Sure, Media... Shah Is ‘Polarising’ the Way Yogi Is a ‘Firebrand’

Video Editors: Varun Tiwari, Ashutosh Bhardwaj
Video Producer: Asmita Nandy

Media should junk timid euphemisms it uses for hate speech by politicians and call them out for being outright bigots.

For example, Amit Shah, the president of the ruling party of India, was quoted as saying by his party at a recent election rally:

“We will ensure the implementation of NRC in the entire country. We will remove every single infiltrator from the country, except Buddha, Hindus and Sikhs.”

Now, how does this not amount to hate speech? Hate speech is defined as abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

But in media-speak, Shah was doing what they call polarisation. Or simply raising the Hindutva pitch. Or just being controversial.

This pathological inability to call a spade a spade has played more than a small part in normalising such hatred in our body-politic.

Now let's break down a few terms commonly used by the media to report on hate speech.

Polarisation:

Defined as division into two sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs.

It is an unsuitable term to describe continuous attacks on increasingly insecure minorities. Especially since they are coming from majoritation politicians at powerful positions in the country's democracy.

Firebrand:

Defined as a person who is very passionate about a particular cause.

A Google search for “Hindutva firebrand” throws up the names of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, former chief of VHP Praveen Togadia and BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj in the first few results.

Togadia has 19 cases of hate speech against him, Sakshi Maharaj has a fair few as well. That brings us to Adityanath, who in December 2017 withdrew 20,000 cases against politicians, including one against himself for alleged hate speech during the Gorakhpur riots of 2007.

To nobody's surprise, being made the class monitor has not made Adityanath any less naughty (show Chetan Bhagat). The latest Muslim-baiting comment came from him in Meerut. He said and I quote:

“If the Congress, the SP and the BSP have faith in Ali, then we too, have faith in Bajrang Bali.”

Dog-Whistle:

BJP has been a master of dog-whistle politics and here's what the term means:

Defined as a high-pitched whistle used to train dogs, typically having a sound inaudible to humans.

In politics, it means a message aimed at, and that can only be understood by, a particular demographic group.

So when the prime minister repeatedly invokes the ‘Pink Revolution’ narrative, when he says Rahul Gandhi is standing from Wayanad because it is a Muslim-majority constituency, when his second-in-command Amit Shah urges people to take revenge against parties who stood for Muslims displaced by the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, when the chief minister of India’s largest state Yogi Adityanath says maximum communal incidents happen in Muslim-dominated areas....it is not just “playing the Hindutva card”. It is a dog-whistle to the Hindus to vote for a party that sees minorities as “outsiders”, as “infiltrators”.

Amit Shah had called Bangladeshi migrants "termites" in September last year and have now expanded his definition of "infiltrators" to conceivably every Muslim or Christian in this country. So who is going to ask the leader of the largest political party in the world’s largest democracy why he is going by the Nazi playbook?

The media has reported these dog-whistle comments by politicians as if they are isolated incidents, without joining the dots. It has a responsibility to call out the bigotry that is a part of BJP's social policy.