By Ranjona Banerji
We’re in a time warp here. The same arguments which were used and countered during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and beyond are resurfacing in the media. How Hindus were historically ill-treated by everyone, how Hindus have never invaded a foreign country and are therefore peaceful, how Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru’s descendants have ruined India.
There are two major differences between the late 1980s to early 1990s and now. The first is the growth and spread of television news and the other of course is social media. It was the Gulf War of 1991 which brought satellite television to India. It is hard to imagine a world such as that any more. And in many ways, I shudder to think of the damage Whatsapp could have caused in those days.
During the January 1993 post-Babri demolition riots in Bombay, rumours that “Muslims†had poisoned the city’s entire milk supply spread like wildfire. Mobile phones had not reached India by then and most people did not even have landlines, if you can imagine such a world.
In Ahmedabad, during the 2002 riots, I came from work at one in the morning to find the whole building awake, armed with sticks, ready to fights mobs of Muslims who were roaming the streets. The army was out by then, there was curfew, there were no mobs. My intervention was not appreciated.
Ironically, in both cases, it was Muslims who were targeted and killed and it was Hindus who were claiming victimhood. This same thought process is seemingly in control today. It has been built up since the campaign to make Narendra Modi ​P​rime Minister began and has now taken hold. The attacks on rationalist and atheist writers who challenged superstition, the attacks on JNU, the targeting of Dalits like Rohith Vemula and then Kanhaiya Kumar, the lynching of Muslims and Dalits in the name of the cow…
As in the past, this violence is justified using the distant and the very distant past as excuses. Muslims invaded us and Vedic Hindus invented everything. The British are usually let off the hook, hardly surprising since the RSS had no role to play in the freedom struggle, but the western world in general is looked upon with suspicion.
Koenraed Elst is back in favour and Francois Gautier is trying to get back – two European names to bandy about as champions of Hindutva. Opinion pieces in newspapers are making the same arguments as before. That the RSS played no role in the freedom struggle, that Savarkar first propounded the two-nation theory, that Hindus have been put upon for millennia, that the caste system is either great and misunderstood by the white man or that the caste system came in with the Muslims. The ingenuity of the human mind is such that it can apparently hold both these theories about the caste system simultaneously and not see a contradiction. But then, the human mind also believes everything it sees and hears on Whatsapp.
The most horrendous change however has been in the quality of journalism. Between 1992 and 2002, most media houses stood for law and order and the facts. Today, we are drowning in a sea of hatred, where more journalists than before have become hate-mongers and propagandists. Any the few who try to take any sort of stand are attacked, excoriated, humiliated, threatened and killed.
What happened to Rajdeep Sardesai in Bengaluru, where he was heckled at a restaurant by a BJP fan is symptomatic of the hatred that now runs free.
I am not so sanguine that the battle for a free India and a fair media will be won quite as easily as it has been in the past.
​Ranjona Banerji is a senior journalist and commentator. She is also Consulting Editor, MxMIndia. The views here are personal​