Celebrating the Hindu festival of Ram Navami, teenage girls in disturbingly deep maroon lipstick shake their unbound hair and still-developing bodies frenetically to disco beats and provocative lyrics, Bharat mein jo desh drohi hain, unki ma ka *********.
They triumphantly justify this lyrics by saying it is abusive only for traitors—and if Muslims are offended by it, then QED, they are traitors! It is bhakt math at its finest, and seems to completely miss the rather major point that chanting such abuses—especially on the day marking Lord Ram’s birth, before his idol, while waving a sacred saffron flag—is not just crude, but deeply disrespectful, even blasphemous.
Having said that, they are in powerful company. Donald Trump, recently, deployed expletives on a religious note of his own—“Open the f***ing strait, you crazy b****rds. Praise be to Allah.” I guess he was hoping to sound frightening, masterful and tough, but I am not very sure that landed.
When asked about the use of expletives in stand-up comedy and public speaking, lyricist Javed Akhtar observed: in places where there is poverty, people add chilli because the food is bland. Abusive language, he said, is the chilli of speech. If you speak good language and are witty enough, you don’t need this chilli. If the conversation is bland, you will put some abusive language in it just to give it some energy.
These teenagers, it seems, find their religion bland without the chilli—preferably directed at the community they have dubbed “desh drohis”, that is Muslims, or even better, Pakistanis. Hate—particularly of Islam—has become the hottest and most addictive spice. Nothing appears to galvanise a certain strain of hindutva fervour more than googling assiduously to see which-which Hindu festivals coincide date wise with which-which Muslim ones, and turning up in Muslim neighbourhoods or places of worship to loudly ‘celebrate’ with pointed slogans, hip-thrusting moves, beer parties.
This is a huge disservice to Hinduism—a tradition that is anything but pallid; it is layered, nuanced, complex and rich in philosophical depth, perhaps more so than any major religion. The same “green chilli” of anti-Pakistan sentiment flavours much of our cinema now. Remove it from films like Uri, Padmaavat, The Kerala Story or Chhaava, and many would struggle to stand. Pakistanis, increasingly, mock this fixation: the endless return to their faith, their slums, even fantasies about their women, contrasted with outrage when Hindu women marry Muslim men.
Speaking of hollow, Trump clearly used ‘f***ing’ to make his threat sound more um, threatening, but it didn’t quite work out that way. So much so that the Iranian embassy reacted to it with a cheeky “we have lost the keys”.
There’s a limit to the ‘energising’ power of obscenity or hating, clearly. Like all chillies, they need to be used in tiny, judicious doses. Iran isn’t using either to spike its propaganda, and, yet, it seems to be winning hearts the world over.
Meanwhile, Trump and the hindutva factory are such heavy grade users of it they may give themselves the s***s.
editor@theweek.in