren. They praised Ali for spending his own money to buy vegetables for supplementing the mid-day meals; how he never hit them; and how he almost always acceded to their wishes. 

It was this everyday bonding that the Hindu Right could not severe, evident from the sharp dip in the attendance at the Ghayaspur primary school in the days following the suspension of Ali. As Kavita, whose children are admitted in what was once Ali’s school, said, “The administration is playing with the future of our children. They don’t care about our children because we are poor.”  

The Ghayaspur primary school’s push-back against the Hindu Right conforms to what Ashutosh Varshney, professor at Brown University, writes in Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy, “The pre-existing local networks of civic engagement between the two communities [Hindus and Muslims] stand out as the single most important proximate explanation for the difference between peace and violence.” 

Places less likely to witness communal rioting are those where the networks of Hindu-Muslim engagement are varied and deep. Such networks are of two types: everyday forms of engagement and associational forms of engagement. The latter, mostly found in cities, include traders’ association, trade unions, clubs, including the Lions and Rotary Clubs, art-lover’s association and organisations such as porters and rickshaw-pullers’ associations.  

Varshney spells out the difference between the two networks and the quality of engagement these foster. “At the village level in India, everyday face-to-face engagement is the norm, and formal associations are few and far between. Yet, rural India…has not been the primary site of communal site of violence,” Varshney writes on the basis of empirical research he conducted around 1994-1995.

“By contrast, even though associational life flourishes in cities, urban India…accounts for the overwhelming majority of deaths in communal violence between 1950 and 1995.” Varshney points out.

Cities susceptible to communal violence are precisely those where the inter-community engagement does not run deep. Associations can bolster everyday togetherness not invent them. Varshney cites the contrasting response of Calicut, in Kerala, and Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Aligarh imploded; Calicut did not, even though Muslims comprised 36%-38% of the population in both cities.

In his survey, Varshney found that the engagement between Hindus and Muslims in Calicut and Aligarh was of remarkably different quality. Nearly 83% of Hindus and Muslims in Calicut often ate together in social settings; only 54% in Aligarh did. About 90% of Hindu and Muslim families in Calicut reported that their children played together, in contrast to just 42% in Aligarh. Again, nearly 84% of Hindus and Muslims in Calicut visited each other; in Aligarh, only 60% did, and “not often at that.” This was a significant reason why Calicut did not erupt in 1992.

Since the 1990s, communal mobilisation has undergone significant changes. For one, it is not episodic but a continuous attempt at keeping the communal cauldron to simmer, occasionally letting it bubble over. For the other, the Sangh’s myriad outfits have struck roots in rural India, straining communitarian relationship that has been under stress because of agrarian distress and economic liberalisation policies.
Add to these worries the bureaucracy’s increasing tendency to mollycoddle the Hindu Right hotheads, all because the BJP is in power.

Yet the exemplary conduct of Ghayaspur’s schoolchildren suggests that Varshney’s prognosis on why certain places are more susceptible to communal animosity than other places is as relevant as it was two decades ago. Engagement between Hindus and Muslims becomes, in a way, a natural bulwark against communal mobilisation. 

Indeed, Furqan Ali and his schoolchildren have brought to the fore the pressing need to nurture and protect the everyday togetherness of Hindus and Muslims from being corroded by the Sangh’s hate ideology. Harried Opposition leaders must learn from the headmaster and his children how to build an anti-Hindutva laboratory. 
 
Ajaz Ashraf is a freelance journalist in Delhi. The views are personal.  

Courtesy: News Click

Eighteen years later, the one-dimensional narrative extolling the Sangh’s exemplary role has been challenged by Malini Bhattacharjee, who teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, in her book, Disaster Relief and the RSS: Resurrecting ‘Religion’ through Humanitarianism.

Bhattacharjee says the Sangh replicated the traditional social hierarchy, including the principle of exclusion, in reconstructed villages and architecturally emphasised their Hindu identity. Her description of these villages makes them appear as miniature versions of a Hindu Rashtra, so to speak. Yet, the Sangh consciously crafted a narrative to project its relief work as non-discriminatory or secular in nature.

Bhattacharjee stumbled upon these aspects of the Sangh’s relief work on her study trip to Kutch district in Gujarat, 11 years after it had been severely damaged in the earthquake. Her purpose was to study the resonance that the Sangh’s seva, or social service, activities have for the people who benefit from it. In the Hindu tradition, seva is supposed to be selfless. This isn’t the case with the RSS. Bhattacharjee writes, “Seva, like all other institutions within the Parivar, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, that of creating a strong Hindu Rashtra, through the awakening of Hindutva.”

