Fish, Trump, and Modi

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Booker of Bookers. I have tried to read this greatest book several times. After umpteen attempts, the furthest I got was page no. 35. I tried many of his other books, with similar results. Since I was unwilling to consider myself as intellectually inadequate, I called Rushdie a pseudo-intellectual. Like certain avant-garde artists, he relishes in creating literature that will be praised because it is not understood. In a lighter vein, I had suggested Satanic Verses should have been banned for poor writing, not for any other reason.

When I began my anti-Rushdie tirade at a book club which I had just joined, the female readers pounced on me like vultures (metaphorically speaking). One lady had read Midnight’s Children more than twenty times, and had enjoyed it more and more during successive readings. One girl called him the greatest existing writer. An MBA executive recited entire passages from memory.

To be fair, there were other readers there, both male and female, who disliked his writing and agreed with me. We clearly had two camps. One passionately hating Rushdie and the other loving him.

Fish eaters and fish haters

Fish is as polarizing as Rushdie. I hate fish; I can’t sit in a room where somebody is eating fish. By a freak DNA distortion, my brother loves fish. I don’t understand how he can love fish; neither does he understand how I can hate it. The world is full of fish lovers and fish haters. But I have never heard of a riot happening between them.

Nobody calls the fish haters leftists or liberals, fish lovers don’t unfriend them on FB walls; neither party forwards floods of WhatsApp messages giving links to articles endorsing or condemning fish-eating. I don’t think Cambridge Analytica knows I hate fish, neither have they tried to convert me to fish-eating. Fish lovers and fish haters don’t start doubting the intelligence of each other, or stop talking to one another. Why are Trump, Brexit and Modi different from fish?

The only field

Fish is not the only polarizing subject where two sides coexist peacefully. In the book club mentioned above, sixteen years after my joining it, Rushdie haters and Rushdie lovers continue to be good friends. In literature, art, music, science and most other fields, healthy debates happen, differences in opinions persist but they rarely result in violence or wars.

In 2017, following Trump’s election, hate crimes in the USA grew by a record 17%. Brexit so polarized the UK that a week before the referendum, Jo Cox, a young MP, was murdered in broad daylight. In India, after the introduction of a discriminatory law, 53 people were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots in Delhi. In this week’s diary, I will attempt to explain why Trump, Johnson and Modi create a different kind of polarization from Rushdie or fish.

The food chain

Ecological scientists have classified the food chain into four key levels.

Level 1: (Producers): Plants. Plants make their own food and are therefore called the producers. Naturally, plants are the most non-violent species.

Level 2: (Primary consumers): Herbivores or plant-eaters. For example, rabbits who survive exclusively on plants. The world is full of vegetarian animals like rabbits.

Level 3: (Secondary consumers): Carnivores that eat herbivores. Rabbits eat plants, and foxes eat rabbits. So foxes belong to this level.

Level 4: (Tertiary consumers): Carnivores that eat carnivores. Wolves, bears, even eagles and owls eat foxes. They are the tertiary consumers.

You will notice that species like foxes can be predators as well as prey. Like a worker getting harassed by his boss, later beating his wife on returning home.

Species such as tigers or lions are called the apex predators. At the top of the food chain, they are nobody’s prey.

Trump, Brexit and Modi

The modern politicians understand the food chain well. In order to become predators, they need to identify their prey.

Johnson, Farage and other Brexiters identified European migrants as prey. The British, particularly the English, are inherently superior to the continental Europeans, but these outsiders were taking away their jobs. EU fishermen were catching fish in British waters. A danger existed that Brussels would represent a super-state and enslave Britain.

In India, the Modi-Shah combination belied hopes their party will focus on governance. Hindu predators have long identified Muslims as the prime prey. Destroying a 16^th century mosque to build a temple, whatever the rationale, was an animal act. Introducing laws and actions to harass or imprison Muslims suggests Modi-Shah trying to find a well-defined object in the food chain that can be subjugated.

