A Culture shock? Really, Mr Modi?
Narendra Modi says the obscene abuse hurled at him and his late mother by young protesters has given him a “cultural shock”. He says he has forgiven them because they are “misled children”.
Fine. Nobody should abuse anybody’s mother. Political disagreement does not give anyone a licence to drag a mother into it.
But here is an awkward question, Mr Modi: where exactly does your cultural shock begin and end?
Does it begin only when the abuse is directed at you and your mother?
Here is another India. An India where Muslims have been beaten, burnt, lynched, raped and killed. An India where women journalists have been subjected to filthy, misogynistic online abuse. An India where political opponents and dissenters have been called traitors, terrorists and anti-national. Thrown into prisons. An India where mobs have been allowed to turn religious hatred into street justice. Bigotry is praised. Open calls for massacre of muslims is hailed. In Parliament, your MP could abuse a Muslim MP. Your MP can give calls : “Goli maro saalon ko!” This is all fine for you.
So we say that your emotional radar has often been remarkably selective.
Shall we begin with Gujarat?
2002. Modi was Chief Minister when Gujarat was engulfed in one of independent India’s worst episodes of state sponsored pogrom. More than a thousand people were killed, most of them Muslims.
And then came that unforgettable Reuters interview in 2013, when Modi was asked whether he regretted the 2002 killings. His analogy was that if a puppy came under the wheels of a car, it would naturally be painful and he would be sad.
That was the language.
A puppy under a car.
An insensitive comment on a horrendous massacre happened under his very nose.
Today, however, the Prime Minister discovers a “cultural shock” when young women use obscene language against him.
What a strange calibration of shock? What an innovative doctrine of cultural shock by Modi?
And Gujarat has an even darker footnote.
Babu Bajrangi, a Bajrang Dal leader, was convicted for his role in the Naroda Patiya massacre, in which 97 Muslims were killed. In the Tehelka sting, he boasted about his role in the killings and said, “I felt like Rana Pratap.”
See what he admitted to a hidden camera of Tehelka. Ashish Ketan in his book, Under Cover: Journey into the Darkness of Hindutva writes:
There was this pregnant woman, I slit her open, behenchod sala. Showed them what’s what, what kind of revenge we can take if our people are killed. Hum khichdi kadhi wale nahin hai, I am no feeble rice-eater. They shouldn’t even be allowed to breed, I say that even today. Whoever they are, women, children, whoever. Nothing to be done with them but cut them down. Thrash them, slash them, burn the bastards. Many [Hindus] wasted time looting. Arrey [the idea is], don’t keep them alive at all, after that everything is ours. That day, it was like what happened between Pakistan and India. There were bodies everywhere, it was a sight to be seen. I felt like Rana Pratap, that I had done something like Maharana Pratap.” (Published by Westland/Context, January 2021., exerpted in Caravan 17 january 2021)
This was a man convicted in court for his role in the massacre.
And what did this man describe in the sting? The killing of Muslims. The massacre of women and children. The slaughter of a pregnant Muslim woman, Kausar Bano.
So, Mr Modi, was this not a cultural shock?
Then there is Bilkis Bano.
She was pregnant when she was gang-raped during the 2002 Gujarat violence. Seven members of her family were murdered. Eleven men convicted in the case were released by the Gujarat government in 2022. The Supreme Court subsequently struck down that remission as illegal and ordered the convicts back to prison. That should have been enough to produce a cultural earthquake.
Yet the outrage from the highest political office was conspicuously less volcanic than it is today over abusive words directed at the Prime Minister.
The long procession of cow-vigilante violence.
Mohammad Akhlaq was lynched in Dadri in 2015 after rumours that his family had stored beef. Pehlu Khan was attacked by cow vigilantes in Rajasthan in 2017 and died of his injuries. Tabrez Ansari was beaten by a mob in Jharkhand in 2019 and died after the assault.
These cases became symbols of a new kind of street politics in which a mob could claim the authority to decide who was sufficiently Indian, and who deserved to live.
That is the cultural shock we are talking about. All these happened in India. While you are in power.
Then came Hathras.
A young Dalit woman was sexually assaulted and died of her injuries. Her body was cremated in the middle of the night, her family saying that the police did not allow them to bring her home for the final rites. There was enormous outrage over the handling of the case. Where was the Prime Minister’s cultural shock then? Not one drop of a tear for this hapless woman. Not one streak of outrage toward those who raped her. Where was the national sermon about the dignity of daughters?
Where was the volcanic anger when a young woman’s family was fighting even for the right to perform her last rites with dignity?
And then Delhi, 2020.
BJP leader Kapil Mishra, who, during his stint with the AAP, had in fact exposed, in the Delhi Assembly, your second-in-command’s role in surveilling an architect in Gujarat at your behest, publicly stood beside a senior police officer at Maujpur and said that his supporters would leave peacefully while Donald Trump was in Delhi, but that after Trump’s departure they would not listen to the police if the roads were not cleared. The speech became one of the most controversial episodes preceding the violence.
The Delhi riots eventually killed 53 people, most of them Muslims.
Yet the police chargesheet initially did not even mention hate speeches by BJP leaders such as Mishra in its chronology of the violence.
Again, was not it worth igniting a cultural shock?
And let us not forget the cyber goondaism.
Women journalists, activists and public figures who question the establishment have repeatedly faced filthy misogynistic abuse online. Academic research has documented the role of right-leaning political networks and influential accounts in spreading dangerous speech and harassment on Indian social media.
Sagarika Ghose is hardly an obscure person. She has spent decades in journalism. She has described the deterioration of India’s media environment and the pressure on journalists.
And the abuse directed at women critics is often not merely political criticism. It is sexualised, personal and deliberately designed to humiliate.
Where is the Prime Minister’s cultural shock when women journalists are called vile names by political trolls?
Where is his concern for their mothers? Their daughters? Their families? Their dignity?
The list is painfully long. Gujarat. Naroda Patiya. Bilkis Bano. Kandhamal. Cow-vigilante lynchings. Hathras. Delhi. The routine demonisation of Muslims. The abuse of women journalists. The online threats against activists. The celebration of political violence by fringe Hindutva figures.
And now the Prime Minister discovers that young women saying obscene things about him constitutes a cultural shock.
Mr Modi, culture is not a one-way mirror.
If obscene language shocks you, good. It should.
But then let it shock you everywhere.
It should shock you when a Muslim is lynched.
It should shock you when a pregnant woman is murdered because she is Muslim.
It should shock you when a rape victim’s family is denied the dignity of taking her body home.
It should shock you when mobs march behind saffron flags and murder people.
It should shock you when your political supporters abuse women journalists with sexual obscenities.
It should shock you when Gandhi is publicly abused by Hindutva extremists.
It should shock you when the killers of a Muslim family are turned into heroes.
It should shock you when a convicted rapist and murderer is welcomed out of prison as though he were a celebrity.
Otherwise, “cultural shock” begins to sound less like a moral principle and more like a VIP facility.
That is where the real question lies.
A culture is not judged by how delicately it treats the powerful.
It is judged by how it treats the weak.
A Prime Minister’s mother deserves respect.
So does the mother of a Muslim man lynched by a mob.
So does the mother of a Dalit woman who died after sexual violence.
So does the mother of a child burnt alive in a communal massacre.
So does the mother of every journalist threatened into silence.
So does every woman who has had to read the filth of political trolls simply because she dared to disagree.
If Modi really wants to talk about culture, let him talk about that culture too.
Otherwise, his “cultural shock” sounds less like conscience speaking and more like privilege discovering, for once, what it feels like to be on the receiving end.
Vimal
8 Aug 26
