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The Hindutva Controversies
A compilation of few articles relating to this incident
Trishuls, lathis and books
By Kancha Ilaiah, taken from The Hindu Friday, May 16, 2003
Without understanding the implications of the Hindutva project of weapon distribution other parties are aping it...These weapons can in no way empower the Dalit-Bahujans and the poor.
THE BASIC idea behind the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's campaign of distributing trishuls (tridents) is to send signals to intimidate the minorities. But there is a signal to other sections as well. The Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes who are trying to form alternative organisations and set alternative agendas are also warned.
As a response to this Hindutva agenda the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh started distributing swords and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar started distributing lathis.
Even before this competitive distribution of weapons began, we have been witness, every other day, to leaders of political parties being presented with swords — never with books — as a mark of victory or of the growing strength of their party.
Where does this celebration of lethal weapons in civil society and the construction of warring ideologies around them weapons lead to? When some organisations seek justifications on spiritual and social grounds for distributing weapons, others who cannot find suitable arguments in their traditions will be forced to distribute weapons covertly.
All this will only lead to an anarchic civil war. The change that people like the VHP leader, Praveen Togadia, and the RSS chief, K.S. Sudarshan, want will only see a lot of blood spilt without any socio-economic transformation. Any cornered community would resort to terrorism, as it finds no alternative for its survival.
The justification put out by the Hindutva forces for handing out trishuls is that they are 'divine weapons' and therefore no legal hurdles should be created in their distribution. Similarly the RJD and the Samjwadi Party came up with their own socially sanctified alternatives. A point to note is that the youth to whom all these organisations and parties keep distributing weapons come from the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Castes.
No English-educated child of the forward castes — Brahmin, Baniya, Kshatriya or neo-kshatriya — is willing to carry a trishul or a sword or a lathi in his or her hands. The political parties or organisations are not starting English medium schools for the children of the poor or distributing books that give them knowledge so that the youth coming from the Dalit-Bahujan communities could also compete with their own children.
Do the children of top leaders of RSS or VHP carry trishuls? Do the children of the Samajwadi Party leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, or of the RJD chief, Mr. Laloo Prasad Yadav, keep carrying swords and lathis? Mr. Mulayam Singh who opposed English all along got his son (now an MP) educated in English-medium schools.
How liberating is a spiritual and social tradition that hands down weapons but not books to its adherents? All the ancient Gods were war heroes. Except the Buddha, who was born in a ruling tribe and lived outside the fold of ancient Hindu thought, no prophetic figure could gain status and currency without holding weapons within the fold of ancient and medieval Hinduism.
No Hindu thinker could construct a spiritually democratic text that could be distributed among the youth belonging to all castes. Though in the modern period, the Bhagavad Gita was projected as the single spiritual book of Hinduism — on the lines of the Bible and the Quran — - the priestly class never believed in distributing even that book to the children of all castes and training them in its study.
The Arya Samajists claimed that Dayanand Saraswati's 'Satyarth Prakash' is a great spiritual democratic book. But the mainstream Hindu Brahmin priests did not accept it as spiritual text to be used for prayer in the temples and also at the time of marriage and death. Neither did the Arya Samajists themselves distribute it to the children of all castes in the villages.
The VHP does not have a spiritual, democratic book to distribute, as opposed to the Bible and the Quran, in a context where many educated youth want to have such a reference point with which to attack untouchability, inequality and indignity of labour. Quite cleverly, therefore, it resorted to weapon distribution so that the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Caste youth could be involved in violence against the minorities. It is an attempt to build muscle power around the oppressed communities to use in the cause of Brahminism.
Without understanding the implications of the Hindutva project of weapon distribution other parties are aping it. Such an agenda will have long term negative impact on society. These weapons can in no way empower the Dalit-Bahujans and the poor. Obviously, the Hindutva forces have decided to waste the financial resources of the state. Even Mr. Laloo Prasad might justify the distribution of colourful lathis as a socially accepted weapon in the hands of lower castes or as he said "it was a weapon in the hands of Mahatma Gandhi too". But it is better to distribute books and not weapons of any kind.
Youth belonging to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Castes have been brutalised, and their humanity suppressed, by their having been used as muscle power; considered good only for using weapons. All fascist forces had celebrated weapon-using youth within their organizations.
The spiritual-fascist tradition that handed down the tradition of weapon wielding and pushing people into bloody wars did not do this nation any good even before Islam and Christianity took root. The people fought among themselves. As a result this nation fell prey to any small invasion. We had trishuls, chakras, bows and arrows all around and yet the invaders walked over all these weapons.