The Sangh sought to boost its image by trumpeting its humanitarian assistance in the booklets it issued. One of these, Punah Nirman Chunouti, spoke of over “20,000 volunteers, many of whom had lost family and friends in the earthquake,” spontaneously assisting in rescue operations. The Sangh’s publications featured accounts of RSS volunteers about their experience in doing seva and harped on how their work altered the popular perception of the Sangh in Gujarat.

For instance, the Organiser, an RSS weekly, quoted an orthopaedic surgeon saying that he had earlier thought the RSS and its affiliate, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, were merely interested in “temple construction”, perhaps a reference to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement to build a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The surgeon said he had revised his opinion of them after “witnessing their remarkable relief work.”

Accounts in party organs are impossible to verify for anyone. In the main, though, Bhattacharjee reports people fondly reminiscing about the Sangh’s relief work. She quotes a Congress leader from Ajnar, Kutch, saying, “Despite my reservations about the Sangh, I must admit that they did phenomenal work in providing rescue and relief post the earthquake.”

The Sangh sought to emphasise the non-discriminatory nature of its humanitarian assistance during the earthquake. For instance, a pamphlet, Dharatikampanesarjano sad, or ‘Responding to the earthquake by reconstruction’, narrated an incident in which Muslim families in a village turned away volunteers from their community as the RSS had already provided relief to them. It is psychologically revealing of the RSS that it should be crowing about providing assistance without discrimination, which most will consider as an aspect of their being. Then again, Bhattacharjee was repeatedly told by Sangh activists about the eight houses allotted to Muslims in Chapredi, a Kutchi village they had reconstructed, to emphasise the secular nature of their seva.

Yet these stories were contradicted by media reports and Bhattacharjee’s interviews with people. There were accusations against the Sangh Parivar, voiced, among others, by the late journalist Kuldip Nayar, for not organising relief camps in areas inhabited by Muslims and dalits. A report in the Milli Gazette, then a “Muslim fortnightly”, alleged that Muslims were asked to chant ‘Jai Swami Narayan’ and ‘Jai Sri Ram’ before they were given food at the Swaminarayan Temple, from where the largest community kitchen in Bhuj, a town in Kutch, functioned.

The ambiguity regarding the non-discriminatory nature of seva evanesced in the villages that the Sangh adopted for reconstruction. The restored villages conformed to the traditional Hindutva vision of creating a self-conscious Hinduised society that is hierarchical, discriminatory and exclusionary.

Altogether, the Sangh adopted 22 villages; 14 of these were reconstructed by Sewa Bharati, the operational wing of the RSS for providing social service in partnership with Sewa International. The remaining eight had the American wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) as Sewa Bharati’s partner.

Bhattacharjee visited three out of the 22 villages—Chapredi, Mitha Pasvaria and Lodai — all located in Kutch district. Hindus dominated each, with ahirs being the dominant caste group, followed by dalits. Muslims constituted less than 10% of the population in Chapredi and Lodai. Mitha Pasvaria did not have a Muslim. Already boasting a strong base in these three villages, the RSS “galvanised support [in these villages] to drive away Christian NGOs,” Bhattacharjee says.

Reconstruction was initiated in Lodai with a bhoomi pujan ceremony, which was attended by Praveen Togadia, the former VHP president, and Suresh Mehta, a former Gujarat chief minister. A feast was organised for 10,000 villagers, during which Lodai was renamed Keshav Nagar after Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS. Likewise, Chapredi was given the new name of Atal Nagar, after Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the then Prime Minister, who attended the bhoomi pujan there.

The bhoomi pujan at Mitha Pasvaria was attended by KS Sudarshan, the then RSS chief, who extolled the virtues of Hindu culture in his speech. Bhattacharjee writes, “Sudarshan criticised the growing tendency of blindly following Western culture and called for the need to recognise the inter-relationship between humans, animals, birds and trees which had been earmarked by Hindu forefathers as vehicles to our deities,” Bhattacharjee writes. It was a typical example of the Sangh’s supremacist tendencies.

In Atal Nagar and Mitha Pasvaria, the newly-constructed houses were of three different sizes. Their allocation was linked to the quantum of land that families owned—the biggest houses went to those with large landholdings; the smallest to families with little or no land. Although the houses were given free to occupants, yet the Sangh chose to replicate the existing economic inequalities. Lower castes were bunched together, leading to their segregation from others. Ghettoised housing was also planned in Mitha Pasvaria, but protests from Dalits prompted a decision to allocate houses through a draw system.

