Editorial: Hate speech comes from the top

Nothing brings out a nation’s hypocrisy as war: Suddenly, when there’s an enemy at the gates, communities who were sedulously othered over the years are urgently invited into the warm fold of one nationhood. Nothing illustrates this majoritarian duplicity as the current uproar, from institutions as well as civil society, over the remarks of a Madhya Pradesh minister in allusion to Col. Sofiya Qureishi, the Indian Army officer who did the daily briefing during last week’s military action against Pakistan.

While showering praise on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his conduct of the four-day confrontation, minister Vijay Shah gloated in an infantile irony: How fitting, he said, that India had “taught a lesson to the terrorists of Pahalgam using a sister from their own faith”. This nod to Col Qureishi’s Muslim faith and the casual misogyny of using a woman — a sister! — in a transaction essentially of men at war is stomach-churning indeed but par for the course for BJP apparatchiks.

In an election year, the remarks would barely have been noticed but we are coming off a near-war situation and feeling rather grateful for the fact that Muslims can and do love our country just as much as anyone else. Not only did the BJP bro’s sister gaffe draw flak from the commentariat, it made the judiciary fly off the handle. Two judges of the Madhya Pradesh High Court took note of the “gutter language” of the minister and ordered that an FIR be filed against him.

Something about the recent aerial skirmish with Pakistan has made us want to be nice to Muslims for a while. In Karnataka, there’s been a similar backlash to communal remarks by an MLA, inevitably of the BJP hue, at a temple function. Upset about the presence of Muslims in a Hindu place of worship, the MLA berated the temple administration for inviting them. The temple committee had the grace to apologise to the Muslims, whose assistance they had taken to organise a festival. Here too, popular outrage led to the police filing a case against the MLA, which is about the maximum punishment that can be given to a knight of the realm.

Prejudicial remarks against Muslims are not so rare that we can justifiably claim to be shocked by them. To us in Narendra Modi’s India, they have become normalised; to the BJP rank and file, they have become normative. This flows directly from the top. If a military officer’s religious identity can be publicly invoked by a minister to examine her patriotism, it is only because the country's most powerful political figures have made such tactics politically viable. Modi himself has an impressive body of work of innuendo and insinuation against Muslims, starting with the Mian jibe in his Gujarat days. His closest aides Yogi Adityanath and Amit Shah have contributed to this lexicon the pejorative terms “termites” and “those who say abba jaan”.

The judiciary, which could have checked such degeneration, has often looked on like a spectator. In some cases, judges have actively contributed to the erosion of secular discourse. Some gave credence to the coinage “love jihad” in open court, and some allowed government figures to get away with hate speech. The suo motu action in the Col. Qureshi case does not quite absolve the decade-long dereliction shown to her sisters and brothers.