Azadi - Arundhati Roy

India is not really a country. It is a continent. More complex and diverse, with more languages—780 at last count,
excluding dialects—more nationalities and sub-nationalities, more indigenous tribes and religions than all of Europe.
Imagine this vast ocean, this fragile, fractious, social ecosystem, suddenly being commandeered by a Hindu
supremacist organization that believes in a doctrine of One Nation, One Language, One Religion, One Constitution.
I am speaking here of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925—the mother ship of the
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Its founding fathers were greatly influenced by German and Italian fascism. They
likened the Muslims of India to the Jews of Germany, and believed that Muslims have no place in Hindu India. The
RSS today, in typical RSS chameleon-speak, distances itself from this view. But its underlying ideology, in which
Muslims are cast as permanent, treacherous “outsiders,” is a constant refrain in the public speeches of BJP
politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by rampaging mobs. For example: Mussalman ka ek hi
sthan—Kabristan ya Pakistan . Only one place for the Mussalman—the graveyard or Pakistan. In October this year,
Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, “India is a Hindu rashtra”—a Hindu nation. “This is nonnegotiable.”
That idea turns everything that is beautiful about India into acid.
For the RSS to portray what it is engineering today as an epochal revolution, in which Hindus are finally wiping
away centuries of oppression at the hands of India’s earlier Muslim rulers, is a part of its fake-history project. In
truth, millions of India’s Muslims are the descendants of people who converted to Islam to escape Hinduism’s cruel
practice of caste.
If Nazi Germany was a country seeking to impose its imagination onto a continent (and beyond), the impetus of
an RSS-ruled India is, in a sense, the opposite. Here is a continent seeking to shrink itself into a country. Not even a
country, but a province. A primitive, ethno-religious province. This is turning out to be an unimaginably violent
process—a kind of slow-motion political fission, triggering a radioactivity that has begun to contaminate everything
around it. That it will self-destruct is not in doubt. The question is what else, who else, and how much else will go
down with it.
None of the white-supremacist, neo-Nazi groups that are on the rise in the world today can boast of the
infrastructure and manpower that the RSS commands. It says that it has fifty-seven thousand shakhas —branches—
across the country, and an armed, dedicated militia of more than six hundred thousand “volunteers.” 6 It runs schools
in which millions of students are enrolled, and has its own medical missions, trade unions, farmers’ organizations,
media outlets, and women’s groups. Recently, it announced that it was opening a training school for those who wish
to join the Indian Army. Under its bhagwa dhwaj —its saffron pennant—a whole host of far-right organizations,
known as the Sangh Parivar—the RSS’s “family”—have prospered and multiplied. These organizations, the political
equivalents of shell companies, are responsible for shockingly violent attacks on minorities in which, over the years,
uncounted thousands have been murdered. Violence, communal conflagration, and false-flag attacks are their
principal strategies, and have been at the very core of the saffron campaign.
Prime minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the RSS all his life. He is a creation of the RSS. Although
not Brahmin, he, more than anyone else in its history, has been responsible for turning it into the most powerful
organization in India, and for writing its most glorious chapter yet. It is exasperating to have to constantly repeat the
story of Modi’s ascent to power, but the officially sanctioned amnesia around it makes reiteration almost a duty.
Modi’s political career was jump-started in October 2001, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks in the United States,
when the BJP removed its elected chief minister in the state of Gujarat, and installed Modi in his place. He was not,
at the time, even an elected member of the state’s legislative assembly. Five months into his first term there was a
heinous but mysterious act of arson in which fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death in a train coach. As
“revenge,” Hindu vigilante mobs went on a well-planned rampage across the state. An estimated twenty-five
hundred people, almost all of them Muslim, were murdered in broad daylight. Women were gang-raped on city
streets, and tens of thousands were driven from their homes. Immediately after the pogrom, Modi called for
elections. He won, not despite the massacre but because of it. He became known as Hindu Hriday Samrat—the
Emperor of the Hindu Heart—and was re-elected as chief minister for three consecutive terms. During Modi’s 2014
campaign as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP—which also featured the massacre of Muslims, this time in
the district of Muzaffarnagar in the state of Uttar Pradesh—a Reuters journalist asked him whether he regretted the
2002 pogrom in Gujarat under his watch. 7 He replied, in all sincerity, that he would regret even the death of a dog if
it accidentally came under the wheels of his car. 8 This was pure, well-trained RSS-speak.
When Modi was sworn in as India’s fourteenth prime minister, he was celebrated not just by his support base of
Hindu nationalists, but also by India’s major industrialists and businessmen, by many Indian liberals and by the
international media, as the epitome of hope and progress, a savior in a saffron business suit, whose very person
represented the confluence of the ancient and the modern—of Hindu nationalism and no-holds-barred free-market