Manoj Jha & Harsh Mander on India’s politics of fear and division

Manoj Jha, a politician and member of India’s upper house – the Rajya Sabha – is the rare politician who has spoken up about the persecution of Muslims in India and their being pushed into being second-class citizens of the country. Jha believes and has written that Muslims are not mere footnotes but co-authors in the story of India. In this conversation with Harsh Mander, Jha says that the the craving for peace that was once the default template of India has been warped into a politics of hate.Jha attributed many factors to this change. For instance, “the prosperity or the non-prosperity of the middle class, the shift from a public sector to a liberalised economy. The market can sell anything. If it finds that love has few takers, hate has more takers, it will package hate,” he says. This episode is part of the podcast series Partitions of the Heart: Conversations with Harsh Mander, produced in association with Karwan-e-Mohabbat. The inaugural season called Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi's India, focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in India. Mander hosts conversations with a powerful array of Indian Muslim figures both eminent and emerging, young and old. Together, they talk about the lived experiences of Indian Muslims amid the rise of the Hindu Right and escalating Islamophobia, as well as the politics and the history that have brought India to this shocking new reality.You can watch the whole conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8MOhZggVcb4GlossaryRahi Masoom Raza: An Indian writer and poet in Urdu and Hindi who wrote screenplays and dialogies for major Hindi films and among whose important literary works are Aadha Gaon and Topi Shukla.Jawaharlal Nehru on India as a palimpsest: “She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice. Read more: https://www.himalmag.com/Support our independent journalism and become a Patron of Himal: https://www.himalmag.com/support-himalFind us on: https://twitter.com/Himalistanhttps://www.facebook.com/himal.southasianhttps://www.instagram.com/himalistan/