Mihir S Sharma: Ayodhya, again

The internet is not the real world. That is something that any of us who spend a little time there need to keep reminding ourselves. Sometimes I wish that the real world was a little more like the internet — open, global, equalising. In some other ways, though, I hope the real world is as far from the internet as possible.

The reason I say this is because, for the past decade at least, those lovable fanatics at the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) have been celebrating something that they call “Shaurya Diwas” or Day of Valour on December 6, the day in 1992 that an outnumbered group of incredibly valourous young men charged a heavily armed and dangerous structure that was prepared and ready to defend itself with deadly force, while cunningly disguised as an empty and run-down 16th-century mosque. Yet most of us lived in blissful ignorance of the VHP’s joyful celebration, seeing as we have mildly more interesting things to do, like breathing. But this year, the internet made us notice. On Twitter, Shaurya Diwas raced to the top of its algorithm’s selection of globally trending topics, usually reserved for such topics of worldwide importance as Twilight.

Yes, the internet is hardly a perfect reflection of society. A fraction of a fraction of Indians are online; and those who waste lovely winter days talking about Shaurya Diwas and the like instead of watching videos of kittens on YouTube are, unquestionably, the most deranged and socially incapable fraction of that fraction of a fraction. But it does poke a large hole in two optimistic claims: that the whole Ayodhya dispute was a product of a particular time in our history; and that increasing prosperity will make such grievances less sharp.

Why? Because, while all sensible people agree that online political discourse is the intellectual equivalent of your friendly neighbourhood garbage dump when the trash collectors are on strike for their dearness allowance, it is definitely the case that Indians online are considerably younger and more economically empowered than the average. Which means they’re partially justified in triumphantly imagining that they’re our future, even as they obsess over events in 1356 or 1532 or whenever.

That increasing economic prosperity will lead to less fanaticism has always seemed a reasonable assumption. However, for 10 years at least, there’s been a one-word answer to that hope, one that all of us have tried to explain away as exceptional, or alternatively have tried very hard not to think about. And that one word is: Gujarat. The riots of 2002 happened in one of India’s fastest-growing states. Since then, it has continued to grow fast, if less so than before, while simultaneously creating horrendous little ghettoes for Muslims. That is, indeed, a plausible future for the rest of the country even if it performs well economically. The plethora of stories coming out of Gujarat about how communal tension has gone down misses the point — if one community retreats from public life and accepts its second-class status, that doesn’t count as moving on, but as moving back.

Those who should be most worried about the growth of this brainless, uncontrollable, highly-motivated Hindutva rage online should be those in the moderate wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or mild social and economic conservatives. I have seen this sort of anger online before, many years ago — except then it was about American politics, back in the day when the internet was still fairly young. What has now become the Tea Party movement, capturing the Republicans and turning them into the laughing-stock of the world, started with online anger about taxation and foreigners and Muslims and the mainstream media that was similar to what we see now — and as easily dismissed as an unrepresentative online fringe.

But what the internet provides is a way for such crazies to embellish each others’ elaborate theories of unreality; to burnish them with ill-chosen extracts cherry-picked from original sources with all the exaggerated confidence of the uneducated; and to then present them as truth to each other — finally granting them, as a group, the confidence to take their wholesale denial of history, humanity and basic logic offline. Grievances that once would have been eroded away by the sense-inducing passage of time are now sharpened by constant repetition in this echo chamber of madness.

That’s why, although Ayodhya and the aggressive attack on secularism it represents seems a product of distant decades, imagining we could move on without recognising and correcting the damage it’s done us is wishful thinking, and dangerous. Such thinking lay behind the hasty praise showered on the Allahabad High Court’s verdict on the Ayodhya dispute two years ago, instead of the concern that should have been expressed that a property dispute was being treated by our apolitical and irreligious judicial system as a question of religion and history.

Panicked that the bad old days would return and mar our wondrous decade of high growth, all such worries were swept under the table in the blind worship of Moving On — the same altar before which we genuflect in Bhopal, in Gujarat and in Kashmir. Instead of pushing back against the stresses that political Hinduism placed on India’s state secularism, already faulty and shot through with excessive deference to faith, our political and intellectual leadership has irresponsibly swept the fault lines under the carpet. But you can’t hide on the internet. And, someday soon, we won’t hide from the internet. And then our failure to fight back against the growing respectability of the Babri mob will damn us.

mihir.sharma@bsmail.in