CHENNAI: Speakers at a webinar on Hindu nationalism and rise of majoritarian democracy said institutions in the country were decimated and the BJP government was a threat to democracy. They expressed concern over the silence of the top court on critical issues. The webinar was organised by Dravidian Professionals’ Forum.
The Narendra Modi government has turned the Parliament into just a notice board, which is not keen on debate and accountability. “BJP practices a malignant form of nationalism. Its populist leader Modi is not governing on what he campaigned in 2014, but he has been ruling based on exclusionary practices. After the 2019 polls, they have taken the licence to be far more majoritarian, far more direct in imposing their view of Hindutva…Now, Hindutva has evolved into Moditva,” Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor said.
He said Hindutva political doctrine was intruding into everyone’s bedroom, kitchen and living room. He cautioned that the BJP might go ahead to increase the number of seats in the Parliament, reapportioning a larger number of seats to the Hindi heartland if it is not confident of winning the 2024 polls. It would even move to amend the Constitution and it has numbers to do so, he said.
“Hindu majority is now being seen as equivalent to the nation. So, minorities can only be second-class citizens,” Prof Christophe Jaffrelot, research director of Sciences Po, Paris said. He said revelation on Pegasus spyware would unearth the “blackmail” being carried out by the domain and added that all the institutions such as the ECI, CBI, and NIA in India were decimated. Use of such spyware was a threat to democracy, he said. The Supreme Court was silent over it.
Finance minister P T R Palanivel Thiagarajan opined that the BJP was controlling the media and setting the narrative. But it did not fetch the desired result for them in states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal. The BJP has been pushing hard fake news through the media run by certain sections, but it would have very little impact in Tamil Nadu, he said.
This story first appeared on timesofindia.indiatimes.com