Great damage has been done to India’s foreign policy and its global position in the aftermath of the CAA. The country is steadily moving towards global isolation and its allies have questioned the country’s constitutional commitment towards minority rights.
ByImran Jan | May 2020
There are two major myths about nuclear power. One, nuclear energy is seen as dangerous and therefore, public opinion everywhere is opposed to its use for generating clean energy. Public opinion, not surprisingly, has a tendency to be driven more by fallacies than by facts. Statistics, however, don’t lie. Far lesser disasters and deaths have been caused by nuclear plants. The real danger to human lives is from coal, smoking and climate change. There are far higher chances of people getting killed in a car accident than in a plane crash but people are far more scared of air travel than road journeys. People on the road going toward the airport are worried about the flight when in reality their chances of getting into an accident are far more on that very road.
The other myth related to nuclear power is that states cease to be vulnerable to destruction when they become nuclear powers. While nuclear powered states may not be targets of a physical invasion by another hostile country, the real danger to such countries comes from within. Nuclear powered states go down not by an external attack but rather by an implosion. India presents a perfect example of this phenomenon. If anyone were to observe Pakistan and India from another planet, they would realize that both countries cannot go to war with each other because of Mutually Assured Destruction. However, there is one man who is destroying India more than Pakistan ever could. His name is Narendra Modi. This writer firmly believes in the wisdom of Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Therefore, we should be thankful to Modi for validating the Two-Nation theory.
Last year, India did three things that could one day go down in history as the historic events marking the beginning of the end of India. India enacted a law called Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). On its surface, the law was made to appear to be promising asylum to non-Muslims in neighbouring Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. But there is certainly more to it than what meets the eye. The ulterior motive of the Modi regime goes way beyond that nice sounding ambition.
A few months before the law was enacted, the Modi regime rammed down the throats of the Indian population a newly-fangled practice, again, labeled nicely; National Register of Citizens (NRC). This is a register of all Indian citizens, which basically asks all Indians to prove through documentation that they came to India on or before March 24, 1971. The inability to provide documentation rendered close to 2 million Assamese residents stateless. They are up for deportation from the country.
But this is where the game plan gets creative and juicy. Most of the Assamese residents are Hindus. Modi does not want Hindus to be expelled, because that is his main voter base. The other law mentioned above, CAB, besides promising asylum to foreign non-Muslims also allows Indian residents such as Hindu, Jain, Parsi, Buddhist, and Christian minorities, but not Muslims, to stay in India and even become citizens. The NRC and CAB work together by competing each other in ensuring that non-Muslims come to India and Muslims are pushed out of India.
The aim is quite sinister yet clear; making India fully Hindu and removing Muslims from it. And sanitizing this despicable move by labelling it benignly. But beneath the nice labels and behind the facade of secularism lies the ugly truth. Modi achieved what others before him only dreamt of. He has made religious discrimination the law of the land. India’s de facto and de jure logo is: India not for Muslims.
The saffron scarf wearing Hindutva extremists are cheering right now. Many others are looking the other way because, if they are not being targeted, then why pick someone else’s fight? But that sort of willful blindness will come to haunt them in the not too far distant future? They can learn what the Americans learnt the hard way in the last two decades.
When communications among the American people started getting monitored and stored in the name of national security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, much of the population didn’t think much of it and did not object to it. Filled with anger and thirst for revenge, the American people did not imagine a scenario where this sort of surveillance would get out of bounds and hurt the very freedoms they went to Afghanistan to secure. Before invading Afghanistan that is what Bush had alluded to when he asked, “Why do they hate us?” meaning the Taliban hated the Americans for the latter’s democracy, freedom, human rights, justice, and so forth.
But later, a time came when the surveillance state went out of its defined limits and spied on every American and even stored so much as American citizens’’ texts and Google search histories. All this happened every second of the day and night without a warrant. A secret court called the FISA court, stamped its approval on every unconstitutional move of the United States government.
The Indian people ought to know that their fate wouldn’t be much different. It is in the nature of power systems to spread their tentacles where they do not belong. It would be foolish to believe that the Indian government’s overarching tendencies and rights violations would remain confined to the Muslims only. The Indian Home Minister Amit Shah has said that the NRC was sort of an experiment that they would eventually replicate in the rest of India. Everyone’s rights would be violated and their liberties taken away from them.
The CAB-NRC pair of legal systems is limited to one faith for the present but it would only be in keeping with the tradition of power systems if it did not target Hindus and everybody else in the future. Similarly, the draconian laws imposed in the occupied valley of Kashmir, turning it into an open air prison, could soon reach the rest of India. After all, the Indians have a tendency to internalize everything in the name of Pakistan-bashing.
Many people argue that India’s secular identity is being severly eroded by Modi in front of the citizens’ eyes. What is even more alarming is the support people give to Modi. He is not alone in this. He does not speak for his own lunacy alone. He was elected with an overwhelming majority for a second term despite his hateful rhetoric and actions. Perhaps it woud be correct to say that he was elected with an overwhelming majority for a second term because of his hateful rhetoric and actions.
Ultra-right nationalism has swept many parts of the world, including the United States, Hungary, India, etc. It is toxic, addictive and very destructive. Historically, people have given and taken lives in the name of religion and country. The powder keg aspects of both are quite powerful. In India, the situation is more dangerous than many realize because both faith and country are involved. Both are intertwined in the minds of the extremist Hindutva lunatics. The only outcome of such dual lunacy is an implosion of India from within.
'Should all Muslims just go?'
'Over the last several days, we have seen very troubling accounts of vegetable vendors of a particular community not being allowed to sell their wares in parts of India. A daily newspaper has a story how in Gujarat patients were separated in a Covid-19 ward on the basis of their religion. Do you know the pharmaceutical company which is going to develop drugs to tackle COVID-19? It is CIPLA. Do you know who is the owner of that company? It is Yusuf Khwaja Hameed. He is a scientist and a businessman. Do you know that there is another big pharmaceutical company in India known as Wockhardt? Do you know who has made one of the largest donations to fight Covid-19? Who is Azeem Premji? What is Wipro? Since all of you are full of hate, you may know who Shah Rukh Khan is. He is one of India’s biggest stars. Meer Foundation, a Trust Foundation formed by Shah Rukh Khan, has organised some 50,000 PPE kits and is feeding people. But yet you want to attack Muslims, day in and day out and want to abuse them. Do you want A.R.Rahman to disappear from India? Do you want Javed Akhtar to stop writing those lyrics? What do you want? Should the Taj Mahal be evaporated? Should we all (Muslims) just go? Think about it.'
– Saba Naqvi, a Delhi-based
political journalist and author
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