Little big lies

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. (Files)

When you have been writing a political column as long as I have, you learn to ignore the lies political leaders tell. It goes with the territory, you tell yourself, and more often than not the lies are harmless. But last week Rahul Gandhi told a whopper that cannot be ignored. At one of the intimate little gatherings he addressed in some American university, he said India’s reputation had been ruined abroad ever since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. It used to be a land of ‘tolerance’ and ‘harmony’ in Congress times, and it no longer is.

Having covered at least one major communal riot annually in my reporting years, I was so shocked by what he said that I turned to Google for some instant research and came up with 26 pages of ‘Indian massacres’. The list is divided into three sections — pre-colonial, colonial and independent India. It begins in 1024 with the massacre of 50,000 devotees killed while protecting the Somnath Temple from being looted by Mahmud of Ghazni. It ends with the Saharanpur riots in July 2014 in which three people were killed and 33 injured.

The Congress party’s prime ministerial candidate seems to have some really lazy minders travelling with him or they would have advised him not to say what he did. There is not enough room in this column to list the incidents of communal violence that occurred in those long decades of Congress rule, but suffice it to say that nobody reading the list would dare speak of it having been an era of ‘tolerance and harmony.’ And, the list does not include details of that very unharmonious time in the ’80s when bad policies in Delhi created insurgencies in Kashmir and Punjab simultaneously.

My years as a reporter in India began in 1975 and continued for more than 20 years, during which time, I seemed to cover mostly conflicts and communal violence. So to say that intolerance and disharmony began in India three years ago is not just a lie but a big fat lie.

Having said this, I find it necessary to add that what has happened in the past three years in states ruled by BJP chief ministers is the creation of pervasive, insidious tension. This tension is best described in the words of an elderly Muslim man I met in a mosque in Gorakhpur some months ago. He said, ‘It’s true that there have not been any major communal riots in the past three years but something worse has happened. When there were riots what used to happen is that communal harmony would return as soon as the violence ended. Now there is the threat of violence always hanging in the air.’

It is not just Muslims who feel this tension but Dalits too. And it is because large sections of both communities make a living out of businesses related to cows. With violent gangs of cow vigilantes roaming the land, it has become dangerous not just to transport one’s own cows from one place to another but to have anything to do with cows at all.

Dairy farmers have stopped dairy farming and the leather and meat industries have been severely hit in states run by BJP chief ministers. The recent release of the men Pehlu Khan identified as his assailants before he died indicates that cow vigilantes have a licence to kill, especially if they kill Muslims.

It is true that the Prime Minister has spoken strongly against vigilantism as has the chief of the RSS, but their words appear not to have reached the ears of BJP chief ministers. If the Prime Minister meant what he said when he spoke of ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’, then it is time that he took action against those of his chief ministers who have failed to uphold the rule of law. This has become such a serious problem in some BJP-ruled states that violence and barbarity have become the norm instead of the exception. A video that has been viral on WhatsApp for some weeks shows a young couple being stripped naked in public and brutalised by a mob in a village near Banswara for the crime of falling in love. The video is so awful that I found it hard to watch.

This kind of barbarity has been around forever, but it is likely to become the norm if those who are supposed to enforce the law close their eyes when the law is broken. The Prime Minister needs to intervene personally because it is not so much India’s reputation that is damaged by lawlessness and savagery as his own. If he wants world leaders to see him as the man who is dragging India kicking and screaming into the 21st century, he cannot permit his chief ministers to protect murderers.