Review By Harsimran kaur

Rating: 4/5

An aspirational ideological framework is a lethal weapon, transpiring an illicit attack on the immiscible convulsions of rationale mindsets. The majority undeterred spinning on their own axe put the minority in the mendelevium of encrypted ostinato. Majoritarianism in the fulcrum of politics has gained substantiate degree to propel minorities by putting a reign around their neck. What gallops along is religious iconoclasm reflective of ‘Is brotherhood a damp-squib’.

Surely it is! The question that rails in the black holes is ‘why jump on muddy-puddles when the same mud slinged on the boots becomes a cause of irrepressible disinclination?’ Our political mavericks do all the time; they like to rejoice in the foot-tapping reprises of ‘oneness’ but carry a fire in the arm to the beat the drum of obscurantism, to it adding a staccato of their favourite imprecation ‘Invaders’ and ‘proselytizers’.

Is it really a ‘politics of hate’ or a ‘politics of indulging in whataboutery’ or maybe both? Whatever the partakers decide it to be, the heaven crumbles like a behemoth hell on the minorities dilapidated in the ruin of their ghettoized identities. Consolidated articles in the book, ‘Politics of Hate’ presented by imminent scholars and doyens expatiate on minority subjugation in ‘South Asia’ covering these dynamics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. True to their testimonies, each write-up is like an insect crawling on the skin dissecting conflagrated wounds, for the abscess fails to heal.

India, the largest democracy in the world, with secularism as its core crust, today finds itself in the temerity of solipsism. The love for cows has put Muslim progeny to think hard of why worshipping an animal is such a big issue. Cow vigilantes are the new moral police and cow slaughter—a defiance to the pantheism so closely watched by the Hindu puritanical rigidity. ‘Who let the cows out’—a song that political rabble-rousers should sing considering the plight of their cows meandering on the streets.

This is just one aspect of Majoritarianism pageantry, easily toiled and fixed as now it is believed that with majority comes superiority. Eminent writers like, A.Faizur Rahman and Niranjan Sahoo have been candid in the exploitation of Muslims and Christians in India; the idee-fixe on the anti-conversion laws and the promulgation of CAA has made Muslims feel like a fish out of the water.

Is it so easy to alienate a community because it is fabricated differently?

Or

Is it the immoral fear of losing one’s ethnic closet that the pilferage of another’s visceral indulgences becomes a casus belli?

Enterprising as I could be—human mind is a draconian clamper in a state of unrest, fidgeting with the positives and negatives to siphon out an insidious current of ‘your religion—my religion’.

Recently, a news drew my attention which corroborated the write-up on minority status in Pakistan. Hindus in Pakistan are subjected to atrocities related to forced conversion, abduction and girls being married to Muslim men without consent. A gruesome reality the majority fails to enclose in their privileged carapsse for it considers all this as a comeuppance the minorities deserve. Pakistan, an Islamic state fails to be the soft-sentimental anchor to the Hindus-Christians, unpardonably living in the ‘Land of Pure’. The laws of blasphemy are misbegotten trials imposed on the dead pan minorities like brushing the mud under the carpet.

What more? The panjandrum of the Sinhalese Buddhist to be the rower of their own boat has dwindled its capacity to take in the minorities that are treated as a leak in the boat. Islamophobia in Sri Lanka is on a rise; an apparent reason to thick their own boots so that Muslims with a wide spread World reach is nipped in the bud. Doesn’t all this seem like an apocalyptic characterization of minorities that the majority finds solace in? As the curtains fall, what is left behind is a volatile denunciation of imperceptible minds—the distasteful minorities that splurge hard to create a world of their own which is frequently looked as a conspiracy by the majoritarianism rule.

TAKE AWAY

The book ‘Politics of Hate’ edited by Farahnaz Ispahani is a diaphanous distillation of how politics has made minority repression an agenda to titillate vote-bank electorates. To add to the straight-laced vendettas, code of conducts is promulgated to make minorities spineless. Civil War in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the religious tenterhooks so prevalent in India and Pakistan remain dismissive of the irresponsible demagoguery on rise.

It makes my heart bleed to read a societal structure that has put minorities at the ripper’s edge. A profound read on disparagement of minorities and their internal fight to live on!