Of an old friend and Modi’s Gujrat

Last Wednesday, I met one of my old friends after a long time- about two years. N was born and brought up in Port Blair, Andaman Islands. His father was a native of Kottakkal, so he used to visit his father and it was during one of these visits, about 7 years ago, that we met for the first time. We became friends instantly, and I spent most of my summer vacations playing Video games with him.

But then, I returned to my hostel, and he went home to the Andaman. Since then, we met each other three or four times, during his visits to his father. He got married four years ago, and is now a father of two kids.

We talked a lot, about the Islands, his family and life in general.
N has been trying to setup a business of collecting goods that were not easily available in the Andaman from mainland India and selling it in Andaman and vice versa. He had faced many setbacks prior to this, but now he had another friend who was to be his partner in the business and the two of them has been touring various parts of India, doing their own research of availability and selling prospects of goods.

When I met him, N and his friend had completed their tour and was about to return to the Andaman. The tour came up during the talk, and he was thrilled to share his experience of seeing in flesh and blood how life was different from region to region. Among the stories of his experience, none makes a more lasting impression than his experience in a small town in Gujrat.
N is a religious person. He had been quite different when I first met him. But since then, he has learned a lot about Islam and is now a follower of Islam. Being the religious person he is, N has a nice beard.

Having arrived in a small town in Gujrat, N and his friend checked into a lodge and they went out to do some sight-seeing and shopping. They wanted to get some milk, so they went to a Milk store, pulled out two ten rupee notes and asked the shop-keeper for a packet of milk. The shop-keeper glanced suspiciously towards them, and seeing them, he angrily said “I don’t sell goods to Muslims!”. N and his friend were shell-shocked. They knew all about the riots, the hatred-campaign against Muslims, but yet when they experienced first hand what it was to be a Muslim in a right-wing Hinduist regime, they saw the real fathoms of the hatred.

These are the same Right-wing groups being celebrated as ‘nationalists’ by the media, both Indian and foreign. I can not help the irony I feel when I happen to see organizations like the BJP and RSS being described as nationalists in the articles on websites of various western media-houses like the BBC, The Telegraph etc.

India, as a geographical and political region has been a melting pot of cultures, ideas and religions. All the major religions in the world have followers in India. The sense of nationality associated with the modern state of India would have never become a possibility without the contributions made by the various political and religious influxes to India. The RSS and BJP (and right-wing Muslim groups) do not, in any way, represent the nationality of this great nation that has embraced people, ideas and religions from the outside throughout history.

While I recognize the fact that the experience my friend had cannot be modeled as a template to describe the attitude of people in Gujrat or other regions in India towards religious minorities, I do think that this is a pointer to the effects endorsement of right-wing ideologies have on people’s psyche.