Do you know that burqa is empowering and is the best thing ever designed to express solidarity against patriarchy? Wearing a burqa is a fundamental right of any women and those who wear it should be respected for their courage to stand against the evil patriarchal society.
Well the above paragraph, with all its inconsistencies, can be lifted up from any current publications by leftists. But this article is neither about Islamic feminism nor about west. It is rather about crab mentality of Hindu Right wing, where the flag bearers lose no chance to bring each other down whenever possible.
BJP is hardly a Hindu right wing party but for all its drawbacks, it is still the only viable option on the right. Now think of the drama that got unleashed before Modi was anointed as BJP’s PM candidate. The sulking Advani was courted by the Lutyens media to fire salvo after salvo against Modi. But media did what it was supposed to do i.e. help the Congress ecosystem, and made mountains out of molehill. The sulking patriarch on the Hindu right rather than keeping his feelings private and blessing his protégée in public, decided to play into the hands of the same media.
The dissent was crushed to a great extent by Modi but it keeps rising time and again, sometimes led by old horses who are hurt by the fact that they were ignored when crumbs of power were thrown around. The biggest failure of this season has been Arun Shourie who resorted to personal attacks against Modi and called him narcissistic and dictator in a live show hosted by Karan Thapar.
But Shourie is not the only politician/intellectual who can be accused of such mud-slinging. This mud-slinging fest is actually even more common among the intellectuals. The feud between Malhotra and Ganesh had hardly died when Talageri fired his ammo against Manasataramgini, a famous blogger on RW, questioning his views on AIT but character assassinating him in the process.
While western scholars build consensus by slightly modifying each others’ views in peer reviewed journals, the Hindus come out as clowns who don’t lose any chance to bring each other down over minor disagreements.
Since the left still controls the public narrative, the need of the hour is to keep the dissent among Hindus internal rather than publicly vocalizing it. The intellectual debate in the public sphere should be encouraged, but any personal attacks should be avoided at all costs.
There is another very important point which has slowed the growth of RW ecosystem in India. The number of retweets and endorsements by left wing portals and their contributors of their competitors’s articles far outnumber those by the RW. While Scroll and Caravan frequently endorse each other, the RW portals like Swarajya and Indiafacts hardly help each other grow.
Moral of the story- RW needs to get its act together and work cooperatively with more emphasis on the common agenda rather than for petty personal fame, ego or money. Once RW gains control of the narrative and builds a healthy ecosystem, they will get enough opportunities for back biting and mudslinging. But till then they need to suck up to each other to survive else no one can save them from their premature death at the hands of left.
Image credits: http://newsfirst.lk/