You never know what They’ll say next.. 2

I was having this discussion with this person. Let’s call him Veeru(name changed). Veeru has the reputation for being the most ‘liberal’ in my extended family. He is often at odds with his brother who is an unashamed Hindu supremacist fascist. We were trying to discuss state of Indian society, creeping fascism, repression and violence against minorities.

During the discussion I decided to establish a baseline from where to take the discussion forward to demonstrate the systematic repression of minorities and Dalits in the Indian society. To start this off I ask if Veeru thinks the opposite, that is, instead of acknowledging repression of these communities does he think these communities were given more than their due by the state & society. That is, if there was any appeasement?

To my utter horror Veeru proceeded to say the following.

“The biggest appeasement of the minorities is that they have been allowed to live. The fact that each one of them hasn’t been murdered is appeasement(giving them more than due).”

Veeru

My goodness. I couldn’t recover from this whole day. What does one say to something like this.

How does one proceed to have a discussion about justice and fairness when the standard of UC(upper caste) magnanimity is set to not murder every woman, child and man belonging to the 200 million religious minorities and ~170 million Dalits.

Also during the discussion about the normalised lynching of Indian Muslims on the streets of India, Veeru shot back saying what about all these people doing 9/11, terror blasts, so on.

This betrays a medieval mindset of the idea of collective punishment. For the crimes of Saudi born, American 9/11 bombers Indian Muslims must be lynched and taught a lesson as a collective punishment.

This confirms my growing belief that the core myths and stories of even the most liberal upper caste Hindus are detached from reality and provides perfect bedrock for the RSS’s fascist ideas of avenging the imagined historic injustice to Hindus in the past by murdering, raping, oppressing current everyday Muslims.

A man is defined by the thoughts he has. I cant believe I used to look up to Veeru all these years. I am ashamed of myself for that.

If this is what the so called liberals of this country have to offer then there is no stopping the fascist takeover of this society.