Why has women’s safety stopped having any political impact in the Modi age?

 

 

Published   8 May, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wrestlers in protest against alleged sexual harassment by BJP MP, Brij Bhushan Singh | PTI

In January, some of India’s top wrestlers began a street protest in the capital, New Delhi, demanding that Brij Bhushan Singh, president of Wrestling Federation of India, be arrested on charges of sexual harassment.

The protesting wrestlers included some of the top names in the sport, including men and women who have won medals for India in the Olympics. On the other side was Singh, a powerful member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh belonging to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

In response, the Modi government used a tried and tested tactic to quell agitations: it appointed a committee. Frustrated with this delaying tactic, the wrestlers restarted their agitation in April. This had more success than the January agitation. On April 28, after the case had been heard in the Supreme Court, the Delhi Police relented and filed first information reports against the BJP MP. One of them was under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act given that Singh was accused of sexually harassing a minor.

Backing Singh

In spite of the severity of the allegations as well as the fact that the people making them were some of the most prominent Indian sportspeople alive today, the BJP has stuck by Singh. The Delhi Police, controlled by the Modi government, filed an FIR only after pressure from the Supreme Court. However, even then, it has not arrested Singh. In fact, Singh has released statements brazenly saying that he will not resign as president of the Wrestling Federation of India.

How is the BJP managing to resist the political pressures that such a grave incident could potentially put on the party?

Part of the answer lies in the unfortunate fact that women’s safety plays out in complex ways when it comes to voting. In spite of the fact that women make up half the electorate, by itself it is rare for women’s safety to feature as a major issue during elections. Instead, communitarian identity – caste and religion – usually dominate Indian elections along with economic factors such as inflation and welfare.

This cold political calculus probably explains why the BJP thinks that it might gain more by backing Singh than by supporting the sportspeople who allege they have been harassed. The wrestling chief started out life as a so-called bahubali or gangster and has been accused of working with terrorist Dawood Ibrahim. Later he built an impressive political network in Uttar Pradesh, with strong backing from his Rajput community.

Lack of impact

The fact of community identity trumping gender violence is true not only for the 2023 wrestler’s protest: it has been a longtime feature of Indian politics. The 2002 Gujarat riots, for example, saw mass sexual violence against women. However, this played out electorally along the lines of communal identity. The violence ensured a Hindu vote bank for the BJP, catapulting Modi to the status of a national figure. As part of this politics, the BJP-led Gujarat government last year released some criminals convicted of gangrape during the riots and the party felicitated them after they walked out of jail.

As if to illustrate this political phenomenon, on Sunday, in fact, one of the protesting wrestlers shared a message in support of the BJP’s Hindutva push in the Karnataka elections.

So strong is this communitarian superstructure in Indian politics that even the wrestler’s protest has used it. Khap panchayats of the powerful Jat caste from Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh have backed the wrestlers, ensuring that the protests continue even in the face of strong pressure from the Delhi Police.

Apart from straight electoral calculation, the BJP is also helped by the fact that much of the Hindi- and English-language mass media in the country does not report critically on the Modi government. Part of this has to do with the government’s ability to use the legal framework to reign in recalcitrant media houses. In other cases, owners of media companies are friendly with the government. It is also a fact that members of the upper castes, who dominate the national media, tend to be strong supporters of the BJP. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 11 men convicted in the Bilkis Bano gangrape and mass murder case, being welcomed after they are released by the Gujarat government in 2022. Credit: PTI.

The UPA exception

This stands in stark contrast to the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, where the issue of women’s safety actually did acquire the political prominence it deserves. The Manmohan Singh-led government was strongly attacked by the media in the wake of the horrific 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder. In contrast, in 2020, a gangrape in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh saw much more limited media outrage in spite of the fact that the BJP-led government actually moved to quell protests using draconian force by summarily burning the body of the victim.

In 2012, Delhi had seen large protests for women’s safety. In 2020, the Delhi Police used force to make sure no protests happen given that even a limited protest in the capital would generate TV images that could be beamed across the country and undermine the BJP’s political capital.

With strong media control and support from powerful upper castes, the BJP has ensured that the media is unable to repeat the strong watchdog role it played during the Congress years when it comes to women’s safety.

While media control is a strong factor that helps the BJP government control the political narrative, it is not impossible to overcome. In fact, sustained protests seem to be the one thing that can break it. Farmer protesters have successfully rolled back the farm laws while protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act seem to have led to the law being frozen. As a result, while Modi’s BJP has successfully prevented women’s safety from being an issue that could erode its political capital, a sustained protest by the wrestlers against allegations of sexual harassment by a BJP MP could, in theory, change that.

Source: https://indiafix.stck.me/post/82830/Why-has-womens-safety-stopped-having-any-political-impact-in-the-Modi-age

What will be the impact of erasing the Mughals from Indian history?

Published

• 10 Apr, 2023
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aurangzeb holds court. Credit: Bichitr, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal, a newsletter on Indian politics. To get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on “follow”). Have feedback, interesting links or Mughal-era memes? Send them to theindiafix@scroll.in.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training has just published a revised set of textbooks. The biggest change: an entire chapter related to the Mughal empire has been dropped from the Class XII history book, relating the workings of the imperial courts.

NCERT textbooks are used by students taking the Central Board of Secondary Education examinations, which are managed by the Union government. In terms of absolute numbers, the CBSE is followed by only a small proportion of Indian high school students. But given its prestige, it often acts as a guiding light for other boards.

For CBSE students, the removal of the chapter is a loss. The 30-odd-page text is beautifully written by Najaf Haider of Jawaharlal Nehru University and provides a succinct description of how the Mughal court was extensively involved in the production of its own histories. Texts such as this offer a wealth of information not only about the a highly centralised Mughal bureaucratic empire but also about medieval India.