Both Sewa Bharati and the VHP gave a distinctive Hindu character to the three villages. Grand entrance gates to the villages were constructed. Since the ahirs, the dominant caste group, worship Lord Krishna, his statue was installed atop these gates. Ostentatious gaushalas, or cowsheds, were built, largely because, as Bhattacharjee suggests, “the protection of cows is an important political agenda of…the Hindu right.” The boundary walls of houses were inscribed with the images of Hindu gods and goddesses, in sharp contrast to the original settlements having been devoid of Hindu iconography.

When the time came to inhabit reconstructed villages, none of Lodai’s Muslims shifted to Keshav Nagar. In Atal Nagar, only eight Muslim families of Chapredi were assigned houses. None of the Muslim families in the two old villages spoke about a deliberate attempt to exclude them from the new settlements, which had effectively become, to quote Bhattacharjee, “Hindu hamlets.” They merely said they did not want to leave their old houses as these had survived the earthquake. In Lodai, some Hindu families, too, had decided against shifting to Keshav Nagar.
Bhattacharjee, however, found the decision of Muslim families to stay back in old villages at variance with the norm in settlements that non-Sangh donors had reconstructed. She points out, “While some villages built by non-Sangh Parivar donors have retained the earlier pattern of segregated housing based on caste and religion, none of the village communities ‘opted’ to stay outside the new colonies. This reinforces the possibility that the villages built by the Sangh Parivar were conceptualized as Hindu villages, the actualization of which made the Muslim community reluctant to move in.”

The conceptualisation of new villages as Hindu spaces was most evident in the construction of grandiose temples, four in Keshav Nagar, two in Atal Nagar and one in Mitha Pasvaria. The older villages, too, had temples, but these were modest in comparison. Atal Nagar did not have a mosque, although there were eight Muslim families residing there.

RSS volunteers told Bhattacharjee that Sewa Bharati had conveyed to Muslims that a mosque would be built in Atal Nagar subject to all of them shifting from Chapredi. They did not and, therefore, the absence of mosque from Atal Nagar. The Sangh’s explanation was “not validated” by Atal Nagar’s Muslims. And to think, Chapredi was touted as an example of the Sangh’s non-discriminatory approach to humanitarian assistance!

The Sangh may not have spawned the religious and caste ghettoisation, but it did, according to Bhattacharjee, aggravate it further. “Sangh Parivar activities [during relief and rehabilitation] did not intend to disrupt inequalities as this would be counter to its wider political goals inspired by a traditionalist vision of Hindu nationalism,” Bhattacharjee concludes. The caste hierarchy, in other words, was not to be flattened.

Local RSS functionaries told Bhattacharjee that the organisation’s membership saw a sharp upswing across Kutch because of its role in providing relief during the earthquake. But shakha activities, they confessed, could only be sustained in the villages they had reconstructed. Perhaps living in miniature versions of a Hindu Rashtra deepened the relationship between the villagers and the RSS. Or the villagers were tied to the RSS by the knots of obligation and reciprocity. Either way, seva has more uses for the RSS than just salvation.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in
 

“Demagogues have always used fear for intimidation of the subordinate or enemies, and shepherding the tribe by the leaders. Fear is a very strong tool that can blur humans’ logic and change their behaviour,” wrote Arash Jayanbakht, assistant professor of psychiatry, Wayne State University. A neuroscientist, specialising in fear and trauma, Jayanbakht’s piece was an attempt to fathom why politicians worldwide, including American President Donald Trump, scare people to expand their support base.

Fear as a political tool defines as much the politics of Trump’s Republican Party as it does that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Take the people of West Bengal, who are reeling under the fear that the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a pet project of the BJP, will soon be prepared for that state. Sweeping aside worries of earning their daily livelihood, they have stood in serpentine queues to collect documents that could establish their Indian citizenship. Eleven of them, in panic, have committed suicide. It is just the situation that warranted political parties to calm down the people.

Instead, the BJP has callously aggravated the popular fears about the NRC. BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya said, “Be 100 per cent sure about NRC [being implemented] in West Bengal.”

That the BJP revels in fanning the all-consuming fire of fear became palpable in Kashmir, where the Modi government pumped jackboots, incarcerated mainstream political and civil society leaders, and ordered a communication blackout before reading down Article 370 on August 5. This is largely perceived as a strategy to frighten Kashmiri Muslims into submission.

