Enemies

 

I was planning to take a holiday from my #WriteAPageADay commitment today when a friend’s message on WhatsApp woke me up this morning with the blow of a sledgehammer. The message was sent last night. As I am an early sleeper, it got my attention only this morning. And I decided that the message demanded more than a personal response, because I’m being bombarded with similar views from many sources these days.

The crux of the message is this: As times change, politics need change too. Congress has lost itself. Marxism is redundant now. The right-wing politics of BJP is the ideal option for today’s India. “If the majority Muslim countries can be declared Islamist, India (Bharat) can also declare herself Hindu Rashtra.”

The message was written and sent by a Christian who is the principal of a Christian school in Bengaluru. He is a knowledgeable person with a doctorate in English literature, the morality of Thomas Hardy’s fatalism being his specialisation.

I read his message lying in bed well before 5 o’clock, as I usually do every morning with all electronic messages of the previous night. I not only go to bed early but also wake up early. [Has it made me healthier, wealthier and wiser? Well!] The message stole my morning contemplation and I decided to ‘write a page’ today too.

The first image that the message drove to my consciousness was that of the nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.”

What draws my Christian friend to the BJP is his hatred of Muslims, as far as I have managed to gauge it. The BJP hates Muslims, my friend hates Muslims. They have a common enemy. So they are friends. [My friend’s hatred of Muslims stems from his few years of employment in a Gulf country where he was subjected to various afflictions that normally accompany Muslim fundamentalism.]

“For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential,” says Samuel P Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations [from where I borrowed the Dibdin quote too]. The BJP is seeking an ethnic identity which allegedly was stolen from them by the Mughals and then the British. My friend is joining them because of his personal hatred of Muslims.

There is not much difference between personal hatred of a community and national hatred of the same community except that the latter will create more havoc.

Hatred is the foundation of ethnic quests. I can understand my friend’s personal hatred of a community, especially since that community had made his life miserable for some time. I too don’t have any soft corner for that community, particularly because of their approach to social reality, an approach that is no different from the ghetto mentality of their enemies, the Jews. 

Philosopher Nietzsche said

We all tend to become like our enemies. None other than philosopher Nietzsche said that. My friend’s statement that if Muslims can make Islamist nations, then India should be a Hindu Rashtra is the natural outcome of a hate-based weltanschauung. My friend has become just like his enemies. My country is on the way. That is the tragedy which I keep trying to avert through my writings. Sorry for repetitions of the same theme in different words.