A partial history

Without an understanding of the Mughals, it is unclear how history students will be able to understand medieval South Asia and, especially, the Hindi belt, which was the heartland of the empire. To take one example of how tightly the Mughals are woven into subcontinental culture, biographers of Tulsidas tell of a meeting between the Vaishnav poet-saint and Emperor Akbar. While probably apocryphal, given that in the tale, Akbar is impressed by Tulsidas’ power to work miracles, it illustrates how important the Mughal state was even for cultural and religious figures.

Similarly, in 1857, when the sepoys of the British East Indian Company revolted, they rushed to Delhi to solicit the Mughal stamp of approval, even though by that time, the emperor was powerless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Capture of the leader of the Indian rebels and last Mughal King, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Source: London Printing and Publishing Co., Ltd., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

However, the effects of the deletion of this chapter will not be limited to students. The demonisation of Mughals is a core part of Hindutva, India’s ruling ideology that now stands on a nearly equal footing with Indian nationalism itself. As Hindutva’s chief ideologue Vinayak Savarkar laid out, Hindutva sees Muslims and Christians as perpetual outsiders in India. Attacking the Mughals is a key part of how Hindutva imagines Hindus as victims as victims even though they are the majority in India.

While mainstream historians recognise the British Raj as a colonial period, Hindutva supporters extend this idea back much further. In 2014, for example, the newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of India having undergone “1,200 years of slavery”, presumably dating the country’s colonial age to the eighth century Arab conquest of Sindh in modern-day Pakistan. Framing India’s colonial experience as the longest-ever in the world provides a powerful source for Hindutva to draw on for its politics of victimhood.

Though this is ahistorial, it has paid rich dividends for the Bharatiya Janata Party. The constant ideological battle over India’s medieval period has provided powerful ideological buoyancy to the BJP that other other parties have found difficult to counter. This nationalist debate over history, in turn, has allowed the BJP to paper over economic and social fault lines that would have easily felled less ideological governments such as the United Progressive Alliance.

Lack of history

Of course, the battle for history will have much longer-term consequences than merely a few elections.

For one, the attack on the Mughals remakes the idea of India, casting it as a Hindu state. For a sovereign to be legitimate to Hindutva supporters, the ruler has to have been Hindu. This obviously rules out the Mughals and the many sultanates that dotted South Asia from Bengal to the Deccan. In some ways, it also excludes the Buddhist Ashoka. Sanjeev Sanyal, one of the Modi government’s chief ideologues, has sharply attacked Ashoka for “large-scale religious persecution”. (This analysis leaves out Hindu kings, who on the matter of, say, caste, are not held up to modern standards.)

In an even more fundamental way, however, these omissions will end up reshaping the foundation of the Indian state. Modern nation-states are, as the theorist Benedict Anderson suggested, based on “imagined communities” that share most commonly a language or, in some cases, religion. However, they also look back to historical states to legitimise themselves.

Modern China, for example, is a state with the Han ethnicity as its majoritarian core. Yet, it takes great care to include non-Han dynasties as a legitimate part of the historical Chinese state. The final Chinese dynasty, for example, are the Qing who were not Han but from the minority Manchu ethnicity. Yet, modern China includes them as legitimate emperors of China. It views the Mongol Yuans who ruled it the same way. (As it so happens, the word Mughal is a Persianised form of Mongol and the Mughals proudly noted the fact they descended, on the maternal side, from Genghis Khan).

This is not only catholic. It is a clever part of state formation. It allows China to project the myth of an unbroken history of thousands of years. It is also a powerful historical weapon for Beijing to wield in international affairs. For example, China’s claim to Tibet is based on the region’s conquest not by any Han king but by the Mongols. It now this to justify its occupation of significant swathes of Indian territory.

Hobbling India

In contrast, India is currently in an odd situation. Legally, modern India is a successor state of the British Raj – universally seen as a foreign-controlled, colonial state. But while the British might offer some legal justifications, modern India clearly would not want to claim inspiration from Britain’s Indian empire.

Till now, Indian nationalists could fall back on the Mughal empire. The powerful medieval state, at its height, covered a large section of territory that now forms part of the Indian Union. However, if the Mughals too are branded as a colonial power, the modern Indian state has nothing to offer as medieval equivalent. Unlike the Chinese, who can easily deploy the Mongol conquest of Tibet, the current Indian government will not be able to use the powerful argument that Ladakh has been a part of India since the Mughals integrated it in the seventeenth century.

To understand how powerful this history is for state building, it is worth noting that even Modi has, for a decade now, used the Mughal Red Fort in Delhi as a backdrop for state functions such as Independence Day. In 2021, when farm protestors stormed the Red Fort, harking back to Sikh oral histories of attacks on Mughal Delhi, there was widespread outrage in Hindutva circles: given the continuities between the Mughal state and the modern Indian Union, they saw the Red Fort as an Indian symbol.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modi at the 2022 Independence Day function at the Red Fort. Credit: PTI.

Space for a non-Delhi history?

While the erasure of the Mughals might present problems in extending the Indian state back in time, it may inadvertently address a long-highlighted problem: the lack of texts that correctly portray the subcontinent’s diverse political pasts.

Given that much of medieval North Indian history overlaps with Mughal history, it was easy to give the dynasty the lion’s share of historical space. However, other states in India have their own histories that often diverge sharply from Delhi’s. With the gradual erasure of the Mughals and the pan-subcontinent history they so easily portrayed, the Indian Union’s many states and communities may finally have the opportunity to tell their own rich histories.

Source: https://indiafix.stck.me/post/74305/What-will-be-the-impact-of-erasing-the-Mughals-from-Indian-history