Sometime ago BJP patriarch L K Advani’s Emergency remark had created a buzz in the Indian political circles. Few months down the line two prominent citizens of India writer Nayantara Sahgal and poet Ashok Vajpeyi returned the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award to express their solidarity with “all Indians who uphold the right to dissent” and “targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silence on recent incidents of violence (read Dadri).”
What had prompted the BJP patriarch to make such a high-pitched statement was speculated heavily then. Speculation aside, the prevailing situation not only reminds the minority groups what is coming but also provides leverage in campaign to safeguard and promote their values and belief systems. This is so because such situation has come at a time when apprehensive mindset of the minority groups is at play that, at the core of the Hindutva movement stands Narendra Modi. For quite sometimes now the gossip clubs have been speculating that Mr Modi will employ policies to clear things that stand in the way of the Hindutva movement.
Few months ago in an interview to The Indian Express L K Advani had stated that a suspension of civil liberties similar to the 1975 Emergency could not be ruled out in future in India. “At the present point of time, the forces that can crush democracy, notwithstanding the constitutional and legal safeguards, are stronger,” he added. “But that it cannot happen again — I will not say that. It could be that fundamental liberties are curtailed again,” L K advani commented.
Well, in reality the ground work for the “suspension of civil liberties and to crush democracy” has started engineered by those people at the helm. This fact became visible after the ignorance of the values of the Muslims and the Christians and their belief systems. If there is a societal insecurity today among the minority groups it is because of this cultural imperialism of the Hindutva movement which the former perceives as a threat to their survival as a community.
