In recent weeks, two books throbbing with immediacy have caught the headlines. In their distinct ways, writers Siddhartha Deb and Radha Kumar paint with words the stark reality of the times, marked by intolerance, violence, bigotry, and glorified falsehoods. Both Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India, and Kumar, in The Republic Relearnt, alert readers to the politics of one nation, one religion, one leader; and of the possibility of an elected autocracy. Their work travels from Kashmir to Assam, Gujarat to Odisha, with a reminder that the threat to the idea of India is persistent and present.
Broad sweep
Deb’s is a stirring saga, a recounting of known challenges which needs reiteration. Whether he talks of Gujarat or Ayodhya; Assam and the National Register of Citizens; 1% Indians cornering over 50% of wealth; challenges of being activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh — the picture he conveys is of a nation that has lost its moral compass, desperate to “arrive” on the global stage, by going to the extent of forgetting its own history. Deb writes how he discovered the erasure in progress. “... on Google Maps, I looked for the city of Allahabad, one of the oldest and most significant cities in Uttar Pradesh. It wasn’t there. How was it possible that a city of 1.8 million people could have ceased to exist without my hearing a word about it?” Allahabad, founded by the Mughal emperor Akbar, had been renamed Prayagraj, and Google made it official. Allahabad wasn’t the only city to face such a fate. Mughalsarai and others too were lost as the BJP government adopted a delete-your-past policy on history.
At the site of Ramjanmabhoomi Temple in Ayodhya. | Photo Credit: ANI
Deb’s writing conveys the impression of a river in spate sweeping away all that comes in its way. A New York-based writer, Deb goes wherever controversies beckon. From the banks of the Sarayu, he writes of the Prime Minister of India carrying “out a ceremony inaugurating the construction of the (Ram) temple” even as coronavirus raged in August 2020. Then without a warning, he asks, “Had a great Hindu temple to Ram ever previously existed here?” His exploration leads him to the Supreme Court’s words in its Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi verdict where the court admitted, “There is no specific finding that the underlying structure was a temple dedicated to Lord Ram.” Yet, “on the basis of documentary and oral evidence”, it ordered “the site to be handed over for the building of the temple.” Deb’s work is a cry of anguish for India.
Rural women labourers repair roads under the NREGS (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme), near Baliyanta village on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. | Photo Credit: Biswaranjan Rout
Kumar, on the other hand, expresses her fears gently, letting facts do the talking, building her narrative layer upon layer. In the chapter, ‘India’s Weimar Moment’, she writes that during Manmohan Singh’s decade, 2004 to 2014, India’s economy grew by “roughly 7.8% per year” and “275 million people were lifted out of poverty.” She says that after a first-term of broadly jobless growth, over 17 million new formal-sector jobs were created in his second term.
A woman worships a cow on the banks of the Ganges, in Allahabad. | Photo Credit: AP
Love jihad and other ‘threats’
Of Modi’s rise in 2014, Kumar analyses: “The Modi administration came to power when chauvinist administrations were emerging or had emerged across the world. Three perceived threats were drummed up against Muslims. The first was the threat of Islamist terrorism, which Indians had grown to revile following a series of Pakistan-backed attacks from 1990. A key plank of Modi’s campaign in both [the] 2014 and 2019 general elections was to associate Indian Muslims with Pakistan, labelling the Muslim community ‘anti-national’ by innuendo... The second perceived threat related to cow slaughter. Between 2015 and 2017, sixty-three incidents of cow-related lynching were reported... The third perceived threat was ‘love jihad’, a term Hindu chauvinists applied to marriage between Muslim men and Hindu women. Coined in 2009, the term was assiduously promoted during the BJP campaign.”
Women associated with ‘India Against Love Jihad’ hold placards and form a human chain to protest against love jihad and conversion to Islam, in Bhopal. | Photo Credit: A.M. Faruqui
Kumar, however, believes all is not lost, and says the common Indian will call a halt to all totalitarian tendencies. “Though the conditions for totalitarianism are still incipient, considerable inroads have been made... Even totalitarians could not eradicate individual dissent. There lay hope,” she concludes. Deb though alerts readers to the challenges ahead, writing, “The Ram temple in Ayodhya, built with stone from Rajasthan, designed by an architect from Gujarat, and funded by dollars from the diaspora in the West, is only the beginning of an effort to construct a past that never was, in the hope of devising a future from which India’s Muslim inhabitants can be erased.” Remember Allahabad?
Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India; Siddhartha Deb, Context/Westland Books, ₹599.
The Republic Relearnt: Renewing Indian Democracy (1947-2024); Radha Kumar, Vintage, ₹999.
ziya.salam@thehindu.co.in