The BJP’s politics of fear is manifest in the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation, which the Supreme Court had once described as the government’s “caged parrot”, investigating politicians for corruption. Almost all belong to the Opposition; some are languishing in judicial custody.

Anyone who opposes the government is packed off to jail. Think of the nine human right activists still locked up nearly a year after they were dubbed ‘Urban Maoist’. Or the income tax notice served on Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa’s wife, presumably because he had dissented against the Election Commission’s decision to clear Modi and Home Minister Shah of the charge of violating the model code of conduct during the 2019 poll campaign.

Neuroscientists trace the roots of the politics defining Modi’s BJP or Trump’s Republican Party to fear being hardwired into human beings.

They say fear was what ensured the survival of tribes: it kicked in the “flight-or-fight instinct.” They ran away from assailants or united to combat them. Fear is primal, yet surfaces at the scent of danger in the modern human. Politicians engage in fear-mongering to arouse the instinct for safety among a disparate people, divided by class, language, region, etc, for herding them into a cohesive group.

Jayanbakht argues, “That response [flight or fight] has helped us survive the predators and other tribes that have wanted to kill us. But again, it is another loophole in our biology to be abused… When demagogues manage to get hold of our fear circuitry, we often regress to illogical, tribal and aggressive human animals, becoming weapons ourselves—weapons that politicians use for their own agenda.”

This is precisely the BJP’s script in West Bengal. The exclusion of 19 lakh people from Assam’s NRC sparked a scramble among West Bengal’s people to secure documents for their citizenship. Since 11 lakh Bengali Hindus are said to constitute the list of the excluded in Assam, both Hindus and Muslims comprised the army of people scurrying around West Bengal’s offices for documents. This fact ostensibly contradicts Jayanbakht’s theory that leaders harness fear to carve out a united group of supporters for themselves.

But examine Vijayvargiya’s statement on NRC in Bengal to comprehend the BJP’s strategy of using fear to consolidate a ‘tribe’, so to speak. He said, “…Hindus have nothing to fear as we are soon bringing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill.” The Bill says non-Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan without valid travel documents will neither be imprisoned nor deported.

“As the national general secretary of the BJP,” Vijayvargiya said, “I want to assure all of you that NRC will be implemented but…each and every Hindu will be given citizenship.” Vijayvargiya is stoking tribalism in both Hindus and Muslims, but with the aim of generating contrary consequences.

Hindus are being rallied as a group, from which Muslims are excluded. It is a classic case of “us” versus “them”. Vijayvargiya said as much, “India is not a charity house that those who are the majority community in Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan (Muslims) can infiltrate, spread terror and take away the livelihood of our citizens.”

The BJP leader’s statement echoes Jayanbakht, who writes: “The typical pattern is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to harm us or our resources.” Tribal boundaries spring up between “us” and “them”; hate and aggression follow. “This is the human animal in action,” Jayanbakht declares.

Tribalism was stark in the triumphalism over the reading down of Article 370 and the lockdown in Kashmir. Outside the Valley, people jubilated over the prospect of buying property there, until then disallowed to non-state subjects because of Article 35A, which has now been abrogated. There were intemperate remarks, including from Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, about the possibility of getting fair-skinned Kashmiri women as brides. The jubilation mimicked a tribe’s victory in the ancient past—of resources being appropriated from the vanquished and women taken into bondage.

In Tribalism: The Evolutionary Origins of Fear Politics, its author, Stevan E. Hobfoll, who is Chair of the Department of Behavioural Sciences at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, says that hyper-nationalistic movements, among other types, are often presided over by the authoritarian father-leader, who amplifies the “need for affinity and belongingness of members of the group, and asks for sacrifice to the higher calling of the dream they provide.”

Modi does, in a way, fit Hobfoll’s bill. Recall how he appealed to the people to bear the hardships inflicted on them during demonetisation and when the Goods and Services Tax was implemented.

Hobfoll also says that the authoritarian-father leader “combines a kind of father-like authoritarian form of compassion and ruthlessness, spreading the message of great danger from external and internal threats, for which only he has the solution.” Recall Modi and the BJP selling the change in Kashmir’s status as an action none dared over the last seven decades, or the quality of his governance as being superior to anything India has experienced previously.

Hobfoll identifies the traits of the authoritarian father-leader—he is beset by grandeur and has an unflinching sense of superiority; he is manipulative and “any means justifies the ends” for him; he lacks anxiety or guilt when his acts harm others; he craves loyalty, allegiance and attention.

