Democracy is dead. Long live majoritarianism. That may well sum up the times we are living in. Bulldozer times, times of othering and times for cronyism. And, of course, the wait for the last straw that will break the camel’s back. It is a time of grave introspection, resolute actions and firm resolve.

It is also the time where the silence of some is as loud as the music of the victorious. Our silences are a testimony to our kind of living. Even as the houses of some go down in a tumble, ostensibly to provide greater glory to the majority, the high priests are silent.

The moral bankruptcy of the elite is as good as the dance of the lumpen on the streets.

Three catastrophes are staring at us — the catastrophe of a religious and ethnic meltdown, the catastrophe of great inequalities of income and livelihood, and the catastrophe of the environment that hovers upon us all and yet we feign ignorance.

The history of humankind tells us that when catastrophes visit us, people rise up in resistance. To lose this hope in the inherent humanity of the human is to die a million deaths. Yet one has to be afraid, for our conscience-keepers are silent — or silenced.

In the beginning there was the word. And the word was with the people. Until the people speak out loud, how would one know that they are people — rational, moral, ethical, fair, just, caring, loving and thinking? How do we, without the word of the people, fight the words that make uncaring, insensitive, irrational, unethical humans strut on the stage of our civilisation?

Our lexicon is empty today because we have lost the one word that encapsulates all others: integrity. It is the integrity of the person that is at stake. The integrity of our civilisation that is dying a thousand deaths. Our civilisation is not the civilisation that flattens the earth and its people. It does not trample upon differences, but as Tagore wrote, allows each and every unique aspect to flourish.

To be civilised therefore is to have the word that leads us to myriad tongues and only when the word is with the people can it become a conduit of that civilisation that talks about integrity, love and caritas, about the coexistence not only of the human but also flora and fauna.

The bulldozers roaming our streets were born in our hearts first. It is in the forges of our defunct, consumptive, neo-liberal, wealth-maximising philosophy that our utter contempt of those who are not like us are created. And thus, the first catastrophe that I mentioned above dovetails into the second.

Sociology tells us we are all socialised entities. People who have learnt their normative values from family, friends, kin and kith. In other words, from society at large. And the process of learning is continuous, though one may not know that one is imbibing lessons on the go. It is here that our concern must be the most -- for when we condone the violence and hate against the minority on a daily basis, we normalise these aberrant and unwelcome norms as part of our daily living.

In the normalised world of the vacuous and vicious there are words to justify the carnage. Anthropology, at most times the handmaiden of brutal colonisation, found savagery and the savage to justify the oppression and the land grab.

Desmond Tutu underlined the sleight of hand when he pithily said that the missionary asked “us” (Africans) to kneel down and pray and when the prayer was over, “we” had the Bible but “they” (white colonisers) had the land.

Today in India, we are constantly claiming democracy to be in place and the Constitution to be working and yet foisting a majoritarian diktat, so that after a few more years citizens would be left with the shell of a document, hollowed out, meaningless and empty of all the promises that marked the emergence of a new experiment in 1947.

Last, but equally important, the catastrophe of the environment is upon us. Climate refugees are already in evidence as the sea level rises and marginal and precarious populations are pushed out of home and hearth. The greed so assiduously cultivated in the name of development is asking for more forests to be cut down, more flora and fauna to be destroyed, more people pushed into penury and misery.

For, the underbelly of all religious supremacy is the underwriting of the expropriation and exploitation, the evolution of an ethnicised capitalism using the garb of law and order to garner majoritarian entitlements.

The bulldozers would dispossess the religious minorities, deepen the upper caste stranglehold and demolish the middle class who now try to fence-sit and usher in a new pan-Indian socio-political order where sectarian attitudes would be part of the philosophy of the State.

That is why, perhaps, the present political class finds in Israel its doppelganger and takes lessons from its techno-military and violence-fuelled existence rather than from the teachings of Kabir, Chaitanya, Gandhi or Tagore.

So here are the three catastrophes and a warning. The fulfilment of the three and ignoring the one would take us quickly to the broken heart of India.

Author is professor of sociology, Amity University, Chhattisgarh