Sreenivasan Jain: The rise of high-level majoritarianism

It's not necessarily intolerance that has been rising. It's something else

It's been an exasperating and amusing (mostly exasperating) past few months watching those gripped by the feeling that All Was Not Well With The Realm struggle to find the terms to describe their unease, and the arguments to justify it. At some early point, now lost in the fog of countless news cycles and online ridicule, consensus broadly crystallised around the term "rising intolerance" to describe the degradation in the state of affairs since the advent of the new regime. The arguments advanced to give this somewhat inchoate assertion a harder, more empirical edge rested, sadly on unwieldy and easily challenged props. The murder of rationalists in Maharashtra and Karnataka? Began during the Congress regime. The murder of Mohammed Akhlaq in Dadri? Law and order is a state subject. A spike in the number of communal incidents over the past year? Data shows otherwise. From here, the debate was only a tweet away from referencing the intolerance shown by Pterodactyls towards Gondwana Man.

Which is of course not to say that something bad is not rising. But it's not, in the strictest terms, intolerance. What has shown a marked jump in the past year and a half is the extraordinary number of instances of high-level functionaries of the ruling establishment -from the chief executive himself, to Cabinet ministers, to ruling party MPs, governors, party bosses, chief ministers and MLAs speaking in a language that covers the full spectrum of majoritarianism - from outright bigotry to soft communalism. To illustrate: the prime minister's abrupt insertion into the Bihar campaign of a conspiracy to carve out a quota for minorities from the reservation pie (which he added, not at all in a provocative manner, that he would oppose with his life). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president's reference to the bursting of crackers in Pakistan should his party suffer a loss at the hustings. The Haryana chief minister's suggestion to India's minorities of the dietary changes they will need to undertake should they wish to stay in this country. The external affairs minister's hint of an alteration of the status of our national book. The ever-expanding list of communal no-balls by BJP-appointed governors, particularly the Twitter timeline of the Tripura governor which reads like it was telegraphing hot flashes directly from the brain of a certain Republican frontrunner [for example: @tathaghat2: "intelligence should keep tab(s) on all (except close friends and relatives) who assembled before Yakub Memon's corpse. Many are potential terrorists"]

One could go on - we haven't even got to the invective of the "fringe elements", the Mahesh Sharmas and Giriraj Singhs and Niranjan Jyotis - but for the increasingly stingy word count allowed on these pages (aha! Intolerance!).

It is certainly not my case that a sharper definition of what we are facing will provoke a reassessment of the cost of such dangerous high jinks, but it may, if nothing else, reduce the scope of the ruling regime and its supporters to shrug off culpability. In simple terms, you can't fight what you can't name.

The revaluation - if at all there will be one - will naturally pivot on political calculations. The Bihar defeat appears to have prompted a lull, at least at the very top. It's unclear whether the ceasefire will extend to, say, the Assam election, which comes with plenty of scope for communal dog-whistling. Regardless, the BJP's more toxic adherents, notably on social media, may not take kindly to a shift towards a saner conversation. There is no better recent example of this than the case of a BJP MP who was forced to issue public mea culpa for challenging the influence of right wing Twitter on government decision-making. This is not good. The same home ministry report cited to argue that there has been no increase in communal incidents since a change in government had an important but overlooked footnote - social media, it said, was a key driver in communal riots this past year.

The writer anchors the ground reportage show Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24X7