The reason was that the people of this country were never unified on the basis of common book that a shoemaker, a pot-maker, a shepherd, a school teacher and a priest shared, debated and discussed. A weapon is not a source of knowledge or a social source of unity. Any war weapon is a source of division and destruction.
Let the Togadias distribute books among the Dalit-Bahujan youth. Let the VHP distribute one book that children of all castes could read with pride and let all these social forces teach the illiterate youth how to read those books. Let all of them stop distributing weapons.
© Copyright 2000 - 2003 The Hindu
The Chariot of Fire
By Salil Tripathi
(First appeared in Index, 4th Quarter 2002)
Ten years ago this December, a mob of Hindus destroyed Babri Masjid, a medieval mosque in Ayodhya, to liberate the land where they believed their revered God, Rama, was born.
Nothing was spectacular about that mosque, which had stood for four centuries. India has grander, more beautiful mosques, and Ayodhya has many temples commemorating Rama. Yet some Hindus resented Babri Masjid because it was built precisely where they believed a temple, marking Ramas birthplace, had once stood. They claimed that the Moghul emperor Babars invading army had destroyed that temple. Their conviction was based on devout belief, for if Rama existed at all, he did so in prehistoric times, and in those days they didnt publish birth certificates.
For over four decades this dispute between some Hindus and some Muslims had simmered; a court order prevented them from disturbing the site. Through the 1980s, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) made progressively louder noises seeking to reclaim the site. Muslims formed the Babri Masjid Action Committee, and refused to surrender their claim. Angry Hindus formed the Rama Janambhoomi (birthplace) liberation movement.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led a movement to rebuild the temple. On December 6, 1992, Lal Krishna Advani, who is today India's deputy prime minister, was in Ayodhya, sitting and watching as a frenzied mob he had encouraged first climbed atop the mosque and then razed it, all in a little more than four hours. Ek dhakka aur do, masjid ko tod do, (One more push, and destroy the mosque) screamed Sadhvi Ritambhara , a Hindu priestess, cheering the crowds. The crude rabble-rousing shocked many Indians, but there were enough Hindus who saw redemption in that destruction.
In the last ten years the new temple hasn't been built. Hindu activists have periodically turned up in Ayodhya, threatening to start construction, only to retreat after a fresh court order. Earlier this February, when one such bunch of Hindu activists was returning from Ayodhya, their railway compartment was torched by a Muslim mob in the town of Godhra in Gujarat state, killing 58 people. What prompted that heinous act is not known. But what's known is that Hindus in Gujarat, where the BJP rules, retaliated swiftly, killing hundreds of Muslims, razing Muslim shrines, looting property, and displacing thousands of Muslim families. Capitalising on the riots, Gujarats chief minister dissolved the legislature, seeking fresh elections later this year. Progressive Indians feared that Gujarat was the laboratory of Hindu nationalists. The VHP agreed, promising a repeat of Gujarat if Muslims dared to misbehave elsewhere. Such talk, reminiscent of the violent Partition of 1947, is once again part of Indian discourse. And its success is because India's secular model has failed.
********The rise of Hindutva, or the Hindu nationalist ideology, is possible because India's governing consensus has disintegrated over the last quarter century. In the 1980s India underwent a mid-life crisis. The Emergency of 1975-1977 had shown that an autocratic leader could mangle the constitution. Even though Indira Gandhi lost the elections that followed, internal bickering among her successors disillusioned the voters. The Punjab insurgency from 1978, the military assault on the Golden Temple, and Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, threatened national unity.
Rajiv Gandhi came to power promising a clean administration. Instead, corruption increased, and his government capitulated to fundamentalist demands. First, Gandhi banned Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses. Then, he surrendered to conservative Muslims and denied Muslim women the right to seek alimony, effectively making them second-class citizens. Insurgency worsened in Kashmir.
Internationally, India's pro-Soviet Non-Aligned foreign policy appeared increasingly meaningless, as one Eastern European nation after another became free in 1989. The economy stagnated even as India's East Asian neighbours were growing at a rapid pace. By 1991 India was virtually bankrupt. The same Congress Party that had ruled India since 1947 promising to build a socialistic pattern of society made an about turn and liberalised the economy.
The only solace for Indians, it seemed, were Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, telecast on Sunday mornings, hearkening back to a golden age. Those schmaltzy made-in-Bollywood TV programmes filled an ideological vacuum. If only India could return to that golden age. If Nehruvian non-alignment was wrong, if Nehruvian socialism too was wrong, surely, Nehruvian secularism could also be wrong?
The BJP was waiting for just such soul-searching among Indians. The BJP is a cadre-based organization, closely linked with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Voluntary Corps), which has been banned twice in independent India. The RSSs leaders have expressed admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. They want Hindus to rise, to feel pride in their ancient past, and they consider Islam and Christianity as alien faiths. The umbrella organization, which includes the VHP, the RSS, the BJP, the Hindu Maha Sabha (HMS) and other political fronts, is called the Sangh Parivar. It has been working painstakingly at changing the Indian consensus. Its goal is to use the political power to transform India's liberal, secular, modernist ethos.
The BJP capitalised on the growing disenchantment with the status quo and stepped into the void, offering the attractive cocktail of nationalism and Hindutva. Its activists painted slogans in cities, saying Garv se kaho , ham Hindu hai (Say it with pride, we are Hindus). Forget the corrupt Congress and the ideologically bankrupt Left. Turn to us; we will bring back the golden age of Rama.
The BJP has had few supporters in the past. Until mid-1980s, the BJP (and its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh ) rarely got over 15% of the vote. In 1984, it had two seats in the Indian parliament, whose full strength is 547. That figure rose to 88 in 1989, then 121 in 1991, and now stands around 170, because of electoral alliances it formed with other parties. In 1996 it became the single-largest party in parliament; two years and another election later, it came to power with allies. When Advani embarked on a rath yatra (chariot march) in 1989, sitting in a Toyota truck, carrying a bow and arrow, exhorting thousands of Hindus that they liberate Ayodhya, he cut a bizarre, comical figure. But he had the last laugh. In three years the mosque was gone. Six years later, he was India's home minister.
The BJPs rise can clearly be traced to the razing of the mosque, which some Hindutva supporters claim have made them feel they have avenged the humiliation they had suffered. Their swagger received intellectual imprimatur. From his rarefied pulpit in Oxford, the late Nirad C. Chaudhuri said: I say the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 AD every Hindu temple has been sacked (by Muslims).
Other intellectuals backed the braggadocio. Nodding approvingly, V.S. Naipaul called the mosques destruction an inevitable retribution. For too long Hindu nationalism had been subjugated; it was now finding its true voice, and this resurgence could only be a good thing, he argued in his book, India : A Million Mutinies Now. Hindus should relive what historian A.L. Basham called the wonder that was India . That meant a time before alien faiths contaminated India.
********The central tenet of Hindutva is precisely that. India must recapture its proud past. The world must recognise it and offer India a place at the head of the table. If it wont listen, India will go nuclear (as it did, first in 1974, and then, as a reminder, in 1998).
The BJP is not in a hurry. Like Communist ideologues, BJPs leaders think long term; their vision is to transform the way Indians think over a generation or two. With that in mind, Hindu nationalists have astutely focused on history textbooks. Their strategy is clear. First demonstrate that Indian history is written by westerners with a colonial agenda or Left-leaning Indians who distort reality. Then reveal how the historians have deliberately overlooked Muslim atrocities against Hindus through centuries. Then the nationalists will take on India's secular icons -- Gandhi and Nehru -- for appeasing minorities. And in that chasm the BJP will underscore its message: that Hindus can only be safe in a Hindu India, and minorities in India must live on rules set by Hindus.
The first target is the building block of Indian history, the esoteric Aryan Invasion Theory. Conventional history says that around 5,000 years ago Aryans came to India , as immigrants or invaders, and settled around the Indus Valley , creating the Mohenjo Daro and Harappa civilisation. They later came into contact with Dravidians, who lived further to the south, and over centuries, the two groups intermingled, creating the complex Indian society. Islam and Christianity came later, leading to the multi-everything Indian identity today.
If you accept that scenario, you accept the syncretic nature of the Indian society, which is an amalgam of many influences and ethnicities. But if you challenge that view, you can provide an alternative, purist view, which is that there was no Aryan invasion. According to the revisionists, Hindu civilisation predated the Aryans, and India had always been the land of sanatana dharma (eternal faith). Invasions, if any, only occurred in the last millennium, first by Islamic invaders who ransacked temples and killed thousands, and later, during the colonial period.
The political import of this alternative view is obvious: if you accept it, you can argue that Muslims and Christians in India are foreigners. The challenge to the Aryan Invasion Theory, thus, is not an impenetrable debate among Indologists, but a vigorous argument that goes to the heart of the Indian identity. Hindu nationalists have challenged the orthodoxy of Indian history and questioned the work of Max Muellar, Romila Thapar, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, Bipan Chandra, and other historians. Leading the charge are David Frawley, an American Ayurvedic doctor, Koenraad Elst, a Belgian Hindu philosophy student, N.S. Rajaram, a former consultant with NASA, Bhagwan Gidwani, a retired tourism official, Shrikant Talageri, a former bank officer, and others. None of them is a historian or archaeologist.
The lack of archaeological training among the challengers doesn't matter. Contemporary history and archaeology have become a cartel of historians agreeing with one another, with a reputation to protect. By challenging their orthodoxy, these maverick historians intend to reclaim India's genuine past. They've taken on the role of Galileo, casting the establishment historians as the Pope.
While the Hindu nationalist revisionists continue to write voluminously, few historians take them seriously. Michael Witzel, professor of Indology at Harvard University, calls their attempts guesswork bolstered by actual fraud, he writes. As an example, Witzel shows how Rajaram wants to prove horses existed in pre-historic India. now zoology and archaeology tell us there were no horses in India till early second millennium BCE. But if Rajaram can show horses in India before the Indus civilization (2600-1900 BCE), then he can presumably prove that Rig Veda, an ancient Hindu text, preceded the Indus civilization because it refers to horses. That would disprove the commonly-accepted theory that the speakers of Indo-Aryan languages came from outside. Witzel concludes: Apparently, they do not realise how ridiculous all of this reads outside the confines of the revisionists rewriting of Indian history along autochthonous lines. Their claims are historically impossible and are based on an unsubstantiated reading of the script. But Witzel, the nationalists argue, is a westerner, with an imperial history and reputation to defend.
After debunking scholars to establish that India was always a Hindu civilization, the nationalists' next target is Islamic invasion. Blaming historians affiliated to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi (which wags once called the Kremlin-on- Jamuna ) for understating the horrors of Muslim rule in India, the revisionists quote from Al- Beruni and Gulbadan, recounting stories of Islamic rulers taking Hindu slaves and killing Hindu women and children. That may indeed have happened, but what that has to do with Hindus and Muslims in India in 2002 is an issue the revisionists duck.
Secular shibboleths are the next target. Islam, the nationalists assert, is not a religion of peace. Appeasing minorities, they assert, is wrong. After Sept 11, they had hoped their rhetoric would gain wider currency, but mercifully that hasn't happened. Their work, of documenting Islamic atrocities in India including destruction of hundreds of temples and murdering thousands of Hindus, goes on. To set these historical wrongs right, the Sangh Parivar doesnt claim all the temples that were destroyed. It wants only three sites, in the holy cities of Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura. Elst defends these demands, saying: In withholding from the Hindus access to their sacred sites in Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi, you also make present-day Hindus pay the price for the defeat of their ancestors by those who indulged in vandalism and destruction. If punishing the progeny of the perpetrators is indeed undesirable, punishing the progeny of the victims is even more undesirable.
If India has not confronted these demons, the nationalists argue, the fault lies with the colonized Indian mind. The Congress leaders who led India's freedom movement -- Gandhi, Patel, Nehru -- were all educated in England. They were Anglicised and original Macaulayites , a reference to Thomas Macaulay, whose 1835 Minute spread English education in India. Today, Macaulay is remembered in India for writing that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia, and for calling upon imperial Britain to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. Macaulays children, the English educated Indian elite, could hardly be expected to understand India.
The BJP, in contrast, is home-grown and genuine, its leaders argue. Despite its apparently pro-business outlook, the BJP remains suspicious of urbanity, of alien influences and cultures, and of multinationals. It coined the famous slogan, We want computer chips, not potato chips. And it doesn't like Christian missionaries either.
Their final target, interestingly, is Gandhi. Not necessarily the Gandhi who asked Indians to boycott foreign goods, but the Gandhi who went out of his way to accommodate Muslims (am HMS activist assassinated Gandhi in 1948), and the Gandhi who made non-violence a powerful weapon. While no BJP leader has openly criticised Gandhi, plays and films which show Gandhi without the halo which Sir Richard Attenborough placed around him, have become popular. Other heroes of India's freedom struggle, particularly martial and violent ones, like Bhagat Singh and Subhas Bose, are being resurrected.
The timing could not be better. A recent poll in Outlook magazine shows that few teenagers have any idea of Indian history. Catching them young and transforming them early would suit the BJP just fine.
If the strategy succeeds, it would make India a Hindu Pakistan. When India and Pakistan became independent, Pakistan had chosen to be a religious state, with Islam as its identity. India had chosen secularism and democracy. By championing Hindutva , the BJP is making Indians identify with their narrower identities. The BJP may appear foolhardy, but we must remember that its goal is not to win only the next election, but the next generation. It can't get more ominous than that.
Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London . He is working on a novel set in Southeast Asia and is a regular contributor to Index on Censorship.
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