This is why Modi must be greeted by thousands on his return from the American trip, the gains of which remain nebulous. This is why Lavasa must be harassed because his dissent, subliminally, challenges the authoritarian father-leader and, therefore, his legitimacy. This is why bureaucrats must be intimidated lest one of them imitates the American whistle-blower whose disclosure haunts Trump. Dissent destabilises the leader’s self-proclaimed mission of protecting and nurturing the ‘tribe’.

This is also why politicians must be hounded and harassed because they can become an obstacle to the authoritarian father-leader’s ‘tribe’ expanding from 37.5% of India’s population—the BJP’s vote percentage in the 2019 Lok Sabha election—to as close as to 100%. Tribalism demands total domination of the terrain and complete annihilation of all rivals. That ensures complete security to the leader’s tribe.

Not for nothing did Vijayvargiya say that West Bengal’s Hindus have nothing to fear. Not for nothing did BJP MP from Bengaluru, PC Mohan, who is said to be the brain behind the idea of building a detention centre in the city for locking up Bangladeshis, declared: “I am only implementing the vision of our leaders Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.” These remarks flow from the BJP’s strategy of expanding the tribe, arousing its primal instinct, and validating the vision of Modi, the authoritarian father-leader.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Delhi. The views are personal.

Courtesy: News Click

Representational Image
 

In the imagination of Hindutvadis, the change in the constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir has become synonymous with a Hindu victory and conquest. For them, the Muslim population of the state, which is due to become a Union Territory on October 31, has been defeated after waging a decades-long battle of attrition against the Indian state. The Hindutvadis, therefore, can now impose their will on the vanquished people. The Valley, to use that familiar term from history books, has been “annexed.” 

These apocalyptic images, typical of the medieval and ancient times, continue to emerge from the world of Twitterati, which echoed with spontaneous celebrations at the reading down of Article 370 on August 5. There was an incessant chatter about the abrogation of Article 35A, which debarred Indians from outside Jammu and Kashmir to buy property there. The Twitterati perceived the annulment of Article 35A as a decisive move to efface Kashmir’s identity.

This was precisely why Twitter posts on acquiring land cheap in the Valley started doing the rounds. There were memes stating the price per square yard of land in the Valley. These posts presumed that the conquered relinquish their right to determine at what rates they can sell their property. They, after all, will be at the conqueror’s mercy, as was the norm centuries ago.

The Twitterati’s perception seemed chillingly true because it matched the ground reality. Thousands and thousands of boots stomped the streets in the Valley, its people locked inside their homes, their silence construed as their acquiescence in the conquest. Though his intention may have been noble, the video of National Security Advisor Ajit Doval having lunch with a handful of Kashmiris was transmuted into a metaphor of Kashmir’s subjugation. It now seems some Kashmiris were tricked into having lunch with Doval. Hindutvadis rejoiced and shared the video of Doval’s luncheon in the Valley.

People interpret meanings of any action according to their own worldview. The Eid ul-Adha festival was long marked on the calendar for August 12, yet the Narendra Modi government announced the change in Kashmir’s status on August 5. Perhaps the timing was determined because Parliament was in session and the government required its approval. Perhaps Prime Minister Modi needed to trumpet the integration of Kashmir into India from the Red Fort on August 15 (India’s Independence Day).

The sentiments of the conquered, history tells us, are subordinated to the conqueror’s compulsions. Eid ul-Adha became a footnote in India’s script for Kashmir. That is why Kashmiris will consider the sudden change in their status as a consequence of their territory being symbolically and legally annexed. Their feelings will be further reinforced, as their sorrow is directly proportionate to the happiness that Hindutva hotheads are displaying.

As Kashmiris mourned or countenanced their fate in silence, social media was agog with posts from Hindu netizens rejoicing at their chance of marrying fair-complexioned girls of the Valley. Even Bharatiya Janata Party leaders spoke of the new stock of women available in the matrimonial market. Some posts seemed to even justify the rape of Kashmiri women. Commentators dubbed these remarks as misogynist, which it is indeed.

This form of misogyny, in the context of Kashmir, is linked to the collective memory of what is typically considered the conqueror’s behaviour. The conquering army pillages, appropriates land and abducts women. The rights of the conquered cease to exist. Women are subjugated and enslaved. Their body, as their land, becomes the site to establish domination.

In the imagination of Hindutvadis, therefore, Kashmiri women no longer have the agency to turn them down. They, after all, inhabit the land which has been conquered and annexed – and integrated into India. All these have been achieved against their wishes, in contrast to the tendencies in the Valley to break away from India.

