EXACTLY a month after Sabeen Mahmud was murdered while driving home in Karachi, a small group of her friends and admirers met in a cosy Delhi basement to remember the extraordinary Pakistani freethinker whose shadow promises to linger over South Asia. Most of those gathered there that day had not known her personally but had only heard of her work and that too in a hazy way. To them, she was another activist who had paid the ultimate price for taking on the establishment and the religious fundamentalists. So, when a couple of her friends spoke about Sabeen`s life and times, particularly the risks she ran in doing what she did, it set of f a discussion on the fate of liberal thinkers and activists in the rest of South Asia.

There were some troubling questions that the memorial meeting raised. Are Indian activists at as much risk as Sabeen was? Were they as courageous as she had been? Did confronting the political regime headed by the BJP`s Narendra Modi, perceived as more inimical to liberal thought than the previous Congress dispensation, call for a more gutsy approach? It was a problematic issue. Some were convinced that India was headed the `Pakistan way` or maybe the `Bangladeshi way` where rationalist bloggers who have taken on religious fundamentalism have been killed with impunity and any criticism of the political right is fraught with dire consequences.

Indeed, it would seem the situation is not any different in the weathered, secular democracy of India than it is in the countries where democratic freedom has had limited bursts of life. Liberal circles tend to see the Modi government`s assault on NGOs, particularly Greenpeace which has been practically forced to down shutters in India, as a clear example of the illiberal times we live in. But that may not be strictly true.

The BJP is only continuing the repressive measures started by the Congress under Manmohan Singh which had blamed NGOs for stalling major projects and blocking the introduction of new technologies that would supposedly transform its agriculture and industry. It was the Singh government which had initiated the minute auditing of theseorganisations, freezing their bank accounts and blacklisting hundreds of NGOs that had failed to meet the nitpicking regulations it had instituted, aimed more at harassment than anything else. The BJP finds this a useful policy to continue since Modi`s vision of development does not brook any dissent. All critics of its policies tend to be branded `anti-national`.

Modi has, however, gone a step further by cautioning the judiciary against handing down verdicts influenced by `five-star activists`. That was a clear direction to the judiciary, a danger to the liberal fabric of the country as outraged intellectuals have pointed out.

There are other similarities with what`s happening in South Asia. Murder by fundamentalists may be less frequent but it can strike with deadly accuracy. Just three months earlier, veteran communist leader Govind Pansare, who has been a relentless critic of right-wing extremism, was shot and killed in Kolhapur while on his regular morning walk. His murder took place a year and a half after his comrade-in-arms, the well-known rationalist crusader Naresh Dabholkar, was eliminated in similar fashion in Pune.

Between Dabholkar`s killing in 2013 when the Congress was in power, both at the centre and in Maharashtra where the rationalist lived and worked, and that of Pansare in 2015 much has changed. The seething undercurrent of Hindu supremacist tendencies, or Hindutva as it`s called, has been allowed to boil over by a regime that believes that it`s all in the fitness of things, a time to redress old wrongs, real or imagined. All that has happened in the year that has gone by since the BJP`s landslide victory in May 2014 can be summed up as the Modi zeitgeist the liberation of the majority from the yoke of secularism imposed by the Constitution.

The Pansare killing is critical to understanding what the Modi machismo unleashed in the country even if the man himself is not the trigger for all the events associated with it. The rationalist had received death threats from many radical Hinduoutfits, some of whom have been named in bomb blast cases in the country. One organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha had sued Pansare for defamation because he had written that its activities bordered on terrorism. The Sanatan Sanstha is one of the multitudinous Hindu right-wing organisations that have acquired new legitimacy after operating furtively for decades.

The result has been continual attacks, small and big, on churches across the country, acts of desecration that seem to declare: enough of the `appeasement` of the minorities. It doesn`t matter that Christians comprise no more than 3pc of the population even after centuries of evangelism that Hindu ideologues such as Arun Shourie, a former BJP minister, inveigh against. So, there is the campaign of ghar wapasi or the forcible return of the Hindus to their religious roots even if it strikes at the heart of India`s cultural and religious diversity.

Contempt for dissent and indifference to the sensitivities of the minorities is clear in the new imagination of India. The BJP aims to impose a majoritarian culture on the country even where food habits are concerned. So beef eating is now not just frowned upon as a Brahmanical taboo but is banned by law in an increasing number of states, jeopardising the livelihoods of thousands of Muslim cattle traders and butchers.

This Hindutva machismo is reflected in Modi`s dealings with Pakistan. It has fallen completely off the BJP`s diplomatic map, the only country barring the Maldives that has been kept at arm`s length. The prime minister`s touchy feely initiative with his South Asia neighbours has seen Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka treated with a bonhomie that has surprised diplomatic analysts. Pakistan though continues to be in a winter frost after the false spring that appeared in the air in May 2014 when Modi was sworn in. The initial handshake with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has remained frozen, its promise tripped up by the demands of domestic policy. • The writer is a joumalist based in New Delhi.

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