Obama’s observations

It is an unflattering commentary on our times and on our narrative-manufacturers that it falls to an outsider - a former American President ---to remind us of our collective obligation to involve and include the Muslims in our national story. Our mainstream media industry has  since May 2014 unfortunately bought into a new story-line in which the minorities are either demonised as friends and promoters of inimical forces and terror groups or subjected to an elaborate rituals of benign neglect. We are content to write the grammar of a "new India," which ipso facto rejects the old India's accent on plurality, inclusiveness, participation and partnership. It no longer bothers our conscience that even in popular cultural narratives the minorities, particularly the Muslims, are denied a place of respect and appreciation.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is entitled to its political and electoral calculus of majoritarianism. The sober fringe in the ruling conglomerate finds itself completely marginalised after the grand success of Hindu vote bank politics in  Uttar Pradesh, especially after the anointment of so-obvious a Hindu face as Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. The majoritarianism is recognised to have a momentum of popular acceptance behind it. An otherwise sensible political leader like Nitish Kumar too has found it cost-effective to make his peace with the hard-line Hindutva forces. So much so, even the Congress mascot, Rahul Gandhi, deems it necessary to position himself as a 'janudhari Hindu' and feels constrained to visit every big or small temple in Gujarat. And, ludicrously enough,  Rahul Gandhi's temple-hopping has prompted the BJP to field its most modern face, Arun Jaitley, to remind everyone that it is the ruling party that had the or intellectual property rights to “Hindutva” platform. 

President Obama's observations should jolt us out of our internal preoccupations. We need to keep in mind that the outside world judges us differently by exacting global good practices in governance, geopolitics and economics. Obama was not being preachy; he was simply reminding us of sound principles of statecraft observed, recognised and practised statesman-wisely by Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.