One of the first things that the bright young men recruited by the East India Company and, subsequently, the Crown were taught before being shipped out to rule India was an apparent paradox: for everything that is true about India, the opposite is equally true.
In recent weeks and months, the sheer dichotomy of the Indian experience appears to have become starker. Apart from the divergences of geography, the Bharat-India gulf and the class divide, which were always there, pre-existing political fault lines appear to have exacerbated. The gulf is so wide that different Indias are speaking completely different languages and experiencing the public space in diametrically different ways.
A recent manifestation of this gulf was the outrage that greeted the murderous assault on a young Muslim boy inside a local train in Haryana. The boy, returning from a bout of Eid shopping with his cousins, got into an argument with some boisterous (and, some say, drunk) men over seating. The arguments turned vicious and acquired sectarian overtones, leading to a brawl in which the Muslim boy was knifed to death.
The same day, in a completely unrelated incident, a policeman deployed outside the Jamia Masjid in Srinagar was set upon by a mob during the Friday prayers and viciously beaten to death. From all accounts, the mob consisted of people harbouring separatist feelings -the proverbial stone throwers -who saw the policeman as a symbol of the Indian State they have come to hate. There is also a suggestion that he was also mistaken for a Hindu.
Since the first incident happened in Ballabhgarh, not terribly far from Delhi - India's media hub - it received disproportionately more publicity than the killing of a State functionary in Srinagar. More to the point, since the abuses hurled at the Muslim boys on the train were quite explicitly communal in character - media reports say they were apparently called beef eaters and told to go to Pakistan - the incident was sought to be linked to the anti-beef campaign that has led to some unsavoury vigilantism.
The politicization of the Ballabhgarh incident is now total, a process where the contribution of media activists has been much more than that of Opposition politicians looking for a stick to beat Prime Minister Narendra Modi with. India has been dubbed 'lynchistan' and a venerable vice-chancellor has argued that "A monstrous new moral order is unfolding, irrigated by the blood of our citizens... This violence seeks to alter the fundamental moral and constitutional order: The victim of the lynching is presented as the criminal, while the ideologies that justify this killing enjoy the patronage of the state." Read with interventions by TV presenters arguing that "The national project for instilling fear has reached completion," it is possible to understand the endless chatter on June 25 (the anniversary of Indira Gandhi's 1975 Emergency) about an 'undeclared Emergency' shaped by majoritarian impulses.
This state of heightened anxiety has been compounded by a campaign of unrelenting ridicule of the prime minister. Once again, it is not Congress or even Left politicians that are responsible but the so-called opinion makers. An academic of Indian origin based in California has described Modi in a Twitter post as a "pathetic little man" and a "pathologically self-obsessed maniac." His anger is quite unconcealed. "Trust these BJP oafs" he fulminated on Twitter, "to reduce yoga to an annual clown show."
A former public relations professional with close Congress links was appalled when Portugal organized a special Gujarati meal for Modi during his brief visit to Lisbon. In a social media comment, he gave vent to his fury: "Like him I am a Gujarati from Vadnagar. Unlike him, I embraced cosmopolitanism, learned to enjoy the pleasure of steak cooked rare and the joy of seafood like a flaky Bombay Duck or clams in a Vermouth sauce... And along with cosmopolitanism came an unshakable commitment to diversity."
The derision, quite predictably, extends to the cow worshippers. Puzzled by the Pakistan team offering prayers after their win over India, a self-proclaimed "Sickular libtard" shuddered, in a column in this paper, "at the thought of a victorious Indian team doing some copycat 'Jai Shri Gau Mata' shashtang pranam in the near future."
The social embarrassment the 'Hindus' are likely to create for cosmopolitan - and often nominal - Hindus was also echoed by a former chief economic adviser to a Congress government. "A disproportionate amount of global news and writings on India," he complained in a characteristically lucid article, "is now related to cow slaughter, gau rakshaks, anti-romeo squads, banning momos, religious intolerance. There is a noticeable drop in India's visibility in important global debates, from diplomacy and international economic and monetary policy to other urgent concerns of our time."
That the lynchings and the high-handedness of vigilantes are ugly facets of India are undeniable. They also make for sensational headlines such as the "Is India descending into mob rule?" poser by the BBC website. The Hindu disdain for beef and their abhorrence of cow slaughter are also oddities that the cosmopolitan 'nowhere man' finds both intriguing and amusing. Predictably, there are stories that feed into the larger narrative of 'exotic' (and, sometimes, by implication, 'ugly') India. Likewise, the touching tales of individual hardships during the demonetization exercise prompted many observers - including hardened politicians - to conclude that the Bharatiya Janata Party would get an almighty drubbing in the Uttar Pradesh elections.
Yet, the question arises: if the Modi government is indeed so crass, authoritarian and evil, why do Indians continue to repose faith in his leadership? Why do opinion polls indicate that the prime minister's popularity today is greater than what it was in 2014? Why were so many Indians, cutting across class and caste, willing to endure personal hardship and yet extend political support to demonetization? Is it because today's Indians have reinvented themselves and turned their back on the lofty civilizational values that defined the so-called 'idea of India'? Incidentally, this is what Rabindranath Tagore had imagined had happened to the country when Gandhi-mania gripped the land during the Non-Cooperation movement of 1920-22.
There are obviously no conclusive answers. However, if the revolt of the intellectuals is, by their own admission, not getting either mass support or even the endorsement of the entire Fourth Estate, it could be because there is a sharp divergence of experience. The dissidents don't appear to have sufficiently probed the impact of either the Centre's initiatives (such as the greater availability of power and cooking gas and the more efficient disbursement of welfare handouts) or the larger impression that this is a more rooted and honest government. The question 'Kovind who?' asked by some people after the BJP announced its presidential candidate was, at one level, legitimate. But it was also accompanied by a generous serving of social condescension that has become the hallmark of India's beleaguered dissidents.
Modi has created a new moral economy centred on the projection of indigenous values and a complete rejection of the entitlement culture that defined the earlier Congress governments. Yes, in the process, there has been a marginalization of global cosmopolitanism and a repudiation of the old elites who were tainted by the brush of special privileges. This has undoubtedly led to some over-zealousness and some shows of triumphalism. These must be corrected. But the demand for throwing the baby out with the bathwater is also tantamount to the return of the ancien régime. Despite their pious veneer, today's protests personify the anger of those who have lost power and access to it.
