ThePrint has carried my piece on RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat’s two New York engagements of 29 August. You can read it here: Muslims, Sikhs, Christians: how minorities are reading Mohan Bhagwat’s New York speech.
I begin by giving the speech its due, because a critic who cannot concede a good sentence has no standing to examine a bad one. Bhagwat told an interfaith summit that a Hindu who wants a Bharat without Muslims will not remain a Hindu. In the domestic weather of the last decade, that is worth having, and those calling it mere public relations are being lazy.
The piece then asks what each of three communities actually heard.
The Muslim reading turns on grammar. The right to remain is established through a proposition about what a Hindu must believe, which means the whole load is carried by Hindu self-definition. Reverse the theology and the protection goes with it. I also take up the word shelter, which is honourable applied to the Parsis at Sanjan and a category error applied to Indian Muslims. Maulana Azad was not a lodger.
The Sikh reading is simpler. He said nothing about us at all, and that absence now has dates attached to it, from Bangkok in 2023 to Mumbai in February. The Vaidya note of January 2001 remains unrepeated from any public stage.
The Christian reading turns on the distance between the dais in Manhattan and the street in Raipur.
All three converge on one omission. Each community was told it would be protected. None was told that nobody is entitled to be its protector, because all are equal owners.