The Putrid Fumes from Pastor Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s Pulpit that Escalate Hijab Separatism
Dissecting Pratap Bhanu Mehta's biased article in the Indian Express on the Hijab row.
Even more barefacedly, Pastor Pratap writes,
In India’s particular context, the progressives fell into the trap of being seen to oppose or defend the hijab, where the truth is that it is presumptuous to do either. Neither is necessary. They also fell into the trap of another equivocation. The hijab is not a moment where liberty or equality are being tested.
George Orwell perhaps provides the best counterpunch to such sleights of hand in his classic, Politics and the English Language.
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. WORDS OF THIS KIND ARE OFTEN USED IN A CONSCIOUSLY DISHONEST WAY. THAT IS, THE PERSON WHO USES THEM HAS HIS OWN PRIVATE DEFINITION, BUT ALLOWS HIS HEARER TO THINK HE MEANS SOMETHING QUITE DIFFERENT… OTHER WORDS USED IN VARIABLE MEANINGS, IN MOST CASES MORE OR LESS DISHONESTLY, ARE: CLASS, TOTALITARIAN, SCIENCE, PROGRESSIVE, REACTIONARY, BOURGEOIS, EQUALITY.
Capitalisation Added
Pastor Pratap does precisely this when he writes, incredibly, that:
The hijab is not a moment where liberty or equality are being tested. IT IS COMING WHEN THERE IS AN ATTEMPT TO VISIBLY ERASE MUSLIMS FROM INDIA’S PUBLIC CULTURE. It is also to give progressives that last bit of pretext to be comfortable with the BJP, as if the BJP was carrying out the completion of a liberal project that the Congress had no courage of conviction to pursue… The BJP has succeeded in its aims of constructing the Muslim as a figure of threat.