All That Pent Up Anger

The JNU/ Kanhaiya Kumar episode is old news; but only recently did I read a very interesting analysis of why events may have played out the way they did. No, it goes beyond the usual screaming sessions on TV as to whether calls to break up India crossed all kinds of lines or whether nothing better can be expected from a right wing government.

I feel Santosh Desai is right in an additional aspect to this saga:

“There is a red hot anger … and it is one that comes from a very real place. For long now, the right wing support base has nurtured fears about the intentions of the left-leaning elite. The suspicion was that the sympathy for Muslims was so great and the hatred for Modi so profound that they would actively wish for harm to befall India.”

In such an environment, throw in a right wing government with absolute majority, a left wing university like JNU and calls for breaking up India and fireworks are not altogether a surprise, are they?

“A lot of hitherto imagined fears suddenly acquired an address. The fears got crystallised when students received support from commentators as well as politicians including Rahul Gandhi.”

This also was a genuinely black-and-white issue for many people:

“Nationalism is a more legitimate label than Hinduism and one that speaks to a wider constituency. It works better as a category of exclusion; while Non-Hindu is not an emotionally resonant label, anti-national is. It has an absoluteness that cannot be argued with –unlike  categories like left/ right, upper caste/lower caste and majority/minority, where both sides can be argued for, in the case of nationalism, the other side is by definition illegitimate.”

Desai also wonders if many such incidents are now happening regardless of the BJP wanting them to happen or not:

“The BJP adopts these issues not because of strategic reasons but because it cannot help itself. Decades of chafing under the then dominant Nehruvian narrative have created a pent up sense of anger that has now found an enabling environment and there is no way that the party can control it.”

It may be easy to describe all that’s happening as a case of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind, but that’s just too simplistic. After all, who can honestly say that none of the criticism about left leaning instructional policies and “sympathy for Muslims” was valid? Did vote bank politics and political correctness of the last few decades not contribute to the situation today? And doesn’t this seem to be an increasingly global phenomenon, with Donald Trump being the most visible symbol?