Tale of the CAB Driver and His Cleaner
By Mohajer Ansari
US
NaMo is a stout, dwarfish, five feet-two ugly Gujarati Chai-Wala. Had he emigrated at the coattails of his umpteen uncles and aunties to the West, he would have owned at least half a dozen Dunkin’ Donut franchises or many Econo Lodge properties in seedy parts of downtowns. Thank God, he didn’t!
Instead he honed his tea-stall chirping skills to enter partisan politics of division. His deep-seated hatred for minorities of all shades - Muslims, Christians and Dalits in particular - made him a choirboy (oops...bhajangayak) of the party.
What started as Jana Sangh with highly myopic but extremely dangerous view of India as a Hindu State, slowly but systematically merged into the far-right religio-political platform called Rashtra Swaym Sevak (RSS). That amalgam of extremism is today’s BJP. One of its more extremist off-shoot is Hindutva - a violent fascist arm.
The manifesto of Jana Sangh aka RSS aka BJP is no less vitriolic or diabolic than that of Hitler’s infamous Mein Kempf. In fact, the similarities between the two are uncanny: While Hitler was disillusioned with the feigned superiority of the white Aryan race over all others, the brown Hindus of India claimed and still do that there is no place for equally brown folks who practice other faiths. This intolerance didn’t spare even the Dalits who surprisingly follow the same Hinduism as the RSS zealots. In this case, their crime is simply to be born less fortunate, socially.
A mere glance at the manifesto of Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivick who killed 77 people during the July 22, 2011 attack, will expose the stark similarity between the ideals of Neo-Nazis and supporters of Nathuram Godse - the assassin of Gandhi! The premise of pro-Hindu extremism is exactly the same as in the West: whites vs. browns and blacks.
Tana Shah is a balding, obese, even uglier creature, a shade taller than NaMo, with a perpetual scowl on his face with a never-fading disdain for everything that is not his own self. Like NaMo, He is another xenophobic goon from Gujarat. A staunch RSS activist, he was the chief planner and executioner of the Gujarat genocide. With such credentials, his rise from the presidency of BJP 2014 to the member of the lower house in 2019 was a foregone conclusion.
Together, they have been the chief planners of practically every controversy against Muslims of India since early 1990s. Even if only headline-making events are highlighted, it started with the controversy over the Mogul (hence Muslim)-built Babri mosque. It would be safe to say that it was the single-most successful seedling of a religious inferno that led in succession to the indiscriminate massacre of Muslims in Gujarat under the tacit supervision of the state chief minister, countrywide ban on the slaughtering of cows, lopsided decision by the highly-biased Indian Supreme Court to legitimize the claim of Ram Mandir at the site of Babri mosque, and, stripping the special status of Kashmir under article 370. Each of these incidents has the hallmark of naked hatred of one minority group in particular: the Muslims. These events are mere replay of the prescribed playbook of notorious Progrom in Israel against Palestinians, in China against the Uighur, against Rohingya in Myanmar and against Chechens in Russia.
The latest onslaught on the secular status of independent India came last week in the form of Citizen Amendment Bill - CAB. However, unbeknownst to the CAB driver Tana Shah and his cleaner NaMo, the passage of this controversial bill has put their stinking derrière and that of entire BJP on the flames of a scorching grill. The whole country is in the grip of unprecedented -and in many cases - violent protests. What the BJP goon didn’t bargain for nor included in their calculus is the participation of Sikhs, Christians, Dalits and other minorities in solidarity with the main target - Muslims.
India's controversial CAB denies citizenship to about 1.8 million Muslims who migrated to India several decades ago. It is a painful reminder of the extreme xenophobia that is spreading all across the globe. It may be disguised under different names or draped in different flags, it nevertheless is a reality and is becoming more grim everyday. It reminds us that oppression of minorities might begin with a single individual or a handful of people with extreme views about others who do not fit into their perceived twisted mold. If unchecked, world gets the likes of Adolf Hitler, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nathuram Godse. But even under the dark and oppressive clouds, there have risen men like the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, who became Hitler’s outspoken foe.
The CAB may turn out to be the tectonic plate that will shift and test the geopolitical stability of India in coming days. Fissures and cracks have already appeared. Kudos to those who are protesting silently or vociferously on the streets and educational campuses of India. They must have paid heed to Niemoller’s powerful postwar words with an utmost sense of foreboding:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.
For sure, the exclusive targeting of Muslim through this bill is only a prelude to worse things that would follow. Undoubtedly, it would engulf other minorities as well. The well-thought systemic plan includes phases of dehumanization, deprivation of voting and other rights, lynching, rape and torture based on baseless rumors, detention without any due process or legal representation, utter humiliation and denigration in all of the eastern states that border Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and China.
The masses in these states and the minorities in other states across the country should treat this as a loud wake-up call and fight this xenophobic CAB driver-cleaner duo of Tana Shah and NaMo on a single united front.
Think about it: If a few right-wing retards can come up with a scheme to marginalize 200+ million Muslims in a country that once boasted of its secular roots, they can easily decimate Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis, Dalits who are in the 1-10 million population bracket!
Yet, like in so many other bleak and seemingly hopeless situations, a silver lining does exist. Not everyone in India subscribes to the policy of exclusion purported by the architects of Hindutva, RSS or BJP. Nor are all supporters of Tana Shah and NaMo’s vision of a divided India.
The on-going cross-country mass rallies against CAB Is evidence of that sanity among the majority Hindu population. Let us hope that this unified defiance sustains its strength and demolishes the devious plans of the distractors.
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