TeaThey debate on the poster of Leena Manimekalai’s new documentary film Black, depicting the Hindu goddess Kali smoking a cigarette, outlines an India-specific ‘politics of hurt feelings’. This version of politics relies heavily on the collective victimization of a religious community and makes the assumption that faith does not permit artistic expression of any kind.
It is claimed that the artistic expressions deliberately defy religious sentiments to hurt the feelings of believers. This is precisely why the politics of hurt feelings always operates in the framework of ‘freedom of speech versus religious sentiments’.
In my view, this faith-art binary is highly misleading. And the outcry is also carefully designed to intensify religious divisions and increase community persecution. To understand the nuanced workings of this politics, a few basic questions need to be asked: What is the mechanism by which a book, painting, poster, film or even an old useless newspaper turns into an object of religious concern? goes. , How does the discourse of ‘hurting feelings’ arise and persist? And finally, who are the actors who claim to represent the sentiments of a particular group?
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Three political forms of hurt feelings
Broadly speaking, there are at least three distinct types of issues that shape the politics of hurt feelings in India.
The discovery of an art object as a ‘threat’ to religious sentiments is the first and perhaps most influential expression of the politics of hurt feelings. In this case, a conscious effort is made to identify the work of art or any particular aspect of it that may be highlighted as a direct attack on the religious beliefs of a particular community.
Salman Rushdie’s satanic versesTaslima Nasreen shameMF Hussain’s Saraswati painting, and now, Manimekalai’s Black The posters are deliberately ‘discovered’ to make them a controversial public object. In such instances, the ‘intent’ of an artist/intellectualist has trouble claiming that a particular work of art is primarily designed to offend a specific group of believers.
Turning everyday life into a clash of civilizations is another version of hurt politics. In this case, the mundane, ordinary and ordinary aspects of our social existence are reinterpreted in order to discover possible political conflicts. Azan, prayer on Eid al-Adha and the heated debate on animal sacrifice are good examples. This version of hurtful politics emphasizes an inherent contradiction between Islam and Hinduism and justifies the argument that conflict between Hindus and Muslims is always natural and inevitable. It seems that the very existence of Muslims in India is enough to hurt Hindu sentiments.
Finally there is the violent expression of the politics of hurt feelings. The recent years of lynching of Muslims in the name of cow worship and protecting the honor of Prophet Muhammad by beheading an innocent Hindu tailor in Udaipur show that such politics can also take brutal forms.
The Udaipur murder follows a typical pattern. The killers identified a particular person and attacked him in an organized manner. Interestingly, he didn’t hit her only for expressing his hurt feelings. He also filmed the entire episode and promoted it on social media. This brutal display of violence is used to create the impression that Hinduism and Islam represent two different and conflicting civilizations.
It is noteworthy that there is a remarkable similarity between the incident and incident of Udaipur. Strike In 2017 that of a 50-year-old Muslim laborer, Mohammad Bhatt Shaikh. Sheikh was murdered and burnt alive in Rajsamand district of Rajasthan. The accused Shambhu Nath Raigar has also recorded the murder. circulated It was widely on social media that he too aroused the hurt sentiments of Hindus to justify this gruesome act.
Read also: ‘Continuous ridicule of Hindus’ – Hindu Right Press on poster of Leena Manimekalai’s ‘Kali’
Device
Let us see how these three versions of the politics of hurt feelings have played out. Although each case has its own specific performance trajectory, one can certainly trace a broad three-level mechanism that provides the background for the smooth dramatization and execution of such politics.
The first level of this tool is where the ‘idea of injury’ turns into an event. Attacks on art galleries, seminars, conventions, film screenings and lynchings of innocent individuals show how a fictional idea of injury is expressed in concrete terms. This event-focused performance empowers the stakeholders to legitimize their existence as representatives of a group/community.
The second level is the appropriation of such events by breaking news-oriented media where a highly localized event is turned into a national concern for public debate. At this critical level of intervention, the stakeholder’s domain is greatly expanded. This opens up new possibilities for national-level elites to offer larger political perspectives to these random and virtually insignificant events. Finally, at the third level, political parties come into the picture. They redefine media-driven debate to articulate an electorally convenient position.
The issue of Ram temple in Ayodhya is a classic example that explains the working of this informal mechanism. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) rediscovered the political potential in the Ayodhya dispute in the early 1980s. The Rath Yatra of 1984 and the reopening of the Babri Masjid in 1986 were major events that legitimized the notion of hurt feelings of Hindus. The media, including the state-run Doordarshan, played an important role in creating a discourse of the struggle. And finally, political parties appropriated it to launch a new narrative of electoral politics: communalism versus secularism.
A very similar trajectory can be seen in the Rushdie controversy. The Rajiv Gandhi government banned The Satanic Verses to appease the Muslim religious elite. Rushdie and Ruhollah Khomeini were unknown names at that time to ordinary Muslims in India. However, within a period of two years, he was being mobilized by the religious elite to protect the dignity of the Prophet.
The politics of hurt feelings is definitely going to survive. We can be sure by seeing how the injury is being weaponized from all sides. It empowers Hindutva groups to reproduce what Suhas Pashikar calls ‘Hindutva hegemony’. At the same time, it gives ample space to non-Hindutva groups to generate, create and appropriate new forms of Hindu sentiment.
Hilal Ahmed is a scholar of Political Islam and Associate Professor at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. He tweeted @ahmed1Hilal. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Likes)