“We borrowed money by mortgaging valuables and taking loans from moneylenders at high interest. If we are unable to sell our animals and recover the money, how will we repay our debts?” The feeling of helplessness is all too palpable in the voice of this Muslim trader, who found himself and others like him shut out from Beni Bagh goat market in Varanasi, just a day before Bakrid. According to The Indian Express, the decades-old goat market was sealed by an order of the municipal commissioner, who had earlier granted permission for the traditional animal trade site but revoked it after “receiving complaints related to sanitation and hygiene.”No prizes for guessing from which quarters these “complaints” would have emanated but there’s a consolation prize for answering this: How long will these rites of humiliation go on, especially in Uttar Pradesh which is due for an assembly election next year? And, what will the consequences, intended or unintended, end up being?The Bharatiya Janata Party finds itself in a bit of quandary. It feels it has had enormous success in politically marginalising India’s 140-million strong Muslim community. The so-called ‘Muslim vote-bank’ is no longer key to national power for anyone. Since 2014, the Modi arrangement has meant the systematic exclusion of Muslims from the nation’s collective life. The law-maker, the administrator, the magistrate and the policeman no longer feel obliged to be mindful of the Muslims’ “sensitivities.” A corresponding intellectual climate has been manufactured that countenances aggressiveness towards all things Muslim.Still, the BJP problem remains unsolved because Muslims across India – whether by individual instinct or collective common sense – have refused to be provoked. They continue to express their faith in the Constitution of India and in its presumed protector, the Supreme Court of India, even after the apex court has lent its imprimatur on the Election Commission of India’s SIR exercise – which was designed to disenfranchise large chunks of Muslim voters in West Bengal. A bhojshala here or a mosque there has not led to massive or organised ‘resistance’ that would have allowed the “law” to come down with a heavy hand on the community.The Muslims have overtly refused to feel humiliated, thereby denying the Hindutva crowd the satisfaction of having avenged the “humiliation” heaped on their “ancestors” centuries ago by the “outsiders.” In a perceptive 2003 essay on ‘Humiliation’, Professor Ashis Nandy, one of India’s most respected social psychologists, had noted that “humiliation in human relations can never be a one-way exchange. Unless the humiliated collaborate by feeling humiliated, you cannot humiliate them, however hard you try.”Nandy’s formulation precisely captures the BJP/Sangh Parivar’s present dilemma: “Those trying to humiliate may get a kick by doing what they do, but unless there is a consensual validation from the humiliated, humiliation remains one-side, or takes place only in the eyes of a third party.” In this case, the secular-liberal corner has kept on pointing to the Constitution and its promises of a place of honour and equality to all minorities.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.A Mohan Bhagwat of Nagpur can demand that the Muslims refrain from “boisterous” behaviour or a Yogi Adityanath can provocatively tell the community to ‘stay within your corner’ (‘aukaat may raho’), but if the community calmly takes the demarche in its stride, the onus shifts on to the majority community to find new ways of poking and needling the Muslims. That’s the snag. Also read: In Uttarakhand, Bajrang Dal Members Are Now Professional Hate InfluencersThe entire Hindutva ecosystem yearns for satisfaction from humiliating the Muslims in street after street, kasba after kasba, city after city. The revocation of permission for the goat-market trade in Varanasi makes it clear that the BJP is devoting an enormous amount of administrative energy and imagination to hurting the Muslims economically. Will an economic instrument provoke the community to try to go off the reservation? Perhaps not. Because respected economists have graphically demonstrated the strands of economic interdependence between Hindus and Muslims; nonetheless, the fundamentalists in the majority community want to inflict economic pain on Muslims in order to make them bend on their knees. Economic coercion has its attractions: there is no visible victim, no identifiable perpetrator, and, crucially, no image that can be captured on camera.The Muslim community may keep its collective nerve but that will not satisfy the designs and desires of Hindutva strategists. Economic pain and deprivation, in any case, is the everyday lot of the common Muslim. It is only a very small, minuscule portion of the Muslim community that will truly feel the pinch of economic warfare. At the same time, many prosperous Muslims enjoy commercial relationships which provide a degree of patronage and protection from the wrath of the very powerful in the Hindu community.Also read: Bakrid Is a Once-a-Year Occurrence, but the Festival of Hate Against Muslims Lasts All YearWill there then be another strategic initiative, designed to humiliate Muslims so profoundly that they are finally compelled to resist and defy the established ‘order’? So far, the rites of humiliation have been performed largely by second-order provocateurs. But has the moment arrived when Hindutva’s senior-most functionaries pad up and go play a few shots on the front-foot?The signs are unmistakable. The Modi arrangement has lost its sheen. The regime’s bad geopolitical choices and tactics ensure that acchhe din remain an elusive chimera. What better way to divert attention than to seek a fresh confrontation?Harish Khare was editor-in-chief of The Tribune.