NAINITAL TRIP MEMORIES

WHO WILL RETURN MY 20 YEARS

The sky was overcast, but, for the first time in over two decades, they were no longer under cloud, as they stepped out of the Jaipur Central Jail Tuesday, a day after the Rajasthan High Court acquitted them in the 1996 Samleti blast case.

At 5:19 pm Tuesday, Latif Ahmed Baja (42), Ali Bhatt (48), Mirza Nisar (39), Abdul Goni (57) and Rayees Beg (56), stepped out of prison; Beg had been incarcerated since June 8, 1997, while the others were imprisoned between June 17, 1996 and July 27, 1996. During this time, they were lodged in jails in Delhi and Ahmedabad, but were never released on parole or bail.

While acquitting them on Monday, the High Court said the prosecution had failed to provide evidence of conspiracy. It said the prosecution could not establish any link between them and the main accused, Dr Abdul Hameed, whose death sentence was upheld.

After their release Tuesday, the five men said they didn’t know each other until the Criminal Investigation Department (Crime Branch) made them an accused in the case. While Beg is a resident of Agra, Goni is from Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir, and the others are from Srinagar. Before they were jailed, Bhatt had a carpet business, Baja used to sell Kashmiri handicraft in Delhi and Kathmandu, Nisar was a Class IX student and Goni used to run a school.

“We have no idea about the world we are stepping into,” says Goni. “We’ve lost relatives while we were inside. My mother, father and two uncles passed away. We have been acquitted, but who will bring back those years,” says Beg, adding that his sister has since got married and his niece is now about to get married too.

A couple of men hug him and start crying. One is his son, Rizwan, and the other is his brother, Saleem. “We never lost hope all these years,” says Saleem, trying to hold back his tears. “Last night, we couldn’t sleep or eat. The anticipation, and then the paper work, seemed to go on forever,” says Nisar. He claims that he was just 16 years old when he was made an accused, but the officials showed his age as 19 then. Now 39, he says he would like to get married and try to make a fresh start.

Baja says he hasn’t married either, but then points to his bald head and wonders if he will find any bride. The men ask for help to operate a cellphone, so that they can speak to their relatives. Four of them head to the office of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, which they credit with playing a crucial role in their acquittal.

They are offered food, but, after tasting freedom, none of them are hungry. Seeing the hullabaloo around him, Baja says he is bewildered and is yet to process what’s happening. Recounting his time in jail, he says he and Nisar would exercise regularly. Bhatt copied the Quran, twice, and sent one of the copies to his home in Srinagar.

“His youth passed, our parents died, my tears dried up, and I grew old crying for him,” says Goni’s sister Suraiya (62), speaking over the phone from Jammu. “My heart has been beating faster since yesterday. Give me a couple of days, let him come home first, I will tell you everything,” she adds.

The case dates back to May 22, 1996, when a bomb blast in a bus near Samleti village in Dausa, on the Jaipur-Agra highway, killed 14 people and injured 37 others; the bus was headed to Bikaner from Agra. The blast came a day after the Lajpat Nagar bomb blast in Delhi, in which 13 people were killed.

The chargesheet had said the men were associated with the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and claimed some of them were also involved in the Sawai Man Singh Stadium blast in Jaipur in 1996. “They were named in multiple cases without any basis. They have been acquitted in all the cases — but after 23 years,” says their counsel, Shahid Hasan. Pointing to the delay, he says the trial only began in 2011.

While 12 people were accused in the Samleti case, seven have been acquitted so far. While one was acquitted in 2014, six were acquitted on Tuesday. However, the sixth person, Javed Khan, who is in Tihar Jail, is still an accused in the Lajpat Nagar blast case. Two others who were accused have been discharged, while one has since died. The High Court bench of Justice Sabina and Justice Goverdhan Bardar upheld the death sentence to Dr Abdul Hameed and life sentence to Pappu Salim, a former approver who turned hostile.

DISRESPECT TO MANDATE

The recent defections of Congress legislators in Goa and Telangana to the BJP and the TRS respectively and four TDP MPs in the Rajya Sabha joining the BJP seem to pass the anti-defection law test. In all the three cases, the rebels had the required numbers — two-third members of the legislature party — to escape disqualification. One of the MLAs who joined the BJP in Goa had been elected on a Congress ticket defeating the BJP nominee only two months earlier. It’s not been even a year since elections were held in Telangana and almost all the defectors had defeated TRS candidates. It takes an instrumentalist reading of the law to justify these defections as a normal political activity. The fact is these are a violation of political and constitutional morality.

