Since Independence, Indians have been
seduced by the ideology of victimhood, best summed up in the worst song ever
produced by the Hindi film industry: duniya mein hum aayein hai to jeena hi
padega, jeevan hai agar zeher to peena hi padega. (‘Having come into this
world, we must learn to live life. If life is poison, we must learn to drink
it’)
My first brush with it was when I was a
small boy, listening to my grandmother (only half-joking) lament the woes of
the Indian cricket team (pathetic in those days). Her take was that consumption
of meat by foreign teams placed them way above Indians. Actually, it was much
like the experience of the young Mohandas Gandhi, who came to believe, for the
same reasons, in the superiority of his Muslim friend.
The widely-trumpeted Indian proclivity
for vegetarianism is the foundation of the victim story. It persists to this
day under the BJP government, which continues to condone mob violence against
the meat-eating population, purportedly in the cause of cow protection. It’s
the type of dog-whistle politics that has become the hallmark of public affairs
in India.
But let’s not digress. Without going too
far down the highways of history, it’s clear that for nearly two centuries,
India was a victim of British colonialism. The majority of the population
tamely accepted it as the yoke of fate. But the more progressive minded made
the best of the situation: they took to British education, the English
language, the professions including law and medicine. From them, as Macaulay
had predicted in his famous minute, arose “a class of persons Indian in blood
and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in
intellect”.
While Macaulay found no favour with the
political class in India, the fact remains that it was from this class of
people that arose first the Home Rule, and later the freedom movement. The
Indian nationalist movement broke the back of British colonialism in India with
its innovative protests and charismatic leaders. No victim mindset here but
instead, a confident assertion of a people determined to wrest freedom from
foreign rule. Its success spawned copycat freedom movements around the colonial
world and spelled the end of European manifest destiny: the white man’s burden,
control over the non-white world.
Away from the heady sweep of India’s
independence movement, proponents of victimhood nevertheless lurked in dark
corners — grim and dour men steeped in caste and religious bigotry. These Hindu
fundamentalists took no part in the struggle against colonial rule. Instead,
they supported the British colonial government against the nationalists, afraid
of their confident vision and inclusive prescriptions. Not for them the secular
ways of the freedom fighters.
In the event, the nationalists fired the
imagination of the Indian masses and the British were vanquished. But not
before they played their last card of skullduggery: some diehards in the
British government of India actively encouraged rivalry between the Indian
National Congress and the Muslim League, hoping to delay the inevitable so they
could enjoy the plush life of colonialists a little longer. This rivalry
festered and led to a grisly aftermath. The Partition of British India into
India and Pakistan had no precedent; the scale of dislocation and violence was
pure evil.
But it gave hope to unreconstructed Hindu
fundamentalists harbouring deep hatred for nationalists. As such, they chose to
back the colonial diehards who widened the chasm of religious division in
India. The legacy of Partition was a pernicious animosity between Hindus and
Muslims. This suited the bigots and fed their dark vision of victimhood.
Opportunists as ever, they launched a whisper campaign among the victims of the
India-Pakistan divide, pointing fingers at the secular nationalists as the
cause of their tragedy and suffering.
As India blossomed into a democratic
republic, the Hindu victim movement kept religious hatred alive. Every now and
then, it would boil over into what came to be called communal violence, when
actually it was instigated mayhem. Over the years, the men behind communal
violence realised it could be used to build a political constituency.
The rest, as they say, is history. Today,
the Hindu fundamentalists rule over India with a brute majority. They tolerate
no dissent. They are flush with funds. They are seemingly unstoppable. Even so,
they haven’t been able to exorcise the demons of victimhood. They still point
to the diminished secular forces and hold it responsible for their inability to
govern. They continue to feel embattled, especially now that things seem to be
slipping out of control. Their narrative: for 70 years, we’ve been victims of
this pseudo-secular movement that still exercises a grip over the public
imagination; we won’t rest until India is wiped free of the influence of the
secular liberal intelligentsia.
These victim victors still rail against
the three ‘M’s’: Marxists, Muslims and Macaulayites. While they have managed to
subdue the first two, they still have their hands full with Macaulay’s
children, uncompromising liberals who have no time for what Jean-Francois Revel
called “Marx or Jesus”.
(This
article appeared in Education World, November 7, 2017)
