Wonders, Horrors, and Surprises

In a world where wars and viruses can consume all our cheerfulness, it was pure pleasure to see the BBC’s short video in which birds, fishes, and animals carried congratulations and best wishes from a king named Charles to a man named David who had reached his hundredth birthday. Any who haven’t seen the video, or those who’ve merely seen it a few times, should click on this link.

You will find, or realize afresh, that this little video isn’t national, or racial, or religious, or political. It is planetary. And it pays a magical, and almost silent, tribute to a man who has brought home to human beings the wonders and fragility of their home, Planet Earth, and of its non-human inhabitants. 

I doubt that the king, or others whose awareness has been enhanced by David Attenborough’s portrayals of his explorations, see him or all his views as perfect. A human being who has enriched millions has scored a century. Bravo!

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At times I’m more saddened than angered by unpleasant utterances. Such, for instance, was my reaction when Akash Banerjee’s remarkably brave (and remarkably well-researched) YouTube channel in India, The Deshbhakt (“Nation-devotee”) played videos from the recent election campaign of the BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari, West Bengal’s new chief minister. Adhikari, 55, has succeeded Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), who headed the state’s government for the last fifteen years, from 2011. 

Since the state’s Muslims (around 27 percent) were not voting for the BJP, said Adhikari in one of the videos, after gaining office he would only work for Hindus. He would also ensure, he promised in another video, that wherever found in his state, the names of 16th and 17th century Mughal emperors would be “rubbed off” – above all, it seems, because they were Muslim rather than Hindu. 

“FIND AND KILL” 

In a third video, Adhikari asks the central (i.e. federal) paramilitary forces brought to West Bengal in their tens of thousands for ensuring election-time peace to “find and kill” an allegedly vast number of Muslim infiltrators from neighboring Bangladesh who in the BJP’s long-voiced but never-established theory have distorted West Bengal’s population mix. Their supposed entry across the border was obviously not prevented by the federal government, which has been in the BJP’s hands for the last 12 years.

Until 2020, when he defected and moved to the BJP, Adhikari was an active member of the TMC, which he had joined in 1998. Becoming a key Mamata Banerjee aide, Adhikari entered India’s parliament in 2009 and again in 2014, each time on the TMC ticket. Between 2016 and 2020, he served under Mamata Banerjee as a minister in West Bengal. 

Another BJP politician from West Bengal, the former journalist and former member of the Rajya Sabha, Swapan Dasgupta, who’d been expected by some to obtain the chiefministership that went to Adhikari, has written in The Telegraphof Kolkata that the BJP’s victory in West Bengal was partly the result of “the subliminal fear of West Bengal being transformed into an extension of an Islamist Bangladesh.” 

Really? Does, did, any normal Bengali with his feet on Kolkata’s ground, or anywhere else in West Bengal, really harbor an anxiety that Bangladesh, tiny vis-a-vis India, would before long quietly annex West Bengal? Perhaps by clandestinely sending hundreds of thousands of “Islamist” Bangladeshis into West Bengal, despite the spectacular enhancement in border protection and military security secured over the years by prime minister Modi, home minister Shah, and defense minister Rajnath Singh? 

Simplistically calling Bangladesh “Islamist” hardly helps the great many Bangladeshis who are striving to strengthen harmony and equality in their Musim-majority, multi-faith nation. 

A psychological explanation for the curious (and illogical and unmathematical) anxieties entertained by some of India’s Hindus (who make up a whopping 80 percent of those inhabiting the world’s most populous country) was attempted in a chapter of my new little book, Do You Know Your Hinduism? Notes for Modern-day Hindus. I will not insert that explanation here, but will make a related point, which is the following. 

FACE THE REALITIES 

The staggering dimensions of India’s joblessness, the high suicide rates of our despairing young men and women, the resolve in God-knows how many Indians to find a footing in some other land (any other land) – such realities need truthful confrontation, not a search for hypothetical monsters living near us. 

On May 5, within 24 hours of the BJP emerging the winner in West Bengal, Narendra Modi’s cabinet in New Delhi approved a measure to make insulting or disrupting the national song, Vande Mataram, a punishable offence, with penalties including up to three years in prison, a fine, or both. 

When approved by parliament, this measure will bring all of the Vande Mataram song to parity with the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana. On February 18 this year – i.e. less than three months ago, shortly after the Modi government had signaled advance notice of this measure -- I wrote as follows in this column: 

“I must express opposition to, and dismay at, the Indian government’s recent order (January 28) directing that all six stanzas of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s old Vande Mataram song be played at official functions, with everyone present required to stand at attention. Written in the 1870s and 1880s, and first published in Anandamath, Chatterjee’s novel of that period, Vande Mataram is unquestionably a stirring, rousing, and patriotic song, words from which were frequently uttered by freedom lovers fighting the British throughout the first four decades of the 20th century. 

“However, India’s Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as also Hindus uncomfortable with idol-worship, have always separated themselves from the song’s latter verses, which offer obeisance to the Hindu goddesses Durga and Lakshmi.” 

I also pointed out (as did others) that the song’s use had been thoroughly and carefully considered long ago, in 1937, by personalities including Mahatma Gandhi, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru (who ten years later would become independent India’s first prime minister), Vallabhbhai  Patel (who as deputy prime minister would, with along with Nehru, lay the foundation for India’s progress as a democratic country), and Subhas Bose (president at the time of the Indian National Congress and the greatly loved hero from the freedom struggle, who died in a plane crash in 1945). 