Parliamentary politics in India revolves around political parties in the main. Candidates in an electoral contest are seen as representatives of political parties, and not as autonomous agents with a voice distinct from the party they represent. The primary identity of a candidate is political, which is derived from the history and ideology of the party that has fielded him. For the voters, the candidate is the voice of the party. The party symbol, election manifesto, etc. embellish his claims to represent a party and an ideology. The candidate seeks endorsement from the electorate on behalf of the party, and also for the party. There may be times when a leader becomes the face of the party and votes are sought in his name, as in the 2019 general election.

This being the case, a defection of a legislator is a betrayal of the mandate; it is a breach of the trust forged through the election process. A legislator is well within his rights to change party; in fact, he must if he loses trust in his parent party or finds another ideology more attractive. But any shift in political affiliation would mean the right to represent the mandate is lost. Political morality demands that he resign his seat and seek re-election. For instance, when V P Singh fell out with the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi, he resigned his Lok Sabha seat and sought re-election. Ramakrishna Hegde resigned as chief minister of Karnataka when the Janata Party was wiped out in the 1984 Lok Sabha election — though he was under no compulsion to do so — on the ground that he has lost the moral authority to head the government. Singh won the Allahabad bypoll and Karnataka voted Janata and Hegde back to office in the following assembly election. In 2012, R Selvaraj, a CPM MLA in Kerala who defected to the Congress, resigned his seat and sought a fresh mandate from the new platform.

The defections in Goa and Telangana have been blamed on the Congress leadership’s failure to shield its flock — presumably by offering cash, office or other incentives. The defectors also take cover behind hollow terms such as development and governance to explain their political shift. Whatever be the reason, the legislator is duty-bound to explain his defection to the electorate; the first step towards that is to quit the seat.

Is this likely to happen if a defector is not censured by the electorate? The changes in political economy have transformed political parties as well as the political process. The influx of big money into elections has turned electoral contests into an expensive, lopsided affair. Political parties have long ceased to be about beliefs and have become platforms that dispense patronage. In some of the southern states, candidatures have become a privilege of the very rich, who court political parties as a means to to keep the law away and use the privileges the association confers to further business interests. The patron-client relationship that gets established between the party leadership and legislators is thus mutually beneficial — it ensures funds for the party, which, in return, provides protection and privileges for the affiliate.

Occasionally, this system is challenged by the people. Radical left-wing uprisings, the J P Movement, V P Singh’s Jan Morcha, the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare, etc. were expressions of public anger with the corruption of parliamentary democracy. The phenomena of New Social Movements, which mobilised people on issues such as land, livelihood, ecological concerns, too owes it existence to the people’s disillusionment with electoral politics. All these took a toll on the Congress, which was instrumental in the degeneration of parliamentary democracy. It may be the turn of the BJP soon.

ARTICLE -15

Mainstream cinema brings to us a world of enchanting narratives in which heroes perform tasks that are often beyond the realm of the imaginable. However, films also reflect our social and cultural values. Hindi cinema’s dominant language overtly endorses the moral outlook of the social elites while social groups, like Dalits and Adivasis, are often depicted in a stereotypical manner.

It has been argued that the Dalit representation in Hindi cinema reflects philanthropic upper caste sensitivities. Dalit characters are often shown as powerless (Sujata and Sadgati), wretched (Paar and Bandit Queen) and dependent upon the morality of the social elites (Aarakshan and Lagaan). However, in recent times, films like Rajneeti, Guddu Rangeela, Manjhi, Masaan, Newton and Sonchariya attempted to break such stereotypes. Dalits were now no longer just victims of caste atrocities, but complex characters. The recently released Article 15 is a welcome addition to films that portray Dalit subjectivity in a nuanced manner.

In the film, the Dalit community lives under conditions of abject poverty, performs filthy jobs and faces daily violence and social ostracisation. The non-Dalit characters assert their social identities and work to preserve the feudal-Brahmanical order. Article 15 does not shy away from depicting the realities of caste society. For example, the brutal gang rape and murder of two Dalit girls does not shock the civil society. The victims’ parents are helpless against the insensitive local police. Expecting justice for the victim appears farfetched under such conditions.

Ayan Ranjan, a newly appointed IPS officer, enters the scene to bring justice to the victims. He delivers justice not through an act of revenge but by performing his job sincerely. A privileged Brahmin male, educated in the Western world and unaware of rural India’s brutal caste realities, Ranjan is disturbed by the way the feudal order dominates the social and modern state institutions.

