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The few liberal commentators left standing after the saffron tsunami has swept India bemoan the fact that there is no formal Opposition worth the name to stymie the sangh parivars strategy of uprooting India from its constitutionally entrenched secular and pluralist foundations and turning it into an exclusivist Hindu Rashtra, with little or no place in it for minorities, particularly the Muslims.

The ragtag Opposition looks like a comedy team, with Rahul playing the lead clown.

So who or what is to stop the Republic from keeping a second tryst with destiny, this time with a trishul in one hand and the laws of Manu in the other?

Some have suggested that it is the larger part of the Indian electorate who did not vote for Modi and the BJP which won only 31 per cent of the vote in the last general elections who will prove to be the bulwark against the rising tide of fiercely aggressive Hindutva.

According to this view, a large if not major part of the Indian electorate still adheres to the idea of India as a democracy that celebrates diversity, and which believes in what has been called Constitutional patriotism as opposed to the parivars cultural nationalism.

Such faith might be misplaced. For it rests on the premise that democracy is another not word for majoritynariasm, that democracy is much more than the mere winning of elections but subsumes a whole set of values and institutions which protect the rights of the individual.

But today Indian democracy along with that other British legacy, cricket has become nothing more or less than electoral victory, by whatever means achieved.

T20 has totally supplanted Test cricket as the preferred game of choice, where winning is the only thing that matters. The fans of T20 are not aficionados of sport, who care about how the game is played. All they want is victory, at all costs, particularly when its an India-Pakistan match.

Similarly, democracy has come to mean nothing but the winning at the ballot box and forming a government. The preservation of democratic institutions like the independence of the judiciary, the armed forces, and other organs of the state doesnt matter a hoot.

Modi and his Hindutva cohorts have won the T20 match of Indian democracy, and thats all that seems to count.

And theyre all set to win their coveted trophy of a Hindu Rashtra thats a saffron mirror image of Islamic Pakistan.

Howzzat.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Read the original here:
Democracy, T20 cricket and the making of the Hindu Rashtra - Times of India (blog)