The lynch mob mentality has gripped us. Moral policing is on the rise and added to this dangerous cocktail are the strident voices emanating from political parties that expect conformity with the idea of a mono-cultural India.

Recently, the Assam BJP chief Ranjeet Kumar Dass made the preposterous claim that India will become a Gau Rashtra by 2025. Such statements only confirm one’s worst fears that the BJP will not tolerate the religious beliefs and cultural practices of non-Hindu minorities. This is a case of a political party in power flexing its muscles to exert a sort of control on people’s minds.

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The BJP’s muscular policy in Jammu and Kashmir reveal its character and intent of riding roughshod over minority sentiments and a suspension of democracy which in any case has been the case in that troubled state. India seems to be regressing into a counter-culture where democracy is being challenged every day until people acquiesce through sheer protest fatigue.

This is perhaps how dictatorships function. They begin with statements that go uncontested and are then acted out. For a party that has scant respect for democratic tenets, it is rather absurd that the BJP would go into an advertisement overdrive to remind people of the evils of the Emergency. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in a comment even alluded to the Emergency being a lesson drawn from Hitler’s Germany.

There is a cacophony of statements from BJP MLAs and MPs, which shake our faith in the system and create a sort of paranoia. The BJP MLA of Jammu and Kashmir recently threatened journalists with dire consequences for standing up for what they believe in and pointed to the Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari as an example. Prime Minister Modi has not said a word till date on the ghastly killing of Bukhari.

This silence is inexplicable as Modi is highly articulate on a range of other issues, which he considers important. Evidently the killing of journalists is a fairly routine affair not necessitating a statement from the head honcho of the Central Government. Does silence mean that Modi condones Bukhari’s killing and by extension the elimination of all dissenting voices? Isn’t this a frightening thought for all those who believe in free speech as guaranteed by the Indian Constitution?

But there is such a thing as an active, vibrant civil society that can collectively stand up against state bullying. I witnessed this in Goa — a BJP ruled state yet one where beef is served in most eating spaces without anyone getting the jitters. If there can be a Goa why can’t there be a North-east India where all manner of food is allowed to be served without anyone warning us that we are violating a gau rakshak diktat?

One characteristic of Goa is when it comes to protests on issues that involve the public good; people transcend political affiliations and come together. This is something we don’t see much in the North-eastern states. Actually it is those in the BJP who should, instead of toeing the party line on almost everything, be standing up to conserve and protect their cultural values, which include culinary practices.

Why does a political party have to instill fear in people? Being in a political party does not mean losing one’s voice. It means negotiating democratic spaces within that party to give it a more humane disposition. A political party is given the mandate to govern, not to inflict a moral and religious code of conduct on citizens.

Ranjeet Kumar Dass was responding to the findings of the UN special rapporteurs, which projected the heightened fear of Muslims in Assam as a result of the updation of the National Register of Citizens. This fear is not unreal. There is a sort of persecution mania at work to derecognise citizens on the basis of religion simply because they are alleged to be interlopers from East Bengal, later East Pakistan and now Bangladesh, without, for a moment, trying to understand the histories of a bloody partition and later the transfer of territories based on religion.

The mood in Assam today is not even conducive for such discussions. People seem to have taken intransigent stances and they include academics and intellectuals. One can understand political activists going completely overboard to suit the current political narrative of the BJP but why should scholars and ordinary citizens adopt an intractable disposition? So much so there is a fear that the final draft of the NRC apart from sealing the fates of many as non-citizens might also unleash a reign of terror.

In an article, “Social Perspectives on Violence,” Thomas W Blume says families, communities and nations often evolve in ways that benefit some of their members and work to the disadvantage of others. Societies have created a variety of mechanisms including elections, courts, and mediation with the intent of facilitating change and eliminating injustice. But such mechanisms have their limitations.

For example, courts require that the litigant be educated and have enough financial resources to guarantee the fair hearing of a grievance. But when a society is gripped by poverty and cannot afford the legal process, it tends to take the law in its hands. Indeed, violence is often explained as the only alternative for individuals and groups who do not see a nonviolent way to break out of a position of disadvantage. And that position of disadvantage is growing with poverty.

Social stability is brought about when social change does not threaten the privileges of the powerful elite. But when social hierarchies are threatened, the elite use subversive forces to perpetrate violence and disrupt harmony.

Every society has its hierarchies and it would be wrong to say that tribal societies are egalitarian. In fact, when societies are under economic stress, they tend to develop strict social mores for their members almost as a protective mechanism because they already have so much to handle. Hence the violence and moral policing in Assam, and elsewhere, require conscious interrogation by scholars and academia because they cannot be allowed to continue unbridled.

In a situation that is as politically charged as now, rumours take the shape of reality and people tend to believe the worst of one another. Societal trust is jeopardised as the lines of tribe, religion and community get sharpened and as people await a verdict they find hard to accept. Perhaps all these fears are preying into peoples’ minds and turning them more moralistic and more demanding of their young ones to remain on the correct side of the moral fence.

But when society takes upon itself the onus of punishing its members for not following certain codes of conduct, then we are regressing into a dark abyss where the rule of law loses its meaning and impact. It almost seems as if moral policemen/women enjoy the act of punishing those they consider having transgressed the moral codes circumscribed by their society.

The fact that such moral policing often happens under the lenses of television cameras makes one feel that we are entering a perverse world of voyeuristic adventure where style, romance and the genteel side of an unattainable way of life is replaced by a more crude, down to earth expression of raw anger and the desire to punish. Television cameras incidentally juxtapose both with equal flourish.

We are all unsure of the future and what it holds. We are all grasping at straws; all this while the government run by those we elected to govern us unleashes its agenda of perpetuating its continued control over our fates and fortunes.

The writer is Editor of the Shillong Times and can be contacted at patricia.mukhim@gmail.com