It’s an old cliche to say that we live in two countries — India and Bharat. The distinction is generally made along the urban-rural divide. Actually, there are many more sub-countries within these divisions and exemplifying them is the persona of our dynamic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Even his worst enemies cannot but admire his energy and dynamism. The recent tour of the United States brought this to centrestage once again. There was Mr Modi hopping from city to city, at the United Nations one day, meeting President Barack Obama on another, with corporate and digital czars, NRIs… The list is so large that it’s difficult to see how much he packed in, in so little time.
Mr Modi also seems to have made a strong impression on everyone he met. Whether it was the G4 meeting with heads of state from Germany, Japan and Brazil, or leaders of corporate America or the whiz kids of the digital world, to NRIs gathered in a stadium, to each he spoke in their language, so that all thought of him as a very special leader. Mr Modi, on the world stage, is like to the manor born: a man of meagre education, of humble upbringing, of limited political experience, and yet he straddles the world with confident step, as if he has done it all his life.
Then he returns to India. And settles in quite comfortably into a country whose value system he (or at least his council of ministers and fellow partymen) seems to be taking in a direction diametrically opposite to the one he so forcefully espouses overseas. Abroad it is all Digital India, Make in India, Marching Forward India… Back home it is ban meat India, ban beef India, do not delete SMS, emails India... Raids on couples in hotels, imposition of grossly unqualified people as heads of important institutions, arbitrary retrospective tax demands on corporates, bureaucracy with an increased supply of red tape and corruption (especially at lower levels) unabated.
The question Mr Modi must ask himself is this: Does not the second India impinge on the first? Being an extremely intelligent man, he must surely know that everything he achieves abroad in his meetings and public appearances, is swiftly negated by the happenings at home. When a man is killed for eating beef does it, or does it not affect Bill Gates, even purely at the corporate level? We all know the after effects of the horrifying December 2012 rape case: it affected tourism, it affected foreigners relocating to India on assignments, and it affected NRIs who were contemplating coming back.
You can argue — and one can be sure Bharatiya Janata Party spokespersons have done so again and again — that these are isolated incidents, which do not reflect the true situation in the country. Most of us would even agree with that, but your blood freezes when the party’s mouthpieces go shamelessly on television and actually justify the lynching of a man for eating beef because it “hurts Hindu sentiments”.
This is what Nawab Singh Nagar, BJP’s ex-MLA from Dadri said, “If cow slaughter and its consumption is proven, they (Mohammad Akhlaq and his family) are definitely at fault... It is obvious that such an incident (eating of beef) will lead to anger among people... If this was the case, the family is in the wrong.” As if to prove his point, the police sent the meat seized from the Muslim family for analysis to check whether it was indeed beef or mutton. Surely the police’s first priority should have been to protect the family and arrest the murderers!
As with most things, even the issue of cow protection is far more complex than it is made out to be. Incidentally, and this will surely come as a surprise to people who lay the blame for all reactionary steps on the door of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, many of the beef bans over the years have been imposed by Congress governments. The present position in the country is that the slaughter of cows, including calves and bulls, is completely banned in nine states (Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and now Maharashtra).
Conditional slaughter operates in 10 states while eight states have no restrictions on slaughter. This is strange in a country where as many as 69 per cent of Indians are non-vegetarians according to an official 2006 survey. Since the beef ban in Maharashtra, many dalits have written angrily that beef was always part of their diet, and it’s the upper caste RSS types who are imposing their dietary restrictions on the rest of the country. Surely even dalits would be surprised that the 2006 survey also found that as many as 55 per cent of brahmins eat meat!
According to experts, the ban on beef has resulted in some unintended consequences. Firstly, the population of cows has actually declined rather than gone up, while buffalo numbers have increased. That’s because the farmer has switched to rearing buffaloes where there are no restrictions on slaughter. After all, he is the one who has to deal with the problem of what to do with his “retired” cattle, which is reached when the cow is too old to give milk or the bull too old to plough the field. Earlier he sold these to the butcher.
This may sound like a heartless way to treat an animal which has been of so much use to you, but the poor deal in pragmatism, not high morality. A second unintended consequence is that more and more cows are now being owned by Muslims. Aren’t these supreme ironies for Hindu zealots who are laying down lives to protect cows? (Of course the lives they lay down are not their own.)
This then is the reality of today’s India. There is now absolutely no doubt that the RSS is driving the country’s cultural, educational and intellectual agenda. What were fringe groups earlier — like the Samadhan Sena in Dadri — now flourish and flaunt their message of hate openly. What was the local police doing in the last few months when the group’s anti-Muslim propaganda was gathering momentum? Nothing. Multiply that several times and you get a frightening picture of the direction in which the country is really going.
This is not what Mr Modi talked about in America. What would the digital world’s leaders think if they knew that the Dadri killings were instigated via WhatsApp and that Twitter is now extensively used by people advocating the killing of beef eaters? If things continue the way they are, and Mr Modi allows the dangerous drift to continue, our Prime Minister on his foreign tours will be known as nothing more than a seller of empty dreams.
The writer is a senior journalist
