Why does the Right dislike political correctness? There’s a simple answer to that question. In this era of nation-states, the Right in every country is committed to mobilising a demographic majority defined by race, ethnicity or religion to win political power. The Right’s strategy is to turn nominal majorities (white people in Western countries, Buddhists in Myanmar, Hindus in India) into actively aggrieved majorities. The principal aim of political correctness is to make dominant majorities of every sort — religious, racial, sexual — aware of the ways in which their common sense marginalises minorities. It isn’t hard to see why the Right, which encourages majorities to lean into their right to be hegemonic, dislikes a way of thinking that urges members of such majorities to be self-conscious about that privilege.
In the lifetime of my middle-class cohort, political correctness has been a transformative force for good. I can testify that during my time as an undergraduate in the mid-Seventies, homophobia was the norm because homosexuals were consensually regarded as furtive perverts. This was true regardless of location; colleges in the mofussil and colleges in the metropolis were as one in this matter. The journey from that grotesque ‘normal’ to the present, where the Supreme Court has read down Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality, wouldn’t have been possible if a global movement to empower sexual minorities hadn’t persuaded citizens, lawmakers, judges to caveat a heteronormative consensus. India is very far from being either socially or legally a sexually inclusive country but the progress it has made is wholly down to the unremitting efforts of politically correct activists.
Yesterday, I happened upon a video by that online shock jock, Andrew Tate, where he went on about how the world had been taken over by “faggots” and it was like travelling back in time. For men of my generation, the likes of Tate are useful because they remind us of the toxic way we were and the debt we owe to people and ideas that nudged us into not being that way.
It’s useful to remind ourselves, though, that progress isn’t a given. In those same mid-Seventies colleges where homophobia was respectable, there was a general agreement that explicit religious bigotry wasn’t. This consensus was threadbare and beginning to unravel, but being publicly communal wasn’t cool. This was, if you like, a residue of the political correctness deployed by the Nehruvian State to talk up India’s claim to being a pluralist State in the violent aftermath of Partition.
The last decade, defined by Narendra Modi’s prime ministerial tenure, has seen a concerted bid to make the rhetoric of Hindu supremacy normal. From the prime minister to the sangh parivar’s social media trolls, to frothing film stars, the right to be publicly hostile to minorities, particularly Muslims, has been energetically exercised. I notice that public figures are willing to use pejorative terms for Muslims on the record. So puncture-wala (intended to underline Muslim poverty and the status of Muslims as an underclass), peacefuls (an ironic reference to peace in ‘peace be upon Him’) and potassium oxide (an oblique and lewd reference to circumcision) have become commonplace on X (formerly Twitter) and elsewhere.
We shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which the policies and the rhetoric of Hindutva’s protagonists have shifted the middle ground of Indian politics. When a minister thinks there is political profit in garlanding convicted murderers because their victims were Muslims, or when chief ministers win laurels for law and order by bulldozing Muslim homes without due process, or when the chief minister of Manipur declares open season on Kukis, a Christian minority in that state, we can see the space created for bigotry in mainstream politics over the last decade.
But the reason why politically correct voices like Ravish Kumar and Dhruv Rathee on YouTube, Mohammed Zubair on X (@zoo_bear), Hartosh Singh Bal in journalism and Harsh Mander in the NGO space continue to infuriate the Right despite its regnant position is the fact that its bigotry, while politically dominant, isn’t respectable. It’s hard to make majoritarianism respectable because there is something fundamentally unlovely about a politics designed to help Gullivers squash Lilliputians. Appeasement, love-jihad, cow protection, pseudo-secularism are useful buzz words for stirring people up but a talent for scare-mongering is no substitute for a claim to political virtue.
It is the gnawing feeling that they are, in fact, the heavies that makes far-Right majoritarians hate the politically correct. To see Ravish Kumar take to his YouTube pulpit and preach against communal wickedness, or to hear Harsh Mander speak about inclusivity and love or to read Zubair patiently unpick fake news in the cause of the Truth must seem unbearably sanctimonious to Hindutva’s hearties. The sense that they have power and influence and patronage but not the moral high ground is politically intolerable.
This isn’t confined to India. If you follow the rage directed at politically correct slogans like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, MeToo and Free Palestine in the West, it’s obvious that the pieties of political correctness are a standing provocation to the majoritarian Right everywhere. One reason for this is that politically correct ideas boiled down into slogans are sanctimonious in the way that condensed virtue always is. To have political correctness directed at us can be infuriating because the implication is that its bearer has a prior claim to virtue that we don’t.
The eye-rolling triggered by feminists pushing for Ms instead of Miss or Mrs was predictable and silly. It was a precursor to the eye-rolling prompted by contemporary scrupulousness about pronouns; this too shall pass. The outrage expressed by guardians of due process when the MeToo indictments exploded has subsided into a low rumbling as people realise that Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein and their ilk aren’t the hills they want to die on.
At present, the consensus in Western countries about Israel’s right to pulverise Gaza and the West Bank and kill as many Palestinians as it chooses to is being tested by students and ceasefire activists in those countries. They have been denounced as anti-Semites and dogmatists, as naifs who don’t understand the complexity of Israel/Palestine. Political correctness is necessarily simplifying; they are calling for a permanent ceasefire in the face of tens of thousands of civilian deaths. To reject this call for a ceasefire, to refuse to recognise Palestine as a State, to continue to acquiesce in the occupation of the West Bank, is to defend, not Israel’s right to self-defence, but genocidal violence by an apartheid State. These aren’t the buzzwords of some hipster Left; they are the terms increasingly used by the ICJ, the ICC, agencies of the United Nations, human rights organisations and Israeli dissenters to describe Israel and its actions in Palestine.
One reason why the Right hates political correctness is its influence across the world. Its pre-emption of virtue is global. It doesn’t prevent the Right from doing its worst, but it lurks like a spectre at its shoulder. It was important for not just India but also the world that Narendra Modi fell short of a majority and it’s important that Donald Trump be opposed and defeated. Liberal hypocrisy at least genuflects in the direction of political correctness; the majoritarian Right the world over would like nothing better than an America ideologically committed to the dark side.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
