The Overton Window. And us.

On Independence Day, my biking club, which consists of over 150 members of different religions and castes, from different states, speaking different languages, and owning a variety of motorcycles, arranged for a largish donation to a school for orphaned tribal children (Bhatkya Vimukt Jati Shikshan Sanstha in Wagholi, Pune), and decided to ride down there for their flag hoisting celebration in the morning.

The school is beautiful, the children were well-turned out (even though many were footwear-less) and looked happy and attentive. The founder, Mr Shivlal Jadhav was on the dais, and so were some politicians and other local celebrities. My motorcycling club’s founding members were also invited and seated with them on the podium. The rest of us (including Afroz, a brother rider and a club member) were seated on chairs on the side.

We unfurled the tricolour (I know, I know, it was Independence Day, and we should have hoisted it, but I think we were all in a celebratory mood, and there was no need to nitpick), the national anthem was sung, followed by an oath of fraternity, and then the Constitution’s preamble was sung (the children seemed to know this by heart, and I suspect this is a regular activity at school). This was followed by a heartfelt speech by the founder, who said that he had not received the promised governmental aid for the past four years and they were struggling to feed 300 mouths, but he considered himself lucky to be able to serve the needs of the children. The chief guest (a local political leader) came next and made a bland speech about how much the school was doing for society, how grateful we all ought to be to the founder, and so on. So far, so good. This man, obviously invited to other similar functions, left after that, freeing the microphone for other local leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The first man came on to tell the children how proud they should all be of their Hinduness and how India is a ‘Hindu Rashtra’. He proceeded to tell them how under the able leadership of our PM, Mr Narendra Modi, our economy has moved up from number 11 to number 3 in the world and how powerful our passports have become. He told them to be proud of the courage shown by the great leader in abrogating Article 370 and ‘freeing’ Kashmir, something no one else could achieve in the past 70 years. The 300 children (the same ones the school finds difficulty in finding enough money to buy food for) who sat on the wet, cold tarmac, listened spellbound to the leaps India is taking and basked in the glory and beamed with pride when they thought how wonderfully the economy was doing and how powerful their future potential passports would be. The speaker finished with the rousing cry of ‘Jai Shree Ram’ (which he made the entire crowd shout out thrice) and ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’.

Then, we had a lady (she was the Chairperson or something of some committee of the other) came to the mic and continued with the ‘Jai Shree Ram’ before commencing her speech, in which she told the children the story of the revolutionary martyr, Bhagat Singh, and his last day. She described in great detail how proud the martyr’s mother was and how he died for ‘Dharma’ and his motherland. She went on to explain to the children how it was people like him, who shed blood for their country, who were responsible for wresting freedom from the British colonial power and not the effeminate Gandhi and Nehru. She exhorted the kids to follow in Bhagat Singh’s footsteps and not be namby-pamby by getting carried away in empty slogans like ‘Ahimsa’ and ‘Satyagraha’. She spoke glowingly of the last words from Bhagat Singh’s mouth, ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and how we should always remember them as Hindus, never forgetting that ‘Maa Bharati’ needs to be irrigated with our blood. The children broke into rapturous applause. She followed up that obviously true and well-researched story about Bhagat Singh with another equally true and never-debunked story about the connection between Vietnam and Ch Shivaji Maharaj and how Ho Chi Minh drew inspiration from the Maratha leader, from whom he learnt guerrilla tactics to defeat a superpower like the USA.

At this point, I left.

Later, I wrote the following on the club’s Telegram channel:

“Thank you for the ride. It is always a pleasure riding with BCI. The school we went to was beautiful. They are doing good work for the oppressed and deprived classes. It is the task of nation-building. However, once the ‘Jai Sri Rams’ and ‘Hindu Rashtra’ bullshit started, I had to leave. As I type this, there’s a mad woman who is giving a hate speech about how this is a Hindu nation!! She gave the example of Bhagat Singh, who was an atheist, communist, and spat on right-wing ideology. She talked of ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, which was a revolutionary slogan of the socialist party!!!! And now, she’s recounting the much-debunked fake news about Ch Shivaji Maharaj and Vietnam. I am leaving. Either give me equal time at the mic to respond or leave the meeting en masse.”

“In all the speeches , there was no mention of our freedom fighters, our founding fathers, our martyrs (except Bhagat Singh). Nor was there any of the Quit India movement, about the Naval mutiny, about Jallianwala Bagh, about the tryst with destiny. One speaker even mentioned Narendra Modi when he said proudly that India had become the 3rd largest economy in the world and Article 370 had been abrogated…to 300 starving kids sitting on the cold, wet tarmac in front of him!!! Sometimes, I wonder if these people are human. What a crap ending to a great morning. This country is going to hell in a hurry. We’re so fucked up.”

“We have Dalits, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists in BCI. Our religion is two wheels and a throttle. I was ashamed that we continued to sit there. There was literally a Muslim brother rider, Afroz, amongst us right there. We should have all walked. One for all and all for one. I am seething with anger. My family has given blood to this country. This secular country. This democracy. To my India. I refuse to be part of the forces that seek to divide it. These are the real gaddars, the anti-nationals amongst our midst. I don’t care if I’m alone to walk out. But I cannot be part of this. Not in my fucking name.”

“I’m taking a break from BCI. I’ll stay in the group but won’t be interacting for a while. As a last word, let me say that this country belongs to Afroz Khan and Dr Peter Dhanraj as much as it belongs to me.”

“Sabkaa khoon shaamil hai is mitti me
Kiseeke baap ka Hindustan thode hi hai?”

“Jai Hind!”

“P.S.: I need a fucking drink!”

In response, other than the private message I received from Afroz thanking me and asking if I was going to be OK, most responses were about ignoring it and how it is how politicians speak and how we need not take it all seriously. One of them even told me there was nothing objectionable in the speeches and that India isn’t going to hell but is in very safe hands!

I waited for the founders of the club to respond. And, I am sure after much deliberation at their end, they wrote back saying that we are an apolitical club and that we should keep politics out and that my comments are going to be deleted!

My problem with this is twofold: First, if we are an apolitical club, why the fuck did we attend a political meeting (and not just attend it, but share the dais), and if we did not know it was going to be political, why the fuck did we keep sitting there even when it turned political. The correct thing would have been (given that the club is apolitical) to excuse ourselves and leave. Or were we scared that we would get into trouble? Are we such wusses? Are all our tough biker exteriors, with our armour and our big bore bikes, with our adrenaline-inducing riding and our macho talk, just a fake facade for the cowards we are inside those tough-looking jackets and boots? And secondly, what exactly was political in what I said? I said that India belongs to every Indian regardless of their faith. I said we should have stayed apolitical by walking off when the political speeches started. I said we should stand up for our brother bikers. And I said all of this on Indi-fucking-pendence Day. I mean, speak of timing! It could not have been more perfectly timed. And yet, yet, you took objection to this literally ‘let’s be fraternal and united and reject those that seek to divide us’ message and not to those who were speaking of overturning the Constitution, disenfranchising a huge part of Indians, and being proud of being bigoted and xenophobic while spewing transparently fake news. Wah!

And then, yesterday, I read that a teacher (yes, someone who imparts education) at an Edutech (which is a portmanteau of ‘Education’ and ‘Technology’) company was fired by the said EduTech for appealing to his students that when they have a chance to vote, they should consider using their franchise to vote in educated leadership. His erstwhile employer gave the exact same reason the cowards at my motorcycling club gave: We are an apolitical company, and politics has no place in the classroom.

What is the similarity between these two incidents?

For that, we need to understand something called the ‘Overton Window’, which according to Wikipedia, is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. This window has extreme (indeed unthinkable) views on each end and, in the middle, has a perspective so reasonable that it becomes policy. The range is generally referred to as Unthinkable (the extreme), Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, Policy (being the exact centre).

So, in my case, for example, at one time (say, in my youth, all the way till, say, 7-8 years ago), ‘No religions must be allowed’ would have been the extreme left of this spectrum and ‘Only Hinduism/Islam/Christianity/Sikhism/whatever is allowed’ would have been the other one (at the right), with ‘Let us be tolerant of all faiths and be kind and inclusive to each other despite what they believe in’ would have been in the centre. But over the last three decades (since the early 1990s, when Shah Bano, Babri demolition, etc. happened), this window has shifted (slowly first, and then rather sharply) to the right with ‘All faiths are welcome in India’ becoming the extreme left position and ‘Kill all non-Hindus’, the extreme right, with ‘India is a Hindu Rashtra where Muslims will be allowed as long as they acknowledge the superiority of the Hindus’ becoming the centrist position!!

Similarly, ‘All leaders must have compulsory education till a certain level’ and ‘Education interferes with effective political leadership’ were opposite extreme positions and ‘Let us vote for those candidates who are educated’ being centrist at one time (a time that seems so far away as to make it all very cloudy). But with the Overton Window shifting to the right as it has, the centrist position has become an extremist one. Enough for someone to lose their job for uttering it.

This is the ‘New India’ we are living in now. And you know why we have arrived at this point? Because we, the sane people, refused to get up and walk away the first time someone mentioned this kind of crap. We were being polite. We were being civil. We did not want a confrontation. We thought the ideas of these nutcases to be so far off left field that we did not engage. We did not debate. We did not dispute. We did not stand up. We did not shout. We did not protest. We did not react. At all. We thought we were being civilised. In fact, we were giving them a free pass. We were emboldening them. We were, without wanting to, encouraging them. To talk more and more extreme crap. And pass it off as an equally valid perspective to the sane one.

I say that it is still not too late. All is not lost. We are still not at the point of no return. I know, we are probably inches away. But not there. Not yet. We can change this. We can turn this around. We can salvage this ancient, wise, and vibrant civilisation. We can still save this country, this beautiful nation.

And for that, we don’t even have to take too many risks. We don’t have to be all great orators and debaters. We don’t have to master rhetoric and logic. We don’t have to go up their one-on-one with them to argue our case. We can do that too. But we don’t need to. There are others (like our political leaders, our thought leaders, our intellectuals, our street fighters, our social media warriors, our journalists, and many who still haven’t lost their minds) to do that.

All we have to do when a madman starts to talk is stand up. Turn our back to him. And walk.

Can you do that?