Manipur foretells life in New India

An Indian who is now a French citizen and I were discussing months ago the ascendancy of farRight leader Marine Le Pen in France In this context he wondered what religious minorities feared most regarding the Indian State abandoning secularism for Hindutva Did he think the French police under Le Pen would allow white French mobs to attack migrants Unthinkable as of now he replied Not so in India I respondedManipur has confirmed that the minoritiesrsquo fear of a Hindutva State is not unfounded Media reports say the demographically dominant Meiteis who are mostly Hindu killed Kukis and burnt their properties while Manipur police commandos blithely watched Over 200 Kuki churches have been torched underscoring the religious dimension of the ethnic conflictKuki armed outfits confined to camps under the 2008 Suspension of Operations SoO agreement did retaliate against the marauding Meiteis and even at times fired first This prompted Chief Minister Biren Singh a Meitei to claim that nearly half of the 80 killed till then were ldquoterroristsrdquo implying that the Manipur police shot dead Kukis hellbent on setting the state ablazeThe falsity of Singhrsquos statement is palpable from a Telegraph report quoting a senior army officer on the similarities he saw between the tactics of Meitei militiasmdashArambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepunmdashand a Hindutva outfit blamed for the violence earlier this year during the Ram Navami celebrations in the country India Todayrsquos Afrida Hussain went to Manipur at the outbreak of the ethnic conflict there and returned later at the recurrence of the violence She wrote about seeing ldquocivilian youth dressed in black and mostly wearing black maskshellipbreaking into housesrdquo as Manipur police commandos gazed impassivelyAfter Hussain filed her report she began receiving threat calls A gang of women burst into her hotel Hussain was not there then but thought it prudent to ask Assam Rifles IG for protection Hussain noted ldquoNo one questioned me when I went to Manipur on May 5 and covered Kuki militants But one thing against the majority community got me into troublerdquo The violence in Manipur is just a trailer of Indiarsquos future under a fullblown Hindutva StateIt is not that the Indian State has always been impartial In OctoberNovember 1984 the police did not intervene to stop the largescale killing of Sikhs in several cities including Delhi where Rajiv Gandhi had been swornin as the Prime Minister after his motherrsquos assassination Two months later his party went on to win 414 seats in the Lok Sabha elections In 2002 Narendra Modi was pitchforked into the limelight as the Gujarat Police let Hindutva mobs go on a killing spree Modi is now projected ironically as the countryrsquos most decisive prime minister everThere are other instances of the Statersquos complicity in fanning fires of violence In 1987 scores of Muslims were arrested in Hashimpura in Meerut district and shot dead one by one and their bodies tossed into a Ganga canal The Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry named 31 police officers who participated in the 199293 Mumbai communal riots The number of such instances is too large for me to enumerate hereYet there is a seminal difference between the conduct of the State under the Bharatiya Janata Party and that under other political parties For one Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh apologised in Parliament for the 1984 riots for another the party never adopted antiminorityism as an ideological plank and has now belatedly revived with vigour the idea of composite nationalismBy contrast the BJP has still to apologise for the Gujarat riots Antiminorityism defines the Sangh Its leaders strive to outdo each other in spewing venomous rhetoric against Muslims and Christians Its footsoldiers resort to vigilantism and have lynched citizens Unabashedly promoting Hindutva is the mostfavoured path to success for secondrung leaders in the Sanghmdash think Adityanath Biren Singh Himanta Biswa Sarma Basavaraj Bommai and Shivraj Singh Chouhan who was earlier seen as a moderate Officials have taken a cue from their political masters and turn a blind eye to the Hindutvadriven violence to save or boost their careersThis has made the State grossly partial the inimical impact of which certain dominant castes too have now experienced The wrestlersrsquo protest has gone unheeded because they are Jat a community against whom the BJP seeks to turn other social groups as has happened in Haryana In Uttar Pradesh the BJP has demonised Yadavs to rally others against themThe State is now the agent provocateur Recall Home Minister Amit Shahrsquos explanation of the ldquochronologyrdquo of the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens ldquoFirst we will pass the Citizenship Amendment bill and ensure that all the refugees from the neighbouring nations get Indian citizenship After that NRC will be madehellipwe will detect and deport every infiltrator from our motherlandrdquo he saidInfiltrator is a euphemistic term for Muslims They took to the streets in panic as soon as the bill became a law in 2019 and encountered State repression Biren Singh has only emulated Shah Let us admit Manipur is a portent of the devastation awaiting the chimera called New IndiaThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper