Hindutva: Reaping the Harvest of Hate

By Babu Gogineni <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Many analysts are carefully monitoring developments in the Islamic world: the latest estimates are that there are around 1.5 billion Muslims spread out in several dozens of countries. However, with almost 900 million Hindus, and with most of them in one country, developments in India concerning Hinduism deserve attention from those who value democracy and tolerance. The BBC recently broadcast a documentary by Mark Tully who astonishingly advocated more religion, not less, in Indian public life. In the light of such shallow and unreal analysis, a closer look at the development of political Hinduism becomes important. Babu Gogineni, IHEU’s Executive Director, looks at the pestilence of hatred and backwardness slowly consuming society in his native land. Will secular India survive?

 

So Shall Ye Reap?

In December 2002 the Indian state of Gujarat (population 56 million) re-elected Chief Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power, giving it a resounding 126 seats out of a total of 182 seats. Elections in Gujarat – one of India’s 28 states – were held following communal riots in which nearly 2000 Muslims were killed in a programme of massacre, rape, brutality, and arson orchestrated by Hindu fundamentalists, and allegedly overseen by government officials. The national horror and dismay these developments caused among liberals led to a ninemember Concerned Citizens Tribunal Gujarat 2002 being set up. This unofficial Tribunal, headed by a respected retired judge, examined statements from over 2000 victims, police reports, and forensic evidence and declared that the Chief Minister was “liable for prosecution for genocide for refusal to take any preventive measure and protect the lives and properties of minorities in the state”. Not even this powerful indictment swayed the popular support for the BJP, so strong is the Hindu-Muslim divide in the state. Nor did it create any sense of remorse: several Hindu leaders said attacks on Muslims were just retaliation by Hindus for the murderous attack by (unidentified) assailants on 56 Hindu activists returning by train from Ayodhya.

 

Ayodhya: the Flashpoint and the Rallying Symbol

Ayodhya has been central to Indian politics for the past 20 years. It is a holy city in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, and contained the 400-year-old Babri Mosque built by the Mughal Emperor Babar. From the mid-1980s Hindu fundamentalists had become vocal and militant in their claim to the site on which the mosque was built, which they believe to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Never mind that there are dozens of other sites claiming the same status in the city: this one conveniently had a mosque on it! The Hindus, led by the BJP, argued that the dispute could not be solved in court because it was a matter of people’s faith. They vowed to demolish the mosque and construct a temple for Lord Rama in its place. The mosque was indeed demolished illegally by BJP mobs and other assorted hooligans in 1992 after a deliberate frenzy stirred up all over the country by BJP leader L.K. Advani, currently Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister in the Indian Central Government. When the mosque was brought down, there were protest riots by Muslims, and triumphal rioting by the Hindus: in Mumbai alone, 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, are said to have been killed. A judicial commission was appointed by the government to investigate the killings, but no action has ever been taken on its report.

 

The Saffron Brigade

The Shiv Sena, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP: World Hindu Council) and the Bajrang Dal are the key players in the cesspool of Indian communal politics on the Hindu side. The Shiv Sena is led by the beer-drinking, Hitler-loving, ‘puritanical’ Bal Thackeray. All these groups are offshoots of the Rashtreeya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS: National Volunteer Corps), a 75-year-old organization which is the fountainhead of ideas related to Hindu political activity and Hindu cultural nationalism, collectively referred to as Hindutva. In 1984, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the sympathy wave of voting in favour of her son Rajiv Gandhi, the BJP had only 2 seats in the Indian Parliament. Then, it advocated a mild variety of Gandhian socialism. Twenty years on, after ardently espousing Hindutva issues, it is the largest party in Parliament (183 seats in a House of 544 seats) and the lead player in the coalition central government, ironically maintained in power by support from ‘secular’ regional political parties like the Telugu Desam of Andhra Pradesh, and the ‘atheist’ Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of Tamil Nadu.

 

The Gujarat Laboratory

For the past few years, Gujarat has been described by Hindu fundamentalist leaders as a laboratory for Hindutva. A systematic and sustained campaign to create a mental and emotional divide between the Hindu and Muslim communities really did succeed. They did not create this divide but they certainly exploited it and made sure it resulted in electoral gains for themselves. Now there is a strong feeling among the leadership that the tried, tested, and successful experiments of Gujarat must be replicated elsewhere in the country. Addressing the first state executive meeting of the BJP after the party’s victory in Gujarat, Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani declared that Hindutva would be made the BJP’s election issue during the elections to the central government in 2004.

 

The Hindutva brigade has reaped its harvest of hatred. In two decades it has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of Indian politics. By whipping up low-level existing popular prejudice and mistrust among communities, they have unleashed forces poised to tear apart the already weak and threadbare fabric of Indian society. They are now in power both in central government and in well over a third of the states.

 

India’s Cultural Purge

Changing India’s history and Pakistan’s geography have always been on the agenda of the Hindutva brigade. Whenever they gain power in the states, the BJP and its political clones and allies have presided over rewriting of school history textbooks, and introduced their own agenda and religious bias into teaching materials. Even mathematics was not spared. Take this example of an exam question in one of the BJP states: ‘How many volunteers might be required to demolish a mosque in a given time period ...?’ The BJP was preparing the ground for its later illegal demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, and creating a new generation of communally divided youngsters. There are echoes here of the indoctrination of schoolchildren under the Third Reich.

 

Despite limited checks on its licence by coalition partners, the BJP and its allies have been able to implement much of their dangerous agenda in the centre. The Prime Minister, Home Minister, Finance Minister and Law Minister all belong to the BJP. Nuclear tests have been conducted with impunity. Hindu nuclear virility has been re-established. Public dialogue these days is more militaristic, with scarcely any mention of non-violence. Indira Gandhi announced after India’s first nuclear test in 1974 that it had been conducted “for peaceful purposes”. It is perhaps more honest, if depressing, that today a missile technologist is President of the Indian Republic. He is a Muslim, but also a confused mystic who visited the notorious god-man Satya Sai Baba immediately after his inauguration as President of the Republic and in September participated in the birthday celebrations of Mata Amritanandamayi, the ‘Hugging Mother’, in Kerala!

 

Crackpots and communalists have replaced respected historians like Romila Thapar who have been unceremoniously ejected from official curriculum committees. Party faithful have been appointed to head prestigious institutions like the Indian Council for Social Science Research; the Indian Council for Historical Research has already been completely hijacked. The University Grants Commission is implementing special funding programmes for courses in astrology all over the country. The recent census, for the first time in over 50 years, included the category of caste. In several states beauty pageants have been banned as an insult to women, while many have no compunctions in condoning sati (the supposedly voluntary, but in practice forced act of a widow throwing herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre). After the efforts of 19th-century Indian reformers like Ram Mohan Roy to ban the practice, this is a backward step indeed.

 

Film-makers in Mumbai informally submit their productions to leaders of the Shiv Sena before they are submitted to the censor board. Paintings by the wellknown Muslim artist M.F. Hussain have been destroyed because, nearly three decades ago, he painted the Hindu goddess of learning Saraswati in the nude. Perhaps these distressed Hindus should take a closer look at the sculptures in Hindu temples!

 

Another bizarre aspect of the Hindu right wing has recently made a reappearance: antiseptic, anti-fungal and healing properties of cow urine and dung have been ‘discovered’. Some products based on cow dung are currently being patented. Digvijay Singh, Chief Minister of the Congress Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh has applauded the medicinal qualities of cow urine, having tried it once.

 

Everywhere there are nauseating signs of the end of Gandhian tolerance and of Nehru’s secular vision. Savarkar, once suspected of being the brain behind the assassination of Gandhi and undoubtedly one of the ideologues of political Hinduism, has had his portrait unveiled in the Indian Parliament. Militant Hindus in the US have recently celebrated the birthday of Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse. Indeed, there are clear indications that considerable funding for the Hindu right is coming from Indians living in the west (see box).

 

Minorities and Dissenters

Contrary to popular perceptions, the religious communities in India had largely lived peaceably and learnt from each other. Music, art, literature, and cuisine have always been a marvellous fusion of influences from different regional, religious, and cultural groups in the country. One of the first actions of the Hindutva brigade after coming to power in Maharashtra state was to target marriages conducted between Hindus and Muslims and warn that Muslim men would not be allowed to marry Hindu women and convert them to Islam.

 

India is home to the world’s second largest number of Muslims. They are generally economically and socially more backward than the Hindu community and have shown no real enthusiasm for improving their human rights record or adopting modernity. But the way to reform the Muslim community is not by threats, and especially not by those who have established themselves as their enemies. In reaction to the massive influx of money from western countries to fund Christian activities, draconian anti-conversion laws have been introduced in various states like Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. Christian missionaries have been viciously attacked, some even murdered. Meanwhile, the RSS leader Sudarshan has called for an indigenous, patriotic church in India for the Christians, government controlled, as in China. While this article has focused on Hindu militant nationalism, it is not my intention to give a benign picture either of Muslim fundamentalism or of the obscene Christian evangelical activity in the country.

 

Attacks on minorities have been accompanied by efforts to harass and silence dissenters. Editors are being harassed on frivolous charges which the stillindependent judiciary throw out. The intelligence bureau and the police are creating dossiers on all known dissidents and non-Hindu leaders.

 

Graveyard of Secularism?

Secularism has been described as respect of all religions by several leaders of India since independence. The Hindu philosopher and orator Radhakrishnan, President of the Republic in the 1960s, played the most mischief in this matter. The problem is that secularism, whether as understood by Humanists or as misunderstood by liberal Hindus, is dying in the country, with even the opposition parties adopting a soft Hindutva line on many issues so as not to alienate the votes of the majority community. Lacking in ideology, with little loyalty to modern democratic principles, and with vote bank politics in mind, the opposition parties have allowed the onslaught of the cultural brigands as they began their Talibanization of India. The complicity of the silent majority has been a definite help.

 

Yet despite all this, India is still a functioning democracy, just about. A triumphant Togadia, Secretary of the VHP, who declared immediately after the Gujarat election results that “Gujarat has become the graveyard of secular ideology ... secularists have become the impotent fringe”, was arrested in April in Rajasthan state, where the Congress is the ruling party. Charges of sedition have been levelled at him in court by the state government because he was distributing tridents, which he believes will help Hindus defend themselves, despite prohibitory orders. Released on bail, he appears a little chastened. Other governments too have used the law to curb anti-social activities in the past. My own home city of Hyderabad was synonymous with communal violence and rioting in the 1970s. When the regional political party Telugu Desam came to power under the charismatic leadership of film star N.T. Rama Rao, all political leaders making provocative speeches were arrested as a preventive measure before every religious festival, and for over 15 years Hyderabad has not had a repeat of these violent incidents.

 

Elections earlier this year in Himachal Pradesh state saw the BJP lose power rather miserably, so Hindutva may not work everywhere, every time. National elections are due in less than 18 months. The BJP will, of course, lose some elections and win others, as the complex governance agenda for India does not depend on religion alone. Issues relating to poverty, drought, hunger, illiteracy, child labour, superstition, unequal distribution of wealth, failing infrastructure, and inadequate health care will not go away and will still influence some elections, even though the atmosphere has become polluted and seems almost beyond retrieval. When it happens, if the BJP or their allies lose elections, the parties replacing them may not be much different in their allegiance to human rights and liberties, or to a real secular state, though they will certainly be far less virulent. Not one of them has a concrete agenda for changing the situation, for promoting amity and harmony. Hardly any of them speak for a critical scientific temper.

 

Silver linings appear now and then in India’s other institutions. In September this year the Indian Supreme Court severely reprimanded the Gujarat state government and asked it to resign if it could not protect the victims of the Gujarat riots who had filed cases against police officials and local Hindu leaders. The National Human Rights Commission has come to the victims’ aid as well, while leaders of the Indian Confederation of Industry asked the Gujarat government to justify its actions during the riots. Dara Singh, the assassin of the Christian Missionary Graham Staines, has been found guilty and given the death penalty, dispelling fears that his trial would lead nowhere. But these are only silver linings. Dark clouds hang ominously over India’s secular future.

 

Most people wake up only after it is too late in such situations. In India and abroad, few are waking up to the spectre of Hindutva. Yet if secularism and tolerance die there, so will the multi-chromatic wonder that is India.