Conquests often lead to a breakdown of modes of social conduct. This is because the generally accepted norms of morality cease to exist. It is the conqueror who defines morality.

Obviously, the code of morality hasn’t collapsed in Kashmir. Yet, worryingly, Kashmir has been conquered in the Hindutvadi’s imagination, inspiring him to believe that he has the unfettered right to the land and its women there.

The emphasis on “fair-complexion” in the misogynist posts pertaining to Kashmiri women reflects the inferiority complex of Hindutvadis. Indians have always been conflicted about their dark skin. Families celebrate the birth of fair-complexioned children, particularly girls. It is thought easier to get a match for girls who are fair. No wonder, matrimonial advertisements invariably describe nubile girls seeking grooms as fair or wheatish.

This sense of inferiority has been sublimated in the fantasy of Hindutvadis, who believe they have conquered and annexed Kashmir, where the women are perceived as fair and beautiful. They had earlier presumed that the colour of their skin would have fair-complexioned women, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere, deny them their affection.

The Hindutvadi’s inferiority arising from his complexion has been neutralised because he is now in his imagination the conqueror of Kashmir.

Those harbouring the infantile wish to have fair-complexioned Kashmiris as partners have been bitterly opposed to love jihad, a term invoked to doubt the love of Muslim men for Hindu women. The love of Muslim man is seen as a ruse to convert the Hindu woman to Islam. The fair-complexioned Kashmiri is also Muslim. Yet her religion isn’t an obstacle as it is implicitly assumed that she would be converted to Hinduism.

Indeed, the anxiety over masculinity has underpinned the movements of the Hindu Right. Writing about the 1920s, when there was a spurt in the Hindu-Muslims riots in Uttar Pradesh, Charu Gupta writes in Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu public in Colonial India: “These movements constructed Hindu masculinity as a contrast to the colonial image of the emasculated, effeminate and militarily incompetent Hindu male. For militant Hindu organisations, a show of physical strength was their psychological defence, their reply to the images of the powerful, rational British and the lustful Muslim.”

The stereotype of “lustful Muslim” men was propagated through pamphlets and newspaper stories reporting incidents in which they were accused of abducting Hindu women, marrying and converting them to Islam.

Gupta provides a list of these incidents in Uttar Pradesh, pointing out that the word “alleged” was tendentiously deleted from media reports. When the authorities denied or clarified what had actually transpired in the reported cases of abduction, these were buried in the inside pages. Some cases may have been true. But even instances of elopement of Hindu women with Muslim men, undertaken out of love, were depicted as abduction. It perpetuated the myth of Muslim men’s wanton behaviour towards Hindu women, who had been anyway portrayed as helpless victims of Muslim conquerors in the British colonial historiography. “Hindu masculinity had to be built in opposition to the ‘other’ [the Muslim],” writes Gupta. But Hindu masculinity could not become a carbon copy of Muslim masculinity, although Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar in his writings did advocate such a course. Savarkar was openly disapproving of the Maratha rulers who conquered Muslim territory but did not abduct and rape Muslim women. 

The Hindu Right’s strategy, according to Gupta, was to glorify a “Hindu male who managed to attract the love of a Muslim woman… as the ultimate hero.” He did not abduct; he was irresistibly attractive. Novels were written to extol the ideal Hindu man.

Gupta writes, “The most famous [of these novels] was Shivaji va Roshanara, a supposedly historical story from an unspecified source, embodying the Maratha tradition according to which Shivaji waylaid Roshanara, the daughter of Aurangzeb, and eventually married her, Sambhaji being the issue of this union.”

In the novel, Shivaji is projected as a “handsome specimen of manhood, with a well-built body, fair complexion, and bright eyes. She (Roshanara) slowly falls in love with him.” The novel went on to state that Roshanara preferred being called the queen of a “small king” than being called the emperor’s daughter.

In the posts regarding Kashmiri women, Hindutvadis lack the confidence arising from Shivaji’s physique, as depicted in the novel. Their inferiority has them to construe the change in Kashmir’s status as a Hindu conquest. This has them draw inspiration from history to believe they can take fair-complexioned Kashmiri women as partners.

Indeed, Hindutva has acquired an appeal because it addresses the inferiority of Indian males, their shattered dreams and their fear of the future. All these, in turn, have fanned their anxieties about their masculinity, which they seek to overcome by imagining vengeance against Muslims. The integration of Kashmir into India provided them their priapic delight.

Ajaz Ashraf is a freelance journalist based in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, was published by Harper Collins. Views are personal.