If only he knew how wrong he was!
All I can say is that he hasn’t met the RW (or, for that matter, the LW, though not yet in India) mothers yet. I am a member of a whole WhatsApp group of mothers who have lost their sons in war (Veer Mata/Veer Pariwar), and all they can think of, to absolutely no surprise of mine, is more war.
To them, their sons are martyrs to Dharma. They wish they could have more sons to sacrifice to Mother India. They exchange extreme messages in the group, stuff that cannot be spoken of in civil society. They make and share videos of stories of other ‘martyrs’ (Dharmayoddhas), from Chhatrapati Sambhaji to Maj Unnikrishnan. They lament the weakness of this and all previous governments (interestingly, they worship Indira, but only her, for the Bangladesh liberation war, the Emergency, forcible sterilisation, and Blue Star) who cannot teach Pakistan (and, of course, Muslims) a lesson.
They fantasise about occupying Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, even Myanmar (their notion of Akhand Bharat keeps expanding and contracting depending on the mood). They dream of a war to end all wars, a Dharmayudh, aka WWIII.
They talk of mardaangi and purushartha. They upload themselves speaking about the Gita, specifically the parts where Krishna is encouraging Arjun to kill his own cousins.
They have virtual meetups where they sing Savarkar’s songs and extol the virtues of his exhortation to the youth to break their quills/pens and pick up guns.
They dream of a Muslim- and Christian-free world and while they don’t specifically have plans for a Holocaust (well, not technically yet but close, as I explain below), they justify army and police extra-judicial killings, torture, false confessions, illegal confinement, and even rape as instruments of state policy.
They speak of eliminating (without trial, of course) Naxalites, JNU students, Khalistanis, Dravidian party followers, atheists, communists, homosexuals, and other ‘deviants’, including those liberals, journalists, filmmakers, artists, writers, and of course, non-UC Hindus who refuse to ‘stay in their lane’, apart from the standard Christians and Muslims. Indeed, the overlap between them and actual Nazis is shockingly overwhelming. even the steps they propose are similar: cut the enemy off commercially, then lock them out of jobs, register them en masse, restrict movement and relationships (friendship, marriage, business partnerships, etc.), use as cheap labour to build the infrastructure of this glorious nation (‘teach them the value of hard work and merit’ were the words used, if I remember correctly), and then those that are incapable of this, well, sadly they must be exiled, or if they refuse to go, must be exterminated.
They talk of how it is the duty and responsibility of all Hindu women, specifically Brahmin and Kshatriya ones, to bear more sons to serve and kill & die for the motherland.
They are all, I repeat, mothers. Mothers who have seen their sons die. In war.
I, for one, have no doubt that there are some sort of counterparts of these seemingly sane but completely crazed out loonies in every country, in every society, in every civilisation, if that’s the word I can use with this completely messed-up behaviour.
We (and not just Indians, we humans) are so truly, so totally fucked up as a society that it is a surprise how we are even functioning without killing ourselves by the end of every day.
P.S: We need to end this whole myth of ‘women don’t want war, men do’ because I do not know what started it, but it seems to have zero basis in data. Indeed, data probably proves the exact opposite.
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48590470
2. https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/warmongers-and-peacebuilders-how-female-leaders-defy-gender-norms-20656
3. https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/06/01/who-gets-into-more-wars-kings-or-queens
4. http://odube.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Dube_Harish_Queens_Paper.pdf