DESIRE TO COERCE 

After full deliberation, these leaders recommended, through a publicized resolution of the Indian National Congress, the body serving as the Indian people’s vehicle for their struggle for liberty, that only the opening two verses of Vande Mataram be sung at popular rallies for freedom, which was being demanded on behalf of all Indians, not for religious Hindus only. 

After freedom came in 1947, this clear and precise decision was underlined in 1950 through a resolution of the Constituent Assembly, which had just designed free India’s constitution. Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana was chosen as the national anthem and the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram were adopted as the national song. 

The decision, 76 years later, of the Modi government to require “all six stanzas” to be sung at official functions upturns historical practice. It also defies the Constitution, which prohibits the elevation above others of one religion or of one religious community. 

Let me repeat what I wrote in February: “There isn’t a single social, economic or cultural benefit in compelling millions of Indians to sing or salute words they’re uneasy about. There’s nothing democratic, constitutional, constructive, or wise about the step. It is only a form of bullying which the BJP hopes will be politically profitable as well. ‘Offend Muslims, incite protests, and then speak of Muslim objections to a popular patriotic song.’” 

Requiring India’s non-Hindus to acknowledge Hindu superiority is a sign, I should add, not of confidence but of an urge to coerce. Compelling India’s Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and Buddhists to honor Hindu divinities will only ensure deep internal discontent. Moreover, such compulsion in India can trigger demands from nationalist-religious activists in the rest of the world that migrants from India should not only honor their new homes’ heroes but also conform culturally and even religiously with projected beliefs of the new home.  

VIJAY THE CHIEF 

India’s Tamil Nadu, where 88 percent of the state’s roughly 78 million people are Hindu, around six percent Christian and about six percent Muslim, has produced an unexpected political transformation. Popular movie actor Vijay -- his full name is Chandrasekaran Joseph Vijay -- has become chief minister. 

It was only in 2024 that Vijay founded his political party, the TVK -- Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam or the Tamilians’ Victory Party. Next month he will turn 52. He made his movie-acting debut in 1992 and is equally popular as a singer.

Following the May 4 counting, the TVK, which won 108 seats, put itself substantially ahead of two parties which between them had ruled Tamil Nadu from 1967 until now, for 59 years that is: the DMK, which won 59 seats this time, and the ADMK, which got 47. With the support it subsequently received from the Congress (5 seats), the Left parties (4), an “Oppressed Castes” party (2), and the Muslim League (2), the TVK claimed a majority in the house of 234.

It was Gen Z’s vast and visible resolve in his favor that brought victory to Vijay and his TVK, but the gifted star also appears to owe much to his director-father, S. A. Chandrasekaran, who in terms of faith is described as a Christian, and mother, Shoba Chandrasekhar, a vocalist and playback singer, who is described as a Hindu. 

“Egalitarianism, secularism, and social justice” were proclaimed as the TVK’s ideology at the party’s founding. “All Are Equal by Birth” is the party’s formal slogan. The TVK has opposed the Modi government’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against Muslims, and has pledged support for women and transgenders. 

The word on May 12 from Tamil Nadu’s capital, Chennai, was that a majority of elected MLAs from the ADMK had decided to support Vijay’s ministry, and that the 47-strong ADMK contingent in the legislature had split into two.

SOUTHERN RESISTANCE 

Meanwhile the neighboring state of Kerala elected the Congress-led United Democratic Front, replacing a Communist government that ran the region for ten years. As a result, the Congress Party is now in charge of the southern states of Karnataka, Telangana, and Kerala, and is allied to Tamil Nadu’s TVK government. Andhra (like Telangana a Telugu-speaking region) is one of the two large states in the south where the BJP has substantial local influence, mostly derived from the fact that the party in power in Andhra, the TDP, is allied at the national level to the BJP. In Karnataka, the BJP has a stronger and more direct foothold, having led the government there between 2008 and 2013 and again between 2019 and 2023.

Gaining West Bengal has been a big victory for the Hindu Right, which now controls virtually all of western, northern, central, and eastern India and is not without influence in southern India. New Delhi’s leverage over state governments has grown as a result. In their drive to make the whole of India a Hindu state, Modi, the BJP, and the RSS will now aim to break the remaining southern resistance. 

Staying true to their principles or staying in one piece will not be easy for the non-BJP parties and coalitions now in power in India’s peninsular south. Two huge questions therefore stare at us: democracy’s future in India, and India’s future as an association of states. 

As of writing, the Congress Party has not been able to decide which of three deserving and influential hopefuls it should install as Kerala’s chief minister. Should we be shocked that individuals think their personal future is as important as that of democracy in their country? Even when they know that this thinking is what has brought us to our present condition? 

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This column opened with a link to the wonderful short video around David Attenborough’s 100th birthday. I end it by supplying a link to a most painful article in the New York Times by long-term columnist Nicholas Kristof. In Kristof’s harrowing piece, “male and female Palestinians describe brutal sexual abuse at the hands of Israel’s prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators.” Down in our hearts, each of us knows that neither goodness nor evil is restricted to one race, one nationality, one community, or one region.