Exactly a month after Sabeen Mahmud was murdered while driving home in Karachi, a small group of her friends and admirers met in a cosy Delhi basement to remember the extraordinary Pakistani freethinker. Most of those gathered there that day had not known her personally but had only heard of her work. To them, she was another activist who had paid the ultimate price for taking on the establishment and fundamentalists. So, when a couple of her friends spoke about Sabeen’s life and times, it set off a discussion on the fate of liberal thinkers in the rest of South Asia.
Some of the troubling questions that the memorial meeting raised were: Are Indian activists at as much risk as Sabeen was? Did confronting the political regime headed by the BJP’s Modi, perceived as more inimical to liberal thought than the Congress dispensation, call for a more gutsy approach? Liberal circles tend to see the Modi government’s assault on NGOs, particularly Greenpeace, as a clear example of the illiberal times we live in. But that may not be true.
The BJP is only continuing the repressive measures started by the Congress. It was the UPA which had initiated the minute auditing of these organisations, freezing their bank accounts and blacklisting hundreds of NGOs that had failed to meet the nitpicking regulations it had instituted, aimed at harassment than anything else. The BJP finds this useful since Modi’s vision does not brook any dissent. Modi has, however, gone a step further by cautioning the judiciary against handing down verdicts influenced by “five-star activists”. That was a clear direction to the judiciary, a danger to the liberal fabric of the country as outraged intellectuals have pointed out.
There are other similarities with what’s happening in South Asia. Murder by fundamentalists may be less frequent but it can strike with deadly accuracy. Just three months earlier, communist leader Govind Pansare, who has been a relentless critic of right-wing extremism, was shot and killed. His murder took place a year and a half after his comrade-in-arms, the well-known rationalist crusader Naresh Dabholkar, was eliminated in similar fashion in Pune.
Between Dabholkar’s killing in 2013 and that of Pansare in 2015 much has changed. The seething undercurrent of Hindutva has been allowed to boil over by a regime that believes that it’s all in the fitness of things. All that has happened in the year that has gone by can be summed up as the Modi zeitgeist — the liberation of the majority from the yoke of secularism.
The Pansare killing is critical to understanding what the Modi machismo unleashed in the country. The rationalist had received death threats from many Hindu outfits. One organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha had sued Pansare for defamation because he had written that its activities bordered on terrorism. The result has been attacks on churches across the country. It doesn’t matter that Christians comprise no more than three per cent of the population even after centuries of evangelism that Hindu ideologues like Arun Shourie inveigh against. So, there is the ghar wapsi which strikes at the heart of India’s diversity.
The BJP aims to impose a majoritarian culture on the country even where food habits are concerned. So beef eating is now not just frowned upon as a Brahmanical taboo but is banned by law in an increasing number of states, jeopardising the livelihoods of thousands of Muslims. This Hindutva machismo is reflected in Modi’s dealings with Pakistan. It has fallen completely off the BJP’s diplomatic map, the only country barring the Maldives that has been kept at arm’s length. The PM’s touchy feely initiative with his South Asia neighbours has seen Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka treated with a bonhomie that has surprised analysts. Pakistan though continues to be in a winter frost after the false spring that appeared in the air in May 2014 when Modi was sworn in. The initial handshake with Nawaz Sharif has remained frozen, its promise tripped up by domestic policy.
By arrangement with Dawn
