The Hindutva Virus In India
Bhabani Shankar Nayak
In spite of massive failures, ego trips and misplaced priorities continue to drive the arrogance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government in India today. People struggling to find a place and time to bury their dead due to the devastating effects of the second wave of COVID 19 in India. Crematoriums are overflowing with dead bodies, people are dying without oxygen and basic medical support, cities like New Delhi and Mumbai are struggling to cope. All of these, products of a defunct BJP government led by Modi. Labourers are ferried as “essential workers” to reconstruct the Central Vista in New Delhi, which the government considers an “essential service” in the middle of a pandemic. The BJP government has failed to protect the lives and liberties of citizens mainly because of their arrogant, ignorant and unscientific leadership produced by Hindutva. The Hindutva leadership and its budget cuts have made Indian institutions and state governments fail, but for which the blame is put on state governments — in an attempt to pave the path towards BJP’s electoral gains. The arrogance of Modi and the BJP leadership has created conditions for the triple mutant virus to spread on an unparalleled scale in India.
Door-to-door polio vaccination had led to the complete elimination of wild polioviruses (WPVs) and India was declared a “polio free country” in 2014. In the same way, India has the resources and institutional infrastructure today to mobilise itself to face the coronavirus pandemic. But it is the lack of political will that has led to such a disastrous situation. This lack has contributed to massive administrative failures like shortage in medical infrastructure, hospitals beds, medicines, doctors and nurses. The centralisation of power under Modi and his ideological entitlement of subjugating political opponents and the administrative machinery have led to failures in existing institutions to respond and engage with such a crisis.
The Indian government is grossly mismanaged today by a medieval Hindutva leadership that lacks humanitarian visions, for whom the health and well-being of the people are not the priority of the government. Hindutva forces led by BJP and RSS are drunk with state power. Modi is blinded by his self-importance, that he is unable to see the human tragedy as a fellow human being. He looks at the crisis in India in terms of electoral calculations by blaming people working in the field and responding to the pandemic in their limited capacities. His Hindutva colleagues externalise the pandemic by calling it a “Chinese virus” and show no accountability as the Prime Minister.
RSS’s authoritarian training has made Modi an ideologically rigid individual, devoid of scientific ideas for democratic governance and for the delivery of basic welfare services like health. He stands with his crony capitalist friends and pharmaceutical corporations, building business out of sickness. However, leaders like Modi have always failed the test of time in history and it wont be different this time either. It is clear that the inflated ego of Modi and self-serving Hindutva forces have been devastating to India. Assaults on science and reason are the governing virtues of Hindutva ideology. In the past and present, Hindutva ideologues look at crisis as an opportunity to reorganise and reorder the society based on exploitative social hierarchy. These reactionary forces promote and consolidate Indian society based on the right principles of majoritarianism. The current nightmare is a product of the Hindutva’s ideological praxis at work in India.
The virus can be defeated by universal vaccination, but the dangers of the Hindutva virus are looming large over the lives of the Indian masses. Equally dangerous, both Hindutva and coronavirus reorganise society. In addition, the Hindutva promotes unfettered market fundamentalism, social, political and cultural conservatism which are extremely dangerous for India. As the devastating second wave of coronavirus settles down, India needs to reflect on their political consciousness beyond the Brahmanical identity politics and the nativist thinking of BJP-RSS.
The wrath of the Hindutva virus will cause more conflicts, deaths and destitutions, than the coronavirus if these forces are not defeated ideologically and politically. India needs an organised mass movement to clean up the virus of Hindutva from the Indian society.
Dr. Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a Senior Lecturer at Coventry University, UK.
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