RESCUING INDIA FROM THE ALTAR OF BIGOTRY

Anti-Muslim violence has increased after the election. This is unbecoming of a people blessed with a trailblazing Constitution. We need to breathe new life into our secularism

- SHASHI THAROOR

WHILE the successful conduct of our 18th Lok Sabha elections should have been a cause of celebration, it has been anything but celebratory for many of our fellow citizens. Ever since the results were announced, a spate of antiMuslim violence has occurred, threatening to submerge the very idea of India we celebrate while conducting the world's largest election.

The electoral outcome may have weakened the BJP politically, but we cannot seek solace in thinking that it has also strengthened secularism. While replying in the Lok Sabha to the motion of thanks on the president's address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that after years of "appeasement politics", it was only now that a government was truly practicing secularism. These words overlooked his own conduct during the campaign, when he led his colleagues in a savage assault on our republic's religious pluralism.

The people of India watched in horror as the prime minister, while campaigning in Rajasthan's Banswara, his stentorian voice climbing to a crescendo of hate, wove a web of Islamophobic falsehoods. Modi described Muslims as "infiltrators" and thundered that the Congress would make Muslims the foremost recipients of India's resources; that they intended to snatch away the Hindu majority's hard-earned wealth and give it to Muslims, sparing not even the mangalsutras of their "mothers and sisters"; and that they would redistribute wealth to Muslims (those who "have more children"). As a subservient Election Commission of India watched on, he carried on this fearmongering offensive, bizarrely and baselessly accusing the opposition of plotting to rob the OBCS, STs and SCs of their reservations and award them to Muslims for turning out en masse in a "vote jihad" against the BJP.