For the first time in Hindi cinema, the narrative revolves around the Dalit caste question. The film also has four set of Dalit characters alongside the Brahmin hero. Varied social and political objectives are behind different fragments of these Dalit lives. However, in end, they remain subjects of the brutal feudal order. While the Brahmin hero emerges as ideal and messianic, his Dalit counterparts are depicted as broken, corrupt or pathological people.

The first set of the Dalit characters represent the Dalit masses. The two teenaged Dalit girls are raped, murdered and hanged by a tree because they refuse to obey the diktats of the feudal elites. Their parents are helpless victims, tortured by the police authorities. These horrifying pictures haunt the narrative.

The second set of characters is of social activists, Gaura and Nishad resembling the activist, Chandrashekhar Ravan). They remind us of the idealist leaders of the Dalit Panthers movement which shocked the political establishment with their militant activism in the mid-1970s. Their commitment to radical Ambedkarite ideas and distrust of social and political authorities is showcased impressively.

Two other important characters are Jatavji, the police inspector and Malti Ram, the apprentice female doctor at the government hospital. They are part of state institutions, with salaried jobs, but their social status has not changed much. Both function under upper- caste bosses and lack independent agency. They represent the neo-Dalit middle class that has achieved economic mobility due to the state’s affirmative action policies. However, they have failed to engage with the daily struggles of their poor Dalit counterparts.

Article 15 also comments on Dalit political leadership. The Dalit leader allies with a right-wing Hindu party that advocates Brahmin-Dalit unity to win elections. This draws from politics in Uttar Pradesh, where, in 1995, the BSP entered into a political alliance with the BJP. In current times, Dalit leaders like Ram Vilas Paswan and Ramdas Athawale have became part of the BJP-led NDA alliance.

Portraying Dalit subjectivities in a nuanced manner is welcome. However, the reformism of the the upper caste elites seems to dictate the actions of Article 15’s Dalit characters. They are burdened with sufferings, become part of radical militant outfits or get associated with corrupt political regimes. The Dalit character as an independent hero, who can battle criminal elements without fear, is yet to find a respectable space in mainstream Bollywood films. Dalits are monitored as subaltern subjects who need the upper caste saviour.

THE MARKS PRESSURE OVER STUDENTS

With the college admission fever on, the expectation of securing cent per cent marks to match the unbelievably high cut-offs continues unabated. Scoring a perfect 10 now seems to be the norm for the toppers. Brought up in a generation that believed that there can be no perfect answers and 60 per cent marks meant first division, this is all too bizarre. Does it signify that millennials are more intelligent? Whereas some may be inclined to think so, a closer look reveals that this reflects a worrisome situation of the nature of our education system and is not at all a cause to rejoice.

The truth is that the “perfect 10” phenomenon is symptomatic of a larger malaise that is engulfing the education system of the country — a system that rewards rote learning and perpetuates a coaching culture characterised by overdependence on class notes, and gives a complete go by to reading the standard text books. These are quick-fix solutions invented by an unwieldy and crumbling government education system on the one hand and bolstered by a highly commercialised private sector on the other. The idea of education was to inculcate a sense of inquiry and critical thinking, where creativity and originality get rewarded, and so does the ability to think on one’s feet and apply knowledge, rather than reproduce information. These aspects can best be judged through essays, analysis-based questions and answers and discussions. But nowadays, in this age of WhatsApp and instant messaging, who has the time, energy or resources to go through such processes? It is much simpler to devise check lists, enumerate points, add up marks and, pronto, the results are out.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has fixed the student-teacher ratio (STR) for primary classes at 30:1, and for upper primary classes at 35:1. This, however, remains mostly only on paper. While on the one hand we have the issue of numbers — 1.6 million schools filled to the brim with students, on the other hand, as per the data tabled in Lok Sabha by the MHRD in December 2016, 18 per cent positions of teachers in government-run primary schools and 15 per cent in secondary schools, were vacant nationwide. Left with no option, the students are pushed into the arms of coaching centres. A survey conducted by National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) states that one student out of every four takes private tuition. No wonder the Indian private tuition market, which was estimated to be at $16 billion in 2017, is expected to reach $30 billion by 2020. Those who have the capacity to pay, go abroad. Indians spend more than $4 billion each year on educating their children abroad, registering a 22-fold increase since 2015.

