Like with any deeply divided society, no sentiment is more contentious and polarising than our sense of who or what is Indian. The worst among us have arrogated the right to decide who belongs and who does not, by weaponising religious identity to segregate ‘us’ from ‘them’. It has now become an everyday disputation that has wrecked social harmony.A few days back, the chief minister of Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma engaged in the most scurrilous attack on Bengali-speaking “Miya Muslims”, branding them Bangladeshi intruders and not Indian, urging people to give them hell and drive them out. He even made the diabolical suggestion that the poorest among them – the rickshaw pullers – should be intentionally short-changed. If that was not shocking enough, the BJP released a devilishly suggestive video of Sarma aiming a rifle at two men in skullcaps with hate-filled posts, such as “No mercy to Bangladeshis”, as backdrop. Time and again, he has demonstrated that human depravity has no limits. But what’s terrifying is that such wickedness is electorally productive in today’s India. Even the saints, long dead, have not been spared the malign wrath of the bigots. On January 24, the century-old shrine of mystic poet and reformer Baba Bulleh Shah in Mussoorie was vandalised and completely destroyed along with two nearby shrines. The leader of the vandals, Pinky Chaudhary was brazenly candid: “My Hindu Raksha Dal team today sent Bulleh Shah, who was in Devbhoomi for 70 years, back to Pakistan.” In their reckoning, the Devbhoomi has no place for the non-Hindu, past or present! In this benighted time, there have been a string of cases of Kashmiri shawl hawkers in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Haryana being harassed and brutally beaten by right-wing goons for the simple ‘crime’ of being Muslim. The perpetrators act with impunity because they feel protected by the state which, at best, registers FIRs against ‘unknown people’. It took the personal intervention of Omar Abdullah for arrests to be made for the deadly assault on two brothers in Dehradun on January 28. One has often hoped that the one person who could put an immediate stop to this widespread contagion – Modi – would order his troops back to the barracks, but that’s asking for the moon!Even the attire that has been integral to our sartorial tradition for centuries is under assault. The ever-preening Indian Railways minister, Ashwini Vaishnav, recently declared that the regal bandhgala jacket would no longer be part of the formal uniform of the Indian Railways. In his uninformed opinion, this universally regarded garment is not Indian but a vestige of “the colonial mindset”, whereas the truth is that this decidedly ethnic menswear is an invaluable Indian heirloom that dates back to the Mughal courts and Rajasthan princely states. Let’s face it: it is the Muslim imprint on the bandhgala that is anathema to the saffron-tainted minister. Amidst this choking inhumanity and intolerance, ‘Mohammad’ Deepak showed us another kind of Indian – a rare breed in today’s India – who stood up to the bigots in a lionhearted display of brotherhood with an elderly Muslim. The outrage occurred at Kotdwar, a small town in what has now become the bustling new laboratory of Hindutva – Uttarakhand. The Muslim shopkeeper was being taunted and threatened by a gang of hooligans who objected to his shop being given a Hindu-sounding name – Baba School Dress – that disguised the fact that a Muslim owned it. (In Modi-tutored India, you are not judged by your character but by the clothes or name you wear!) This is when Deepak Kumar, a gym owner, confronted the mob, even daring to call himself ‘Mohammad Deepak’ in a show of support for his beleaguered Muslim friend. He managed to shoo them away but since then, he and his family live in fear for their lives. The other day, some goon posted a video offering a bounty of Rs 2 lakhs for killing ‘Mohammad’ Deepak.Sadly, in today’s India, Deepak is an aberration, a rare example of resistance to injustice while the rest of us submit meekly to the oppression of brute power. We should stop fooling ourselves that our muted disapproval of this evil regime sets us apart from the active collaborators when in reality we are brothers-in-arms. Our craven expedient silence has encouraged the impunity of the tyrant and his minions.The plight of our minorities is akin to that of the migrants in America, the other big country where democracy is teetering on the edge. But Americans have shown great courage in combating the authoritarian white racism of Donald Trump whereas we have quietly acquiesced in the awful Hindu communalism let loose by Narendra Modi. Across that country, ordinary people have joined hands to protest the injustice perpetrated by Trump and his gang, forcing him to pull back his ICE thugs from Minnesota and even acknowledge that mistakes were made. In America, the latest ideological project of the nativist right-wing gang of white supremacists relates to identity, about who is ‘Heritage American’ and has rightful claim to that land and its heritage. It affirms the domination and pre-eminence of people of European descent and their Anglo-Protestant values, institutions and way of life. According to this formulation, ‘Heritage Americans’ are the descendants of the Founding Americans and are Protestant, English-speaking, European and white. They call themselves the ethnic Americans, the TRUE native Americans, as distinct from coloured immigrants. The entire thrust of this project is to rationalise and validate white racism and deny coloured immigrants their rightful place in society. While the Americans are now publicly debating matters relating to identity and who is American, we in India have been schizophrenic about our Indianness for a long time with the battle lines drawn no sooner than we gained Independence.V.S. Naipaul, whose gift with words matched his powers of observation, described the challenges confronting India as a nation-state with devastating precision: a land of “A Million Mutinies”. Given the sheer size and complexity of the country, forging a common sense of community and purpose among a multitude of religions, castes, tribes, languages and ethnicities is a fool’s errand. The only constructive way forward is to accommodate differences, downplay divisions and find common ground while protecting cultural and religious differences.Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru understood this critical challenge. In consequence, their idea of India was based on the values of democracy, religious tolerance, cultural syncretism and economic development. It was an all-inclusive vision. Pitted against this hopeful formulation of a tolerant common Indianness is Veer Savarkar’s venomous sectarian and divisive call for an Indian ethos that is homogenous, exclusive and Hindu – Indianness that means ”one nation, one people, one culture.” Instead of a shared humanity, communal prejudice is the common currency in India today. Savarkar’s idea of Indianness, which is Hindutva, rules the roost. Which means that there is hope neither for peace nor communal harmony in the foreseeable future.Who is Indian, then? Forgive me for concluding this depressing narrative on a personal note. For generations my family has been Syrian Christian but in the last two decades, by dint of love and marriage, we’ve become a gorgeous blend of Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh! And yet a dear friend, an upper caste Hindu, insists that I can never be accepted as truly Indian because according to the insular ideology of Hindutva – the reigning doctrine. I will always remain an outcast, immutably a Mllecha.In an exasperated response, I quoted the great poet, Rahat Indori: ”Khoon sabka hai shaamil yahaan ki mitti maen. Hindustan kisi ka baap ka jagir thodi hai!”Mathew John is a former civil servant. The views are personal.