#AllLivesMatter and #HindusAreHumanToo
What do the slogans #AllLivesMatter and #HindusAreHumanToo have in common?
In May last year, Narendra Modi swept to power in India, with the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) scoring a landslide victory.
There was great excitement in some quarters, and in others deep worries about a potential lurch to the right.
The first battleground in the ensuing culture war has been beef.
Upon Modi’s ascent, politicians and Hindu groups did not waste time in pushing for the imposition and strict enforcement of a nationwide beef ban — in a country where many millions consider the cow sacred and millions of others do not hold the cow in any particular degree of reverence.
Earlier this month, the world was shocked by news of the brutal lynching of an old Muslim man in a village outside Delhi. Hindu villagers suspected him of having beef in his home. A mob descended and beat him to a pulp in a sickeningly orgy of violence. (Not that it matters one iota, but forensic evidence later showed that the meat he had was mutton.) A few days later, another mob stopped a truck on a highway and brutally beat five Muslim men suspected of transporting cows for slaughter. One of the five died.
Not only are the incidents themselves frightening, but so have been the reactions of Modi and other BJP politicians. Some have simply downplayed the incidents as “accidents” or “isolated”; others have gone as far as to suggest that minority religions need to accept widespread enforcement of Hindu preferences (such as avoiding beef consumption) in order to live peacefully in India.
Secular-minded and pluralist Indians have reacted in anger and shock. Modi and the Hindutva brigade have been lambasted. Several intellectuals have returned government awards in protest against growing intolerance.
But let’s not forget that Modi was elected with tremendous popular support. And his faithful— the ‘Modi toadies’ as Salman Rushdie has affectionately labeled them — have themselves exploded in defense. Their arguments have generally fallen along these lines: These ‘sickulars’ and ‘presstitutes’ (affectionate terms used by right wingers to describe some on the left) only care about minorities. Why do they not say anything when Hindus are killed? #HindusAreHumanToo they’ve screamed.
Not long after Modi took power in India, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) slogan started to take hold across America, in response to a spate of highly publicized deaths of black people in encounters with police. In July 2014, Eric Garner was choked to death in Staten Island by a police officer, after being approached on suspicion of selling cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. Less than a month later, unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
BLM has grown into an influential activist movement, seeking to address deeply embedded structural biases that inform and influence how black Americans are (mis)treated in various facets of everyday life.
While some of the tactics used by the group have been debated, most recognize and appreciate the need to address the underlying systemic issues the movement seeks to highlight. But not everyone. A minority of loud voices, typically from the political right, have responded by mistakenly believing that the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ implies an “only” in front of it. #AllLivesMatter they have argued.
It hardly needs to be said that, yes, all lives matter and, yes, Hindus are human too. No reasonable person would argue otherwise. A Muslim mob murdering a Hindu is just as appalling as the other way around. A white police officer being murdered by vigilantes is also unforgivable in civilized society.
But is there a serious concern that whites in the US or Hindus in India are regularly deprived of basic opportunities or subconsciously stigmatized in everyday matters?
Not only do the #AllLivesMatter and #HindusAreHumanToo reactions fail to understand this basic, but critical, nuance, but they also implicitly deny the lived experiences of African-Americans in the US and Muslims in India: the daily disenfranchisement felt as a result of the legacies of histories, the dynamics of power distributions, and the structures of socioeconomic institutions.
And those whose voices are systemically marginalized need particularly focused attention from activists and social justice campaigners. This is why we need BLM in the US. This is why we need outspoken secularists in India.
Otherwise both societies will be for all their citizens in name only.