IIT Madras, in its analysis of results for the year 2005, had concluded that, whereas there was a poor connect between the performance of a student in the IIT and his rank in the JEE, there was a positive correlation with their performance in the Boards. Keeping this in mind, in 2010/14 , the MHRD made a serious attempt to restore the importance of school education by giving certain weightage to its marks in JEE exams. To prevent artificial inflation of marks by the various Boards — with the purpose of maximising chances of entry of their students into the prestigious IITs — the MHRD was to follow up with COBSE in India (Council of Boards of School Education) to normalise the marks inter se amongst the Boards, and, to align the syllabi of JEE and school boards. Had this been done earnestly, this insane spurt in the school board marks would not have taken place. Reportedly, in 2008, less than 400 students appearing in Class XII examinations conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) scored more than 95 per cent marks. By 2014, in just six years, their numbers jumped to 9,000 students, and by 2018 it had touched 14,900 students, registering a 37-fold increase. The story is not very different for the State Boards. The new government would do well to pick up the threads from where it was left off in 2014, and take up the matter with COBSE and the School Boards — some 50 in number — to devise a self- regulatory mechanism to streamline the marking system.

Apart from impacting the nature of education at the school level, this has resulted in inflated college cut-offs for admission to as much as 100 per cent. This absurd situation has led to rising anxiety and depression amongst the students, for even the brightest amongst them are no longer assured of a seat in the college of their choice. Something must surely be done to arrest this trend. Perhaps our universities and colleges could take a cue from the IIMs which, in spite of a common entrance exam, insist on an interview and an essay on a topic handed out on the spot. This, of course, means more time, more personalised attention, and, more resources. Are the universities, the regulatory authorities and the government willing to trust their faculty and delink admissions, even partially, from marks? Another way would be to evaluate on percentile basis.

Motivated faculty, functional autonomy and adequate resources are the three prerequisites for any school to impart quality education and to excel as an institution. In this respect, Kendriya Vidyalayas, perhaps, provide a ray of hope — despite being government schools they have produced not only outstanding academic results, but also well-rounded versatile girls and boys year after year. The state governments need to wake up and replicate this in their schools — the results, in that case, will be positive and enduring.
Credit- Indian Express

TEST OF SECULARISM

An increasingly majoritarian India, though, seeks to complicate secularism, and burden minorities, especially Muslims, to prove their inclusiveness.

I am Muslim. I don’t wear a bindi or apply sindoor. I don’t perform aarti. I visit temples only as a tourist. Does that make me less secular than Nusrat Jahan, the young Muslim MP from Basirhat, West Bengal, who wears bindi, applies sindoor, and inaugurates Jagannath Yatra, a Hindu religious pilgrimage?

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Does my non-participation in Hindu rituals reflect my disbelief in “inclusive India”, unlike Jahan’s belief in “inclusive India”, expressed in her adoption of Hindu symbols/rituals?

Do I disrespect Hinduism while Jahan respects it? No. A resounding, unapologetic, and most importantly, secular “no”.

Secularism, as a state policy, is indifference to religion, or equal rights for people of all religions, including the right to practise religion. At an individual or social level, it translates into practising your religion, and respecting the right of your colleague, friend or neighbour to practise their religions. “Respecting” the rights of people of other faiths means not imposing your beliefs on them, and not degrading their practices or symbols, either by speech or action. It doesn’t require you to adopt or participate in the rituals of someone else’s religion.

Secularism is not a difficult or lofty thing, it is as basic and uncomplicated as minding your own business. As a Muslim, I don’t expect or demand a Hindu to fast in Ramzan or offer namaaz. Likewise, no Hindu has ever demanded that I perform puja or attend a kirtan. An undrawn threshold exists, which is respected by both sides, or all sides, in a multi-faith society like India.

Not crossing the threshold doesn’t make you less secular. A practising Hindu or Muslim who refrains from adopting or wearing non-Hindu/non-Muslim customs/symbols still qualifies as secular, as long as he/she doesn’t harbour or incite ill-will against the other. A Muslim woman wearing a headscarf is no less secular than Nusrat Jahan in a bindi. A Hindu woman fasting on karvachauth is no less secular than a Hindu woman who eats biryani at a Muslim home on a Tuesday.

Secularism doesn’t need grand, camera-friendly spectacles such as Hindu politicians wearing skullcaps in iftar parties, or Muslim politicians doing aartis. If anything, these public acts put unnecessary burdens on entire communities to prove their secular credentials.