Donald Trump is the apex predator. An American, rich, white male with nuclear weapons at his fingertips is undoubtedly at the top of the food chain. He has identified several species as prey. Muslims, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Chinese and immigrants in general.

Supremacists and herd mentality

Social psychology explains a concept called Group polarization. It says collective thinking and decisions of a group are more extreme than its individual members. A single person hating immigrants or Muslims, when joined by another thousand, can become vicious as a group member; is genuinely angry and hateful, is willing to drive them away or in extreme cases imprison or kill them. Since we are discussing animals in this article, this phenomenon is aptly termed: the herd mentality. Social media facilitates forming of such herds.

The winning formula discovered by modern politicians is to become a predator, and then appeal to voters willing to join the predator gang by forming herds. The two top prey species are immigrants and Muslims. Both are easy targets.

Trump started by calling Obama a Muslim. During the election campaign he advocated issuing ID cards for Muslims. After becoming a president, he imposed a visa ban on several Muslim countries. On the other front, he wants to build a wall to stop Mexicans illegally entering the USA. The laws for new legal immigrants are suffocating; many high caliber immigrants are subjected to a lottery.

Trump’s anti-immigrant stance is particularly amusing, because he and his white supremacists’ base are all immigrants themselves. The earlier immigrants’ attacking potential immigrants is similar to the hypocritical nuclear club: We (USA, China, Russia, UK and France), the members, will produce as many nuclear weapons as we wish, will exercise a veto power over every critical global decision, but no other nation should dream of producing a single nuclear warhead. 

Boris Johnson compared Muslim women wearing burkas to letter boxes. He said the EU nationals who made Britain their home have treated the UK like “their own”country for too long. (Conveniently omitting that British citizens have settled in EU countries as well).

Narendra Modi is more suave than Trump or Johnson. He delegates inflammatory speeches to his Home Minister. On Modi’s watch, beef-eating has become a grave sin and crime, love jihad has entered the vocabulary, a saffron monk is appointed as the chief minister of India’s biggest state, Allahabad has been renamed as Prayagraj. Bangladeshi immigrants are called termites by the home minister, and a recent law advocates discrimination based on religion.

These days we often hear the term “Supremacists”. It’s nothing but declaring yourself as a predator, identifying your prey, and screaming to the world that you are superior to your prey. Whether they are the White Supremacists in the USA or Hindu Supremacists in India, they display a behavioral pattern. They usually belong to privileged classes, are economically well-off, white or Brahmin males, pigeonholing immigrants or Muslims and hating the entire class. They usually bully or dominate their subordinates, wives or house maids. They readily believe in false statistics, in history devoid of facts, and specialize in whataboutism. (When I opposed India’s anti-Muslim legislation, one reader defended it by asking me: what about the female genital mutilation practiced by Muslims in Africa?)

Immigrants

Most immigrants, the Mexicans in the USA, the Poles in the UK, and the Bangladeshis in India do jobs the locals are unwilling to do. The lowest paid; the dirtiest jobs are often the only ones available to them. They face racism, humiliation, harassment, uncertainty and still diligently carry out their work. Their contribution to the economy is significant. In the next five years Britain will face a true crisis because of the shortage of plumbers, carpenters, gutter cleaners, barbers, waiters, bartenders and all low-paid jobs. Bombay’s Hindu supremacists, when they book an Uber, usually find that the driver’s name is Mohammed.

Instead of being grateful to the immigrants, the predator politicians declare them as prey; the voting herds applaud those politicians. All that Trump, Johnson and Modi have to do is to invoke the animal spirit. A winning formula is created: the animal instinct elevates the politician and his followers in the food chain, and the hunting game begins.

Evolution

Each of us has an animal sitting inside us. Civilization is about moving from that animal stage and becoming human. For 70+ years, we have lived without a World War. That is a stupendous human achievement. In every election, the voter needs to ask a simple question. Is the candidate a predator? An excellent clue: Does he talk about immigrants and Muslims? If he does, he wants us to become predators and join him in this hunting game.

Predators play a violent game. That is why Trump, Johnson and Modi are so different from Rushdie or fish.

Ravi