What occurred on Capitol Hill final week had a profound impact across the planet. Leaders of other democratic nations watched in horror as did political commentators and even these with no interest in politics. Personally, I located myself truly impressed with how America’s judges, election officials and its media have stood up against Donald Trump’s bullying and his lies. It was this that brought on me to tweet that ‘America may look really bad at the moment but let’s don’t forget that its democracy just passed its hardest test and won. Would we be in a position to say the very same in India about our institutions if place via such a test?’.
In the ‘new India’ that the Prime Minister boasts of getting made, this tweet was observed as anti-national and it brought on the BJP troll army to order me to ‘leave India’. I am routinely attacked on social media, but this is the 1st time that I have been told that I have no appropriate to live in India. It would not matter if the vicious, venomous tweets that filled my timeline came from ordinary twitterers. It matters for the reason that they came from people today whose handles proclaim their pride in becoming followed by Narendra Modi. This has inspired me to draw for you a portrait of the ‘new Indian’ who constitutes the base of today’s BJP, which is as heavily stamped in Modi’s image as the Republican Party came to be stamped in the image of Donald Trump.
The most distinctive function of the ‘new Indian’ is that he believes that criticism of the Modi government amounts to an attack on India. They make this clear every single time they tweet their help of the man they take into account ‘the best prime minister India has ever had’. They hope he continues to rule extended just after 2024 and that he then appoints Yogi Adityanath as his successor. In the eyes of quite a few Modi supporters, Yogi is currently more of a leader than he is for the reason that he is a ‘stronger’ Hindu. This leads me to the second defining function of these new Indians.
They hate Muslims, Islam and Pakistan. So, they are delighted that Yogi has brought his ‘love jihad’ law and that this has inspired other BJP chief ministers to stick to his lead. They gloat every single time that a Muslim is dragged off to a police station in Uttar Pradesh for marrying a Hindu lady. They do not see this law as depriving ladies of their appropriate to pick out whom they like and marry for the reason that they feel of ladies as home. A Bajrang Dal activist clarified this bluntly final week when he told a reporter that ‘rescued’ Hindu ladies are married off right away to ‘one of our men’.
Rage against Muslims is so essential to the new Indians that justice and the rule of law do not matter. A Muslim man promoting footwear on a Bulandshahr pavement was arrested final week for the reason that he sold footwear with ‘Thakur’ written on their soles. This hurt the ‘religious sentiments’ of the Bajrang Dal activist who had him arrested. New Indians are incredibly thin-skinned and are very easily hurt. They are also conspiracy theorists who see international plots to defame Hindus about every single corner.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, they compete with Trump’s supporters. If Trump’s supporters blame Antifa for getting conspired to ‘steal’ the election from Trump, Modi’s supporters are as convinced that ‘Leftists, libtards, and Lootyens’ are behind every single try to criticise Modi’s government and his policies. In their book every person who disagrees with them is anti-national. In their enthusiasm to paint protesting farmers with the very same ‘anti-national’ brush used to paint protesters against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), they went also far. So, they had been curbed and created to alter their tune.
‘New Indians’ exist not just on social media but in true life. They can now be located in the drawing rooms of Lutyens Delhi, in feel tanks of repute, on university campuses and in foreign cities. During the protests against the new citizenship law, I occurred to be in New York in a taxi driven by a Gujarati who had lived in the United States for more than 20 years. When he found that I was an Indian from India, he launched into a tirade against ‘these JNU types’ who are protesting against the man he saw as the ‘saviour of India’. They must be shot, he stated at the finish of his tirade, they must be shot for the reason that it is the only way that India will progress.
This point is created frequently these days by Modi’s more violent supporters. They make it clear that there is no area in India for people today who do not share their point of view. Dissent of any type is for them specifically the very same as sedition and they see it everywhere. In performances by Muslim comedians, in Bollywood films, in the media and in ‘liberal’ Western newspapers who they think exist for the certain objective of defaming Hindus and India. If you run into one particular of these ‘new Indians’, don’t forget that it is useless acquiring into any sort of discussion with them. It will take you nowhere. This is for the reason that the other issue that defines them is certainty of such an intense type that there is not the smallest chink via which the smallest doubt can discover its way. Have these new Indians created India improved? You judge.