An inclusive India, rather, shines through in simple, everyday affairs. In offices, colleges, and homes. My former supervisor, a Hindu, would remind me to go to the masjid across the road for my iftar and namaaz. She didn’t practise a single Muslim ritual, but for me, she was a secular icon. Likewise, I never asked my Hindu domestic help to cook meat on Tuesdays or during Navratras. Beyond the bare minimum, we’ve gone out of the way to help each other in distress, be it lending money or donating blood between ourselves. The operating principle across these instances has been raw compassion, free of the need to adopt each other’s religious customs.

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An increasingly majoritarian India, though, seeks to complicate secularism, and burden minorities, especially Muslims, to prove their inclusiveness. A Nusrat Jahan who sports Hindu symbols was praised by the media for “putting country before faith”. A fatwa, that was never issued by Deoband, was blown out of proportion, and debated endlessly on TV channels. Jahan, in her defence, talked of believing in “inclusive India”. Even after the fatwa, was exposed to be fake, Jahan continued to give bytes to irresponsible TV channels about being “secular” and not responding to “hardliners”. I seek no explanation from Jahan for her personal choices, but as a representative of people, the young MP needs to realise that her flawed definition of an “inclusive India” puts an unnecessary burden on Muslims to follow her example.

Perhaps, the first person, at least in the public eye, to bear that burden was 18-year-old Zaira Wasim. A few days after Jahan’s bindi and sindoor made news, Wasim publicly announced her retirement from acting, citing difficulties in practising her religion in the movie industry. Wasim’s religiosity was pitted against Jahan’s brand of secularism, with the latter supported by both liberal and right-wing Hindus. Jahan was praised for her choice and “standing up against” a fatwa that never was; Wasim was bashed left, right and centre for “giving into pressure” and being “indoctrinated and radicalised” by faith.

Hypocrisy has never been so glaring. When a Taberz Ansari is lynched to death over the forced chanting of “Jai Shri Ram”, when scores of Muslims have been killed by “indoctrinated and radicalised” Hindu youth over the last five years, it takes a special kind of audacity to lecture the besieged community on “indoctrination” and “radicalisation”. These sermonisers were not ordinary social media users, but “intellectuals” who appear on TV and Congress politicians such as Abhishek Singhvi who, in a tweet, questioned the “progress” of Muslims given that “halala is allowed and acting is haram”.

To be fair, liberals have taken on the right-wingers in the discourse against rising fascism, even risking tags like “anti-nationals” and “urban naxals”. But the difference between the Hindu liberal and the Hindu right-winger blurs when they applaud a Nusrat Jahan and bash a Zaira Wasim, when they salute a Muslim woman doing Hindu rituals and bash a Muslim teen talking of her relationship with Allah, when they judge choices according to their own biases. Hindu liberals are doing Muslims no favour in their anti-Hindutva activism. The fight is not for Muslims per se, but for upholding the secular, inclusive values of India. Perhaps, it would do well to go back to the basics of those values: You follow your faith, I mine. Let each be.

HATE CRIMES AND HATE SPEECH

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Once again, the first weeks of the Narendra Modi administration have been marked by hate crimes — two Muslim men beaten by mobs in Jharkhand and Mumbai, demanding they shout ‘Jai Shri Ram’, one so mercilessly that he died. Another man, a tribal, lynched in Tripura on suspicion of being a cattle thief. Most recently, 24 men accused of being cattle smugglers, beaten and made to shout ‘Gau Mata ki Jai’, in Rajasthan.

This time, however, there is a rising tide of concern, both domestically and internationally. Domestically, there have been a number of editorials, OpEds and talk shows calling for action; internationally, India has begun to feature prominently on a growing list of countries marked by hate crime, including hate speech in electoral campaigns.

A rising graph

Studies of hate crimes in India show that they have steadily risen over the past five years. Amnesty International India documented 721 such incidents between 2015 and 2018. Last year alone, it tracked 218 hate crimes, 142 of which were against Dalits, 50 against Muslims, 40 against women, and eight each against Christians, Adivasis, and transgenders. The more common hate crimes, they found, were honour killings — that have sadly occurred for decades — and ‘cow-related violence’, that was rare earlier but has become more frequent over the past five years.

