Hate-Mongering in the name of freedom of speech

By: M.R. Lalu
Post Udaipur-Amravati killings, India witnessed a studied silence among its celebrated intellectuals who seem to have taken an intellectual asylum in their own dens of hypocrisy, who otherwise, were known to be the upright tongues screaming louder for the preservation of the country’s democratic values. The violence that flashed across the country after the brutal bloodshed of the shopkeepers subsided to the level of insignificance. We should be happy that we have plenty of issues pouring in on a daily basis that anything including the madness of men in the name of beliefs gets easily evaporated and as a society, we spin back to the same organic self of insensibility and insanity. Prime time shows on TV channels hunt for new topics and spokespersons, having learned lessons from the Nupur Sharma episode seem to have been putting a brave face of maturity and acceptance. The media slugfest and the subsequent bloodshed had taken India further to a realm of understanding- a realisation, that as a country we have ripped ourselves off the democratic principles that we have been chest-thumping since independence. Nobody thought that the quantum of filth that we have accumulated would amount to the level of arrogance and hatred barricading all the possibilities of cordiality. What next?  
Things seemed to be rolling back to normal but then landed the fiery Mahua Moitra, the Trinamool Congress MP from West Bengal with her most denigrating remark on Goddess Kaali. For her, Kaali is a meat-eating and alcohol accepting goddess. And she said she had the complete right to exercise her imagination to whichever god or goddess she worshipped. Except BJP no political party was seen with hammer and tongs against Moitra. People often stoop into idiotic terrains of intellectual incarcerations and get vocal about the stupidity that they market as intellectual audacity. The irony of India’s present political discourse is that exercising your right to imagine, interpret and ignobly indoctrinate religious ideas for gaining political mileage is legitimised. Most of such attempts go unquestioned if you shoot your arrows from the quiver of a liberal bandwagon and of course it should be directed to a still insensitive majority and what you gain in return is a victimhood ornamented with sympathy. Vituperation on anything except a minority sentiment is legitimized and nobody, not even the judiciary will hold you responsible for it. This never comes under hate speech and you are free to challenge and spit more venom with complete security guaranteed.
West Bengal’s history without pages dedicated to Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda remains incomplete. It was goddess Kaali by worshipping whom, an illiterate Brahmin in Ramakrishna could elevate himself to the greatness of a Paramahamsa. There have never been questions put against his holy gesticulations. His greatness unfolded to its complete glory when he transformed an ordinary boy into a spiritual giant who later came to be known as Swami Vivekananda. Both had in-depth devotion for the divinity in the form of a ferocious, terrifying but adorable feminine energy manifested in Kaali. Bengal owes much to its spiritual heritage that it inherited from the penance of these spiritual gurus and calumniating the feminine energy in Kaali as a meat-eater is nothing but slitting the very idea of spiritual inheritance that the state of Bengal nourished for ages. Moitra’s argument of vehemence in the name of spiritual intelligence and liberty was accentuated by Shashi Tharoor. For him, it was a well-known case for all the Hindus that the black goddess with blood dripping tongue and skull garland around her neck was a meat-eater. Same was the case with Nupur Sharma. Everybody in the media discourse and the Islamic religious fraternity knew that whatever she spoke in defence of her views were well codified in Islamic scriptures and what she did was to reproduce the textual content when she was repeatedly perforated by the man sitting at the opposite side. But outcries for her head are still heard from across the country. Things did not stop there. The entire Muslim world began to put pressure on India against the remarks of a single lady and we witnessed what followed next. The ruling party successfully isolated a person for defending her beliefs when provoked.
Evidently, there are two forces incessantly working to split the society. Religion and politics have so far been able to set narratives in this direction and Moitra was one among those politicians who enjoyed the support of the left-liberal coercive mindset which often found inadequacies with the majority. Terming the saffron upsurge by the BJP as a monolithic patriarchal brahminical enterprise, Moitra went on affirming that she would hate to live in an ecosystem that the BJP is creating throughout the country. When she spoke her demeaning words to an audience in a media conclave, she wilfully erred with an ease of conviction that nothing of that sort compared to the effect in the case of Nupur Sharma would happen. The country has already stooped to a new low after the beheading of the Udaipur tailor and efforts to throw acid on the wounds of a particular community is the plan of politicians and Moitra took the lead this time.
Who spreads hatred in a society that has already gone to the brim of an ideological collapse? Today, an existential threat to a civilization that survived in amity for generations despite being diverse is a reality. Narratives to set the stage of harmony ablaze began long ago. The idea of a potential “Hindu Terror” was an attempt to create lab rats of radicalization to draw parallels to Islamic jihad. “Islamophobia” has been the recent trendsetting narrative catching headlines. Hatred, disseminated in a thousand ways, is reaping a great harvest. Not only political, but academic forums from inside the country and abroad are also actively growing claws to throttle the idea of a living system that survived centuries of invasion and horror. “Dismantling Hindutva” was one such effort to malign the system of plurality living in unison in India and paint it as an outrageous cohort and thus finding reasons to thwart it from growing further. Imagine, what would be the outcome, if the government with Modi at the centre, tried to push reforms to curb radicalization with full force. Reactions from the South Asian countries should be a reminder for India when it plans to cement the holes of religious militancy and we should not be forgetful of our past in the landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism is an open book that anybody could read from whichever page he feels to begin with. Interpretations can be drawn in various ways and it gives the freedom to deduce its principles. This liberty often turns out to be an argumentative overreach by many people and narratives to humiliate the essential practices of Hinduism gets justified as an act of liberal interpretation. Moitra was loudmouthed about this freedom and she said that she had been exercising it in the media conclave, deliberately denying the effect of insult that she was further exacerbating on the blisters that Udaipur and Amravati killings caused. In a democracy, freedom of speech cannot be a burdensome exercise on one community, when others are authorised to weaponize their beliefs as a shield of self defence.   
(The author is a Freelance Journalist/Social Worker)