It began with the writers, who returned the Sahitya Akademi awards in protest against the murder of rationalist and Kannada writer MM Kalburgi by Hindu fanatics and the failure of the Sahitya Akademi to raise its voice over it. They expanded the terms of protest by including the murders of two other rationalists in Maharashtra, Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. The lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq by the Hindu villagers of Balsahad in Dadri for allegedly eating beef, that is the meat of the cow, also was incorporated in the protest agenda. The inference was drawn that intolerance, of the reactionaries, was growing and that the country was slipping into the pit of fear and violence.
It is not necessary to ask the question whether the writers were justified in bundling together the murders of Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare and Akhlaq, except for the fact that all of these criminal acts emanated from the reactionary section of society, and that they enjoyed the support of the reactionary government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP), and the BJP’s ideological affiliates including groups like Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha and Mangalore-based Hindu Sene. What angered the writers was the fact that Modi did not speak out against these hate crimes.
The scientists followed the writers, and then the historians joined the protest as well. The scientists and historians were not returning any awards with the exception of the founding director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley described the protest acts as “manufactured dissent”, a variation on American linguist-philosopher and arch-dissenter Noam Chomsky’s title of a book co-authored with Edward S Herman “Manufacturing Consent”, published by Pantheon Books in 1988. He also described the liberal protesters as being rabidly anti-BJP. It is true that the liberal intelligentsia hates the reactionary Sangh Parivar, and the Sangh Parivar has no intelligent response to the liberals-as-protesters.
Jaitley is quite accurate in the phrases he has used to describe the liberal opponents of the BJP, RSS and the rest of reactionaries. But his descriptive phrases are ineffective in pooh-poohing the opponents and delegitimising their protests.
The major faux pas of the BJP with regard to the killings of Pansare, Kalburgi and Akhlaq was that there was not a strong enough condemnation from the right-wing central government. The silence was interpreted as an assent to killing ideological opponents and members of a minority group, especially Muslims. The BJP and the Parivar have a reputation for being anti-minorities and they have not done anything to deny it. The BJP is seen as a narrow-minded Hindu party, which is hostile to Muslims and Christians. The BJP relishes the fact that it is a Hindu party because of the perception that there is no party to speak up for the Hindus while there are many, including the secular parties, to speak up for religious minorities, including the Muslims and Christians. It also sees a certain advantage in being seen as hostile to religious minorities. It was easy for the anti-BJP liberals to establish the point that the Central Government was keeping silent over the hate crimes because it silently approved the hatred.
If the BJP has been caught on the wrong foot in its failure to take a stand against these hate crimes, the liberals seem to be shooting themselves in the foot by building a fear scenario based on the four murders. These cases are still pending in the court of law. The commonality between the killers is that they represent reactionary sentiments. It appears to be quite a hasty thing to arraign the BJP, the RSS and rest for their moral culpability in these murders. It would have been better if the focus of the protesters had been on bringing the culprits to justice rather than establishing the ideological biases of the killers.
Unlike the rabble-rousing right-wingers, the liberal intellectuals should have adopted a more intelligent approach to the issue. Instead, the liberals are morphing into rabble-rousers themselves. They should have sent out fact-finding commissions to each of the places where the murders had taken place, and they should have established strong evidence with regard to each of them.
The murders of Dabholkar and Pansare took place in Maharashtra, of Kalburgi in Karnataka and that of Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh. The murder of Dabholkar happened when Congress-NCP was in power, of Pansare when the BJP-Sena has taken over power. It is a Congress government in Karnataka and Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. The liberals should have condemned each of the state governments and the different political parties as well. Why did not the Congress, NCP and SP take tough action against the extremist Hindu organisations which were allegedly behind the killings?
But the Indian liberals, who have generally been intellectually lazy, took the easy way out by adopting an ideological position against the BJP. While Bhargava is concerned about the erosion of “scientific temper”, the liberal historians have been nursing the grudge that the BJP-RSS has taken over key institutions like the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and the Nehru Memorial Museum Library (NMML), and they are dismantling the scholarly work that have been accomplished in these places. These battles should have been fought on separate fronts instead of being merged into a single protest against intolerance in general. It does not help.
When a right-wing government is in power, it will use its clout to occupy positions of influence, like Indian Council of Historical Research and The Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, in the same way, that the liberals used their leverage with previous political establishments to dominate these institutions. It was inevitable that the BJP would get its own people to man these institutions. The liberals cannot insist that the other side should not take advantage of the changed political position. The liberals will have to fight on each issue and that too in an intelligent scholarly way than resort to political, rhetorical gestures. It would also be useful to remember that the liberals tolerated no other position other than their own. The BJP-RSS, less scholarly and more uncouth, are hitting back by grabbing positions in research centres and hounding out the liberals.
But all these quarrels have nothing to do with the murders of Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Akhlaq. The BJP government of Narendra Modi has been shamefully cowardly in speaking out against these killings. The liberals showed themselves to be opportunists by latching on to them to make their point against their bete noir, the Modi government.