According to Hate Crime Watch, crimes based on religious identity were in single digits until 2014, when they surged from nine in 2013 to 92 in 2018. Of the 291 incidents mentioned by the website, 152 occurred in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled States, 40 in Congress-ruled States and the rest in States ruled by regional parties or coalitions. Rarely, if ever, did bystanders attempt to stop the violence or police arrive on time to do so. In both studies, Uttar Pradesh topped the list of States with the largest number of hate crimes for the third year, followed by Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Bihar.

These facts are striking enough to concern any government. The Prime Minister expressed pain at the sickening murder of Tabrez Ansari in Jharkhand, but clearly far more is required. The Rajasthan administration is introducing a Bill prohibiting cow vigilantism, but that deals with only one hate crime. An omnibus act against all hate crimes, including hate speech, is required across India and should be a priority of the 17th Lok Sabha. Germany, for example, amended Section 46 of its Criminal Procedure Code, dealing with sentencing in violent crime, to say the sentence must be based on consideration of ‘the motives and aims of the offender, particularly where they are of a racist or xenophobic nature or where they show contempt for human dignity’.

We have a number of sections in the Indian Penal Code that can be used to punish or even prevent hate crime, but they are disparate and few policemen are aware of them. Those that are, fear to use them in areas whose political leaders mobilise through hate speech. Though some Indian analysts debate whether there is a correlation between hate speech and hate crime, worldwide data show that hate speech encourages or legitimises acts of violence and a climate of impunity. France has a a draft Bill to prohibit hate speech, and Germany has already enacted one.

According to a study by NDTV there are at least 45 politicians in our newly elected union legislature who have indulged in hate speech over the past five years; 35 of them belong to the BJP. No action has been taken as yet by the party, though it is in such a position of strength electorally that it would lose little by acting against them.

Court directives

In 2018, the Supreme Court directed Central and State governments to make it widely known that lynching and mob violence would ‘invite serious consequence under the law’ (Tehseen S. Poonawalla v. Union of India & Ors). Then Home Minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament that the government had formed a panel to suggest measures to tackle mob violence, and would enact a law if necessary. The panel’s recommendations are not in the public domain, and acts of hate crime do not appear to have diminished in the year since Mr. Singh’s promise.

In a May 2019 report, Human Rights Watch India pointed out that only some States had complied with the Supreme Court’s orders to designate a senior police officer in every district to prevent incidents of mob violence and ensure that the police take prompt action, including safety for witnesses; set up fast-track courts in such cases; and take action against policemen or officials who failed to comply. Those State governments that did comply, the report commented, did so only partially. In several instances, the police actually obstructed investigations, even filing charges against the victims.

Whether it is political hate speech or police bias on the ground, there is little doubt that the national bar against hate crime has been lowered. On television, we see replays of hate speech and videos of lynching. Though the accompanying commentary is critical, repeated iterations normalise the hateful. Indeed, anchors themselves resort to invective far more often than before — note how Kashmiris are routinely heckled and abused on talk shows. The print media too is failing. Several newspapers now publish triumphalist opinion articles, including comments to articles that are hate speech by any definition. Criticism of blatantly communal government actions such as extension of refuge and citizenship on religious identity has grown increasingly muted.

Key steps needed

One of the policy issues that is high on the Modi administration’s list is dealing with incitement to violence through social media. But the focus is on hate in relation to terrorism, and it is unclear whether government policy will extend to cover hate crime. Important as it is to do so, the digital media is not the only offender. In fact, there are several obvious steps which would be easier to take and yield more immediate results than regulation of the digital media. Parliament could enact an omnibus act against hate crime, and the Home Minister could set benchmarks for policemen and administrators to deal with hate crime. The legislature and political parties could suspend or dismiss members who are implicated in hate crimes or practise hate speech. The electronic and print media could stop showing or publishing hateful comments and threats. Priests could preach the values of tolerance and respect that are common to all religions and schools could revitalise courses on the directive principles of our Constitution.

For Mr. Modi, there is an additional challenge. He has twice spoken out against hate crime, but his words of pain have not been backed by action, either by his party or by BJP-led administrations. Does he have so little influence over his own? We have to hope not.

For a demographically diverse country such as India, hate crimes — including crimes of contempt — are a disaster. Each of our religious and caste communities number in the millions, and crimes that are directed against any of these groups could result in a magnitude of disaffection that impels violence, even terrorism. Far less diverse countries than India are already suffering the result of hate ‘moving into the mainstream’, as UN Secretary General António Guterres recently highlighted. We can still contain its spread if we act resolutely. Or else our political leaders might find the lumpen tail wagging their dog.

 CREDIT- THE HINDU