(Dr. Shashi Tharoor, a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development, is the author of 14 books, including, most recently, Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.)"Id Mubarak!" to all who are celebrating today. I have no doubt that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will already have wished all his Muslim brothers and sisters on this auspicious occasion. It is the kind of thing he rarely forgets to do. But there is a lot more that Modiji has forgotten - or omitted - to say to his Muslim fellow-citizens that we should be concerned about.
Much has been written and spoken in recent days about the Prime Minister's surprising public silence. He has neither been communicative nor accessible to the press; he has broken with Prime Ministerial practice in not taking journalists on board his official plane on his international travels; he has held no press conference nor granted any interviews. Our media is feeling spurned. The man they had hailed as the talking, tweeting, orating alternative to "Maun"mohan Singh's taciturnity has turned out to be far less friendly to them institutionally and personally than they had taken for granted he would be.
It is yet another example of how much Modi-in-power differs from Modi-on-the-campaign-trail and the expectations raised by his electoral insurgency. But that's something I have already written about on this site, and it's not what I'd like to discuss today.
Id is as good a day as any to remind our new government that they rode to power despite the fears of large sections of our society - shared by 69% of the electorate - that the Sangh Parivar is too divisive a force to govern a plural society like India. In particular, given the horrors of 2002 perpetrated on his watch, and his subsequent rhetorical excesses, there were real doubts as to whether Narendra Modi would reach out to Muslims, and indeed whether their needs even figured in his idea of India.
It is in this context that the Prime Minister's silence bothers me. It's not just that he's ignoring the media, which, given the quality of much of our media, may well be what they deserve. My bigger concern is that I believe the Prime Minister is missing an opportunity to send a signal of reassurance to a vulnerable minority that needs it. This sin of omission is all the more glaring because of the litany of recent incidents involving Muslims that his silence has slighted.
The first was the tragic killing of the 24-year-old Pune techie Syed Mohsin Shaikh, who was beaten to death with hockey sticks by the goons of the Hindu Rashtra Sena in retaliation for the uploading of "derogatory" pictures of Maratha icon Shivaji and the late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray on a social networking site.Young Mohsin had nothing to do with the uploading, but the Hindu Rashtra Sena activists were looking for a Muslim to exact revenge upon, and he was visibly Muslim, emerging from namaz at a mosque in a beard and skull cap. This was a classic "hate crime" that was universally condemned across the country - by everyone but the Prime Minister himself.
Modi did eventually mention the tragedy in Parliament, where he included Mohsin Shaikh's murder, without mentioning his name, in a list of recent incidents he deplored: "whether it is the Pune killing, or the killings in UP, the drowning of students in Manali, the rapes of ours sisters... all these incidents must provoke us to look inwards and see answers." But those words were too little, too late - too little for the gravity of the crime ,and too late to avoid the damage done by his initial silence, which allowed a fringe right-wing group like the Hindu Rashtra Sena to assume quiet acceptance of their misbehaviour at the highest level. (It's an old truism, after all, that silence means acquiescence.) And if Modiji is "looking inwards and seeking answers" he hasn't shared any of those answers with the Indian public, which is entitled to know what they are.
More recently, footage emerged of a Shiv Sena MP, Rajan Vichare, trying to force a chapatti into the mouth of a Muslim caterer at Maharashtra Sadan during the Ramadan period of fasting. Vichare's excuse - that he didn't know the man was Muslim and he was protesting the quality of the food - was just as outrageous, since it implied that it was acceptable for MPs to go around showing their displeasure in this manner, by shoving food down unwilling throats. Muslims were not the only ones disgusted by this BJP ally's conduct. Modi again had nothing to say.
Then Goa cabinet minister Deepak Dhavalikar, another ally of the BJP, said India would become a Hindu nation under Modi's rule, and the state's Catholic deputy Chief Minister rushed to support him, declaring, in a perverse fulfillment of Savarkar's and Golwalkar's views, that he was a "Christian Hindu". Alarm bells sounded in every liberal Indian's brain at these words.
Separately, a BJP politician in Telengana, K. Laxman, questioned the national credentials of India's greatest woman tennis star ever, Sania Mirza, because she had married a Pakistani and was now a "daughter-in-law of Pakistan." (The BJP hadn't earlier showed such touching faith in daughters-in-law's allegiance to their husband's land when they attacked Sonia Gandhi as irremediably Italian.) Sania broke down during a television interview, saying it was unfair that she had to keep asserting her Indianness. "I am an Indian who will remain an Indian until the end of my life," she said on Twitter. Would a non-Muslim Indian, even one married to a Pakistani, have had to face such an inquisition on her identity?
Each of these incidents is deplorable in itself, but cumulatively they add up to a disturbing vindication of all the fears the BJP's ascendancy had created since 1989, and which had been sharpened by the events of 2002 that Modi had sought to live down. The Prime Minister's silence on these actions and utterances by his followers leaves the worrying impression that he condones them.
I believe the Prime Minister is missing an opportunity to send a signal of reassurance to a vulnerable minority that their fears are unjustified, and that there is no divisive communal agenda in his party.
Since the PM refuses to speak, can we find any reassurance in his earlier statements? In a video conference addressing NRIs in the US Modi had said, "My definition of secularism is simple: 'India First'. Whatever you do, wherever you work, India should be the top priority for all its citizens. Country is above all religions and ideologies".
That's unexceptionable: but do any of the examples I've cited conform to such a vision? In an interview to the ABP news, he was asked specifically whether his desire to reach out to every Indian citizen would include Muslims. Mr Modi replied, "I will never go by this terminology of yours. Even if you drag me, I will not. I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers."
It doesn't seem that Messrs Dhavalikar, Vichare and Laxman, not to mention the thugs of the Hindu Rashtra Sena, have got the message.
As Monobina Gupta pointed out in Caravan: "the prime minister is powerless to speak on communal violence because his landslide victory in the Hindi heartland and elsewhere, to a large extent, was propelled by communal polarisation and the consolidation of the majority Hindu vote bank. ... By speaking on these issues-which he is not entirely free from-he might implicate himself in a past he tries constantly to escape. Therefore, the fact that he chooses to remain silent says a lot."
Modiji must know that there is a great deal of concern throughout the country, and particularly among our Muslim fellow-citizens, about whether the Bharatiya Janata Party and its fellow-travellers have the desire or the willingness to work for all of India's communities, or whether they seek to profit from dividing the nation on sectarian lines. A few words of reassurance from the master orator could have gone a long way towards calming our disquiet. Instead, the Prime Minister has chosen to stay silent. He has not even made the simple gesture of attending an Iftar during Ramadan, let alone hosting one as his predecessors did. This will not do. This Id, it is time for Mr Modi to live up to his professed intention to be a prime minister for all Indians.
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