India’s Oscillating Public Sphere

One of the intriguing aspects of the public sphere in India is its capacity to hold evidently self-contradictory practices and moments together, rather unproblematically. One such moment is the one under the current version of Right-wing populism where it appears that growing communal discourse, as part of the public discourse, is included in the political regime campaigns such as Love Jihad and Ghar Wapsi. While all of these stand for growing communal polarisation and religious intolerance, you have films such as PK and Bajrangi Bhaijan gaining astounding success at the box office.⁵⁵

A film like PK offered not only an unabashed critique of the godmen but also depicted Hindu gods in a poor light, even if it was meant symbolically. Even as protests by Bajrang Dal and many other self-fashioned Hindu outfits were on the increase, people have returned to the theatres in bigger numbers. Now, what explains this strange conjuncture between the growing popularity of a party such as the BJP and Narendra Modi—who, not long back, was symbolized as the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’, a response to a polarised political campaign in the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Tripura and the Lok Sabha polls of 2014 that they won convincingly—and the success of a film that seems to take a dig at everything is what the politics of the moment seems to stand for.

There is something that needs to be deciphered in the public culture of the nation, in order to understand what is in store for the future of democracy in India. Even as we are lamenting that social life and popular culture in India have grown increasingly intolerant and have become majoritarian in nature, there is sufficient evidence that this phenomenon also has its own antidote in that very popular culture. The most obvious explanation offered in popular perception in order to explain this strange conjuncture is that possibly, Hindus are innately tolerant, and Hinduism is a ‘way of life’ that celebrates composite culture. If Hindus are becoming intolerant, then the reasons have to be sought in external social and political conditions and not in the way the religion is organized.

Whatever might be the merits and demerits of this dominant understanding, it needs to be acknowledged that the public sphere in India—even as it is getting increasingly communalized and polarized—also shows traits of silent resistance to monolithic political constructions. This is more than evident in the way the strategy of VHP to build the statues of Godse across the nation has been rejected. The legacy of Gandhi continues to find resonance in the popular memory of the Hindus in India.

No Visible ‘Islamophobia’

While there might be growing distance and ‘othering’ of the Muslims, as it appears in the receding space in the public domain or spatial ghettoization of the Muslims in housing in urban metropolitan cities, there is also enough evidence to show that there is no visible ‘Islamophobia’ in India that resembles the kind of fear-psychosis visible in the US or Europe. Muslims are not made self-conscious or remain suspected outside the security discourse of the state. There might be more of cultural subjugation but not a collapse of a common sense view of an everyday Muslim visible at the marketplace. The kind of death of common sense that is visible in the way citizens in the West have responded to growing Islamophobia is not self-evident either in the smaller towns or rural hinterlands of much of India. The rise of far-Right wing groups or even BJP has been checkered and is never uniform. In fact, one could recall that BJP lost elections in UP soon after their campaign for building the Mandir in Ayodhya.

What the Indian public sphere is witnessing instead is ‘contextual communalism’ that emerges from the complexities of its diversity and political construction of communities in terms of being the majority and minority groups, wedded to the electoral processes and significance of political power linked to the discourses of nationalism. For instance, in course of an election, Muslims are offered candidature in constituencies where they constitute a sizeable portion of the electorate. The rationale being Muslims should and rather would vote en-block for a Muslim candidate making his/her candidature viable and bring in a winnability factor to their candidature. This is a legitimate way for them to gain political representation when they are in a numerical minority. However, this strategy of en-block voting is perceived by the majority community as ‘vote-bank’ politics and communal polarisation initiated by the minority community. Hindus, on the contrary, have been arguing for some time now that ‘if Muslims can vote en-block to a Muslim candidate what is wrong in Hindus voting en-block for a Hindu candidate’.56 The counter-argument to this by the Muslims is that Muslims are willing to vote for all political parties (except BJP)⁵⁷ when they offer tickets to Hindu candidates, but Hindus are unwilling to vote for Muslim candidates, irrespective of the political party that offers them the ticket. This is the kind of a logjam that perpetuates contextual communalism, where while the minority community demands a level playing field, the majority community demands equalization and standardization of norms and procedures. The secular discourse of the last few decades seems to have failed in arresting the anxieties of the majority Hindu community, without which it would be rather difficult to imagine a shared public domain between different religious communities in India. The micro-dynamics of growing communally polarized political processes need to be foregrounded in order to imagine more shared public spaces. The success of the movie PK reminds us that the opportunity for this within the socio-cultural imaginaries of the majority Hindu community perhaps is not yet a lost cause.