No less a dignitary than the former Vice President of India has stated that the government targets the practices of minority faiths and creates an atmosphere where de facto discrimination and de rigueur violence against other communities are to be embraced if you want to be counted as a patriot.
The recent uptick in online hate speeches and acts of institutionalised bigotry like vandalism of mosques and churches, planned instances of communal violence and brutal suppression of human rights should ring alarm bells for every right-thinking Indian. The country is already on genocide watch and could very well turn into the next Rwanda. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of trends and practices that upend the well-established principles of civic nationalism and the imposition of a toxic and imaginary concept of ‘cultural nationalism’ which profiles citizens on the basis of faith, promotes intolerance, sows the seeds of disaffection and insecurity amongst minorities paving the way for insidious visceral otherisation.
As usual, the thin-skinned Hindutva poster boys were up in arms against this perceived slight and lost no time to trash a learned, erudite ex-constitutional functionary as anti-national and seditious. Sad that in the New India no one is prepared to listen to the voice of reason and sanity. We are slowly but surely sliding down the slippery slope to civilisational doom.
