If governance systems and their guardians—our politicians—fail to calm such violence and are at times the perpetrators or supporters of it, how can we entrust them with the greatest responsibility of protecting our freedom to live? If the laws of our land, which the political elite has enshrined in our Constitution, cannot stop people from killing each other, and don’t even allow the meting out of justice in such cases, on what basis do they claim to know better than us common folks about what to do when free? Even today, ask any politician (or members of their clan and families) about the benefits of governance in India, and they will tell you that in a country where 25.6 per cent of the people are illiterate, the masses do not have the intellectual or emotional bandwidth to take informed decisions about what to do with their freedom and therefore need to be guided by societal norms, religious doctrines and legal frameworks. The truth is that much to the benefit of these politicians who want to stay in power, if the masses are lacking in terms of education—formal and informal—they are less likely to take rational decisions that defy the agenda of the ruling political, societal, corporate and religious elite.
Communal violence, even if a common feature in India,8 has grown neither progressively nor continuously, spurting excessively once in a while. The situation today is not the worst we have seen, yet, undeniably, it has deteriorated in recent times. In 2015, according to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, India suffered a 17 per cent increase in reported communal violence, with 751 reported incidents as compared to the 644 reported in the previous year.9 In addition, there were at least 365 major attacks on Christians and their institutions in 2015, compared to 120 in 2014.10 In 2017, India has risen to the fifteenth rank on the Open Doors World Watch List of the fifty countries in which it is hardest to live as a Christian.11 Also, statistics show that as of 2014, only 5 per cent of marriages in India are inter-caste.12
As opposed to communal riots, which might make it to a sensational newspaper headline, there are individual cases of intolerance-induced violence that appear routine.
Mohammad Akhlaq, a fifty-two-year-old Muslim man in a village close to Delhi, was lynched by a mob in September 2015, after rumours that he had eaten beef and was storing cow meat at home.13 Meanwhile, Kannur, in Kerala, has been a hotbed for political violence for several decades, witness to a number of deaths across party lines. Police data between 2000 and 2016 shows that of the sixty-nine political deaths in this district, thirty-one were of Hindus from the BJP or the RSS.14
In Jharkhand, two cattle traders, thirty-two-year-old Mazlum Ansari and fifteen-year-old Imteyaz Khan, were caught by a group, beaten and left hanging from a tree in March 2016.15 In 2017, a twenty-three-year-old RSS worker in Tamil Nadu was brutally hacked to death in broad daylight allegedly by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The victim was an accused in a case related to the murder of a Democratic Youth Federation of India worker in 2013.16 On 10 July 2017, seven Hindu pilgrims died in a deadly assault in Anantnag, a Muslim-majority region in Kashmir.17 In 2000, an attack on the same pilgrimage also killed thirty people, most of them Hindus, and was blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The list goes on, and will go on.18
There are people being attacked, beaten up and murdered on the basis of various accusations or political interests. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution restricts or bans cow slaughter in twenty-four out of twenty-nine Indian states as of 2015.19 This, indeed, is a law in India, even though it economically marginalizes the people who work in the beef industry, which includes slaughter for consumption, hauling items, and producing leather goods.
Let us be clear that murders and lynching have happened before, under all governments. Communal and political violence in India has occurred across all political regimes. The old slogan ‘unity in diversity’ should be practised and preserved by all government and political parties.
Hegemony is power with legitimacy, and it is the majority groups that are hegemonic today. A gay man can be harassed or killed by a mob, because his murderers would have measured homosexuality by societal values (despite and because of these being ever-changing), and found it shameful, abnormal or just ‘wrong’. A woman can be bullied, harassed and raped by a group of men because she would be considered according to societal norms to be wearing the ‘wrong’ length of skirt. These members of majority groups are immune or deadened to the respect for another individual’s freedom to live a dignified life. They are not educated—despite any number of degrees—in a way that they can think rationally and independently for themselves either. How else can one explain the continual killing of human beings? Even the laws of the Constitution have failed to save man from man—this is a country where homosexuality has always been a legally contentious20 issue.
Freedom in India is therefore subjective, dependent on where you live, which family and caste you were born into, your gender, religion, sexuality, source of livelihood. The guarantee of freedom for our marginalized communities—be it on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation or economic status—has always been the most fragile. This will not change, no matter how many laws are drafted, religious doctrines invoked, and societal norms established, unless all our children—regardless of their background—are educated to be rational, independent-minded individuals who respect one another. It is possible to create various kinds of freedoms by pursuing such an education facilitated by home, school and society.
Because at the end of the day, it is important to ask: What is the defining characteristic of our nation? Is it the territorial
