Theatre of hate

Rajesh Ramachandran

The right to offend and the right to get offended are two missing entries in our Constitution’s formidable list of fundamental rights; yet, these two have dominated our public discourse in the last few weeks. Every social group of any heft wants to offend and get offended as if its very existence is determined by these two attributes of communal misbehaviour. The former is the fountainhead of all hate speech targeted to hurt others and the latter leads to a sense of hurt. So, there is a causal relationship between the attempts to create imagined hurt aimed at group identities. These two have now attained the status of performance art, scripted and enacted on television by news anchors reinforcing their hate-filled viewers, who in turn offer them Television Rating Points (TRPs), enabling news channels to monetise hate through advertising and sponsorships.

If religion is the problem, then let us not try to find good and bad religious behaviour but label all religious behaviour bad and embrace a new kind of secularism.

This social malaise began during the UPA tenure as righteous indignation against a corrupt Union government, and also against certain tainted and compromised journalists who got caught in the Radia tapes. But gradually the moralistic ire turned political and then communal, singeing all civilised norms of public dialogue, particularly on news television, where bullying became the norm and crass, loud exchange of threats and abuses got labelled as debate. This live performance — with a screenful of experts led by the anchor attacking one person, often a Muslim — is the new theatre of hatred, where even the lone Muslim enjoys his or her scripted role. Along with the TRPs for the news channel, this performance offers some sort of celebrityhood and social validation for the “experts” from their respective identity groups.

But unknowingly, these experts of strife are actually validating and legitimising hatred all over the society. Identity politics works because masses tend to identify themselves with a leader or spokesperson. TV anchors and experts have begun to play the role of spokespersons, amplifying concerns of identity politics using the language of othering and hatred. The Nupur Sharma incident of hate speech and its reaction from Gulf Cooperation Council countries have led to actual murders in India, the culmination of the exercise of the right to offend and the right to get offended. We have had a full circle of the orgy of clashing privileges of boorish behaviour ending in the ‘logical conclusion’ of murder.

This cycle of offensive behaviour is now being dissected by political opportunists of various persuasions to analyse which part of it suits them and which part is to be targeted, without understanding that hatred should not be dissected but disowned fully and wholly. And if religion as a whole is the problem, then let us not try to find good religious behaviour and bad religious behaviour but label all religious behaviour bad and embrace a new kind of secularism that will abhor all public religious practices.

Even before the cycle of murderous responses to Nupur Sharma’s hate speech got over, a new question of Hindu blasphemy has arisen with the graphic depiction of goddess Kali smoking a cigarette.

De-contextualisation and de-ritualisation of religious icons are an interesting modern project, whether it be the smoking Kali of a wannabe filmmaker or the famous disrobed goddesses by MF Husain. But to be effective, it has to be a multi-religious project that acts as a confluence of rebellions; where all prophets and gods are de-contextualised in equal measure. But an Indian Prime Minister who hurriedly ushered in modernity through computerisation and telecom accessibility had slammed shut India’s religious modernity project when he upturned the Shah Bano verdict and got the Satanic Verses banned. Around this time, a movie based on Kazantzakis’ brilliant work The Last Temptation of Christ too was proscribed. It is now evident that the Hindutva activists who were forever envious of the very idea of blasphemy, which provides the means for a religious group to exercise the right to get offended, are now seeking that entitlement for themselves.

If a Prime Minister imposes Sharia law over the Supreme Court, religious fanaticism over common sense and group identity over citizenship, it would only be a matter of time before it created a larger, competing group identity. For, till recently, the right to offend was largely and openly exercised by proselytisers who bent the constitutional right to freedom of religion. So, when a Christian preacher repeats the Biblical verse, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me”, he or she is closing the gates of the Christian heaven to all but those who believe in Jesus Christ, thereby condemning the non-Christian other as less equal. Similarly, when the muezzin calls out “La Ilaha Illallah” — or there is no god other than Allah — he is five times a day “othering” all those who do not believe in Allah.

Though there is no scriptural sanction or formula for blasphemy in Hinduism, the Hindutvavadis have gleefully embraced the Semitic notion of monotheism and blasphemy and are trying to apply it universally and indiscriminately in the Indian political context. The way out is not to call the Hindutvavadis Nazis and compare Indian Muslims with Hitler’s Jews — that would only amount to anti-historicity and anti-Semitism. The Nazi Germany was not built after the Jews forcibly partitioned the country on the premise that religious coexistence is impossible and created a separate homeland for themselves, nor did Jews drive out Christians from a province where they were in majority.

The way out is to accept that rights to offend and get offended are not acceptable public behaviour and that they cannot be selectively used. In short, at least the progressive liberals should shun all public display of faith and faithlessness; if they do desperately want to offend the religious bigot, they must do it by de-ritualising icons of all religions. If only Husain had disrobed gods of all religions, without being selective, the Indian offence-taking industry would not have struck roots.

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