A spurious nationalism project

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today


The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has landed the Narendra Modi government in a soup by launching a war against alleged anti-nationals. University campuses and courtrooms are the chosen battlegrounds.

The RSS had played a critical role in getting the BJP to project Modi as its prime ministerial candidate and spearheaded the party’s successful poll campaign in the Hindi heartland which helped it to secure a parliamentary majority.

The Human Resources Development ministry, which oversees education, is one of the government departments in whose working the RSS, which describes itself as a cultural outfit, takes direct interest. A group comprising representatives of 11 RSS affiliates has been liaising with HRD Minister Smriti Irani on a regular basis to ensure that her work is in consonance with its aims.

It is easy for the Centre to influence school education as the Central Board of Secondary Education and the National Council of Educational Research and Training, which decide the curriculum and prepare the textbooks, are directly under it. Since the universities enjoy autonomy, it can influence them only through the Vice-Chancellors appointed by it.

The RSS’s designs on prestigious institutions like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management came to light last year when its two publications, the Organiser and the Panchjanya, carried articles which dubbed them dens of anti-national activity.

The modus operandi is for the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the BJP’s student body, to complain of anti-national activity and for the VCs and the police to initiate action against students belonging to other organisations on the basis of its complaints. If they don’t act, the Centre pressures them.

While in IIT-Madras and the Hyderabad University, the ABVP targeted Dalit groups, in JNU it picked on the Left organisations which have dominated its campus throughout. It used a function organised by a small group to honour the memory of executed Parliament attack case accused Afzal Guru as a pretext to complain of anti-national activities by the Left organisations.

The Supreme Court, in its judgment in the Parliament attack case, had invoked the need to satisfy the nation’s conscience, and jurists like former Law Commission Chairman AP Shah have opined that Guru’s hanging was politically motivated.

Doctored videos attributing slogans and speeches heard at the Afzal Guru function to JNU Students’ Union President Kanhaiya Kumar were soon in circulation, and sensationalist television channels aired them. The police, called into the campus by Vice-Chancellor Jagdeesh Kumar, arrested Kanhaiya Kumar and a few others under the archaic colonial-era sedition provision of the penal code.

The JNU events developed into a huge embarrassment for the government as students and teachers of institutions across India and several prestigious foreign universities condemned Kanhaiya Kumar’s arrest.

Opposition parties denounced the government’s handling of the situation and made common cause with the students. Voices of dissent rose from within the BJP camp too.

Calling for the release of Kanhaiya Kumar, Shatrughan Sinha, a film actor and long-time BJP MP, pointed out that JNU was a seat of learning with some very respectable teachers and some of India’s brightest young minds.

Three office-bearers of the ABVP’s JNU unit quit the organisation, declaring they could not be the mouthpiece of such a government.

To boost the nationalism project, the HRD Ministry directed all central universities to raise the national flag on 200-foot high masts on the campus. JNU has been flying the flag for decades.

The RSS is a new convert to flag-waving nationalism. It flew the national flag atop its headquarters in Nagpur for the first time in 2002, three years after the first BJP-led government came to power and 52 years after the Indian republic was established.

During the freedom struggle, RSS chief MS Golwalkar famously advised Hindus not to waste their energy fighting the British but save it to fight “our internal enemies that are Muslims, Christians and Communists.”

The RSS was banned thrice since Inependence – the first time after Gandhi’s murder in 1948, then during the Emergency in 1975 and finally after its cadres demolished the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.

Putting the current situation in perspective, eminent historian and JNU professor emerita Romila Thapar said the battle was between religious nationalism and secular nationalism.

The RSS having queered the pitch, Modi has no option but to brazen it out. He has said the current furore is an attempt by political opponents and non-government organisations to destabilise his government.

The government’s offer of a full discussion of the JNU issue in Parliament is beside the point, which is whether it is capable of reining in its supporters who are posing an open challenge to the rule of law.

The lengths to which they are willing to go in pursuit of the spurious nationalism project became clear when lawyers owing allegiance to it assaulted Kanhaiya Kumar in the trial court premises and stoned and chased away a team deputed by the Supreme Court to report on developments there. Some of them have also sought to bait the apex court by seeking contempt proceedings against Kanhaiya Kumar for allegedly criticising its judgment in the case against Afzal Guru. --Gulf Today, February 23, 2016

Hindutva’s two-fold strategy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been going around talking about development, shadowy groups have been conducting murderous campaigns to overawe and silence the society.

The violence is directed not against political opponents but against writers, Dalits and Muslims. The game plan, it appears, is to clear the way to declare India a Hindu Rashtra (nation), the proclaimed goal of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindutva ideology.

An atavistic element is discernible in the choice of targets. Hindu texts testify to violent attacks on Buddhist centres of learning by proponents of the Vedic religion in the medieval period. Dalits who were outside the Vedic society came under duress after Buddhism declined and a casteist society emerged.

Muslims were the ‘other’ whose presence helped the Vedic community to posit a Hindu society. According to VD Savarkar, originator of the Hindutva concept, a life-and-death struggle began the day Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who had raided the subcontinent 17 times, first crossed the Indus.

Three eminent thinkers have been killed under a plot which was hatched before Modi came to power. Narendra Dabholkar of Maharashtra, a campaigner against superstition, was shot dead in 2013 when there were Congress-led governments at the Centre and in the state. Govind Pansare, also of Maharrashtra, and MM Kalburgi, of Karnataka, were killed after BJP-led coalitions took office at the Centre.

