Hate Levels

Vir Sanghvi wrote this piece on rising hate levels in India. He starts by citing two recent incidents. The video of a school teacher getting her students to slap their Muslim classmate. And the railway constable who went through a train killing Muslim passengers.

 

You’d think this would be a Modi/RSS bashing article, but no:

“It is popular among people opposed to the current political dispensation to act as though the hate we see all around us emanates from the top and is the result of some careful political calculation.”

Why does he feel that way?

“I don’t think that is true. Every Muslim-hater is not a sangh supporter who is acting on orders from Nagpur. Like fire, hate takes on a life of its own. Nobody can tell where the next conflagration will occur, where the fire will spread or who the flames will devour.”

After all, as he rightly says:

“Nobody ordered the school teachers to target Muslims. Nobody asked the railway cop to kill Muslims.”

 

But yes, he says, the hate levels have definitely spiked in recent years. But don’t go overboard and think that hate didn’t exist until 2014:

“It is nobody’s case that there was no hatred in India before the current outbreak. Independent India was created in hatred and bloodshed.”

There were all too many acts of hatred ever since – communal riots, Kannadigas targeting Tamils over Cauvery, the expulsion of Kashmiri pandits, the massacre of Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination…

 

The danger today, he says, is not individual events, however abhorrent they are. Rather, the danger is whether this mindset is becoming the new norm, the default for the next generation. Because:

“When you start brainwashing children, you poison a society.”

He cites Kashmir as an example of what that can lead to:

“We have seen it in Kashmir… After the ethnic cleansing of 1989/90, when the Pandits left, the Hindu population of the valley has reduced dramatically. Because young Kashmiris hardly meet Hindus, they believe the caricatures of Hindus that are spread by militants.”

 

Which is why he ends by saying:

“We are poised to become a major global power in this century. Don’t let hatred destroy us from within and derail the progress that millions of Indians have worked so hard for.”