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(Seeds of a million tyrannies) Context: The anti-minority violence in India is witnessing a change not principally because of its scale, but because of the processes engendering it. Introduction:
- Formìggini’s despairing suicide is a useful prism to contemplate the silence of India as it is confronted with the religious right’s apparently inexorable rise.
- The recent lynching protests will prove, more likely than not, a despairing lament for a dying secular order, rather than the kernel of a new politics.
- The remarkable feature of the ongoing communal violence in India is how much consent it enjoys: If there is public outrage, it has been remarkably slow to emerge from people’s front doors.
- The new element is state is abandoning the republican project, and ceding control to local squads independent of central authority. These are the seeds from which a million tyrannies may flower.
- The new world full of jobs and opportunity they promise, their own followers rapidly come to understand, is a chimera.
- Like the fascist state in Italy, the Indian state, however, does hold out a road to riches — a system of patronage.
Conclusion: The victims are of no great consequence unless one happens to be among them, and most are not.