Police investigating the cases have said all three were killed by members of a Goa-based outfit called Sanatan Sanstha, founded 25 years ago to provide education in Dharma. A trial court had found six of its members guilty of planting bombs.

Atrocities against Dalits have been reported from several states. The BJP or its associates have not been implicated in any of the incidents but the party’s caste supremacist approach and failure to condemn the gruesome killing of two children and a youth in two separate incidents in Haryana, where it is in power, put it in the dock.

To make things worse, Union Minister of State VK Singh callously likened the killing of children to stoning of street dogs. Public outrage forced Singh, who is a retired Army chief, to tender an apology.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, last year 47,064 crimes against Dalits by non-Dalits were reported. This was 19 per cent higher than the previous year’s figure. More than half the cases were reported from the socially and economically backward BIMARU states – Uttar Pradesh (8,075), Rajasthan (8,028), Bihar (7,893) and Madhya Pradesh (4,151).

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, who visited the family of the deceased children, linked the incident to the Prime Minister’s attitude and accused the BJP-RSS combine of crushing the weak and the poor. However, his party bears as much blame, if not more, for the current situation in Haryana.

Based on official data, the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations recently said 3,198 cases of atrocities against Dalits were registered in Haryana during the 2004-2013 decade, which was 245 per cent more than in the previous decade. From 2005 to 2014 Haryana was under Congress rule.

The most ominous part of the Hindutva project aims at accentuation of Hindu-Muslim polarisation through campaigns on the sensitive issue of cow slaughter. After the lynching of a man at Dadri in UP on false allegations of killing a cow, a truck driver was set upon by a gang at Udhampur in Jammu and Kashmir state, where the BJP is the junior partner in a coalition government headed by the People’s Democratic Party.

The driver died in a Delhi hospital a few days later. A protest by dissidents paralysed life in the Kashmir valley. In Jammu, members of the RSS held a route march, openly displaying firearms.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said the small incidents which had taken place would not dent the country’s prestige, which, he claimed, had gone up under Modi’s prime ministership. However, Modi himself found it necessary to break his long silence and talk of the diversity which was India’s beauty.

What rattled the government was the spirited protest of scores of writers in different languages who returned the awards they had received from the state or its agencies. Most of them pointedly referred to Modi’s silence on the Dadri lynching and the official literary establishment’s failure to condemn the murder of writers. It was protest of a kind with no parallel in living memory.

Some observers are of the view that the violent activities of small Hindutva groups are hurting Modi’s development agenda. But, then, Hindu Rashtra is also part of his agenda. --Gulf Today, October 27, 2015 

US rebuke evokes divided response

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Public statements by President Barack Obama chiding India for the recent attacks on religious minorities has chilled the officially promoted euphoria over the personal chemistry between him and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and elicited diverse responses from the Bharatiya Janata Party government and its Hindutva ideologues.

Obama was the chief guest at this year’s Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi. He and Modi appeared before the media after one-to-one talks to announce elevation of the strategic relationship between the two countries to a new level.

Modi repeatedly referred to Obama by his first name to impress listeners about his personal rapport with him. That did not hold Obama back from telling a home truth. Addressing a rally before leaving New Delhi, he said, “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered on religious lines. Nowhere is it more important to uphold religious freedom than in India.”

Obama’s remark, coming in the wake of a series of attacks on religious minorities and a spate of conversions in the guise of homecoming by those who had forsaken Hinduism, was interpreted by observers as a parting shot. Modi, his government and the ruling party were not happy but chose not to respond publicly.

Last week, Obama brought up the subject again while addressing the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event in Washington attended by political, social and business leaders. He referred to his visit to India, a place “full of magnificent diversity…where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs” and said the acts of intolerance would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi. The government and the Hindutva outfits responded this time.

The first response came from unnamed officials who suggested that Obama’s statements were the result of political compulsions. They suggested that he had criticised India to placate the Christian lobby in the US and to prevent perceptions of closeness between India and the US racing ahead of ground reality. They also insinuated that the remarks were aimed at pressuring India into making concessions on the issues that defied solution during the Delhi talks.

For the first time officials admitted that the Indo-US nuclear, defence and clean energy discussions were marked by hard bargains. The most startling disclosure was that the US had pressured India to commit troops for service in Afghanistan, arguing they could be effective as they knew the region well.

One part of the officials’ theory was clearly wide of the mark. Far from pleasing the Christian lobby, Obama had invited its wrath by following up a reference to Daesh in his Prayer Breakfast speech with reminders of the terrible deeds committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Drawing attention to the treatment of the Blacks, he added, “Slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

As is his wont, Modi maintained silence on Hindu communalism. However, two senior ministers responded to Obama’s criticism.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who dismissed the attacks on minorities as mere aberrations, said, “The best example of India’s tolerance was the Dalai Lama sitting next to Obama.” The Buddhist leader, who has been living in India since he fled Tibet in 1959, was among the guests at the Prayer Breakfast.

“Religious tolerance is inbuilt in our culture,” said Home Minister Rajnath Singh. “No one is insecure in the country, no matter to which religion he or she belongs.”

In an apparent attempt to meet the US criticism, he asked the Delhi police to take stern action against those responsible for vandalising churches in the capital. A high official telephoned the Archbishop of Mumbai and apologised for the refusal of visas to two Vatican representatives who were to have attended a meeting of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India.

While the ministers spoke in measured tones, Surendra Jain of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, called Obama a “stooge of the Church” and said he had not been a good guest. He asked the government to weed out politicians batting for the Church.

By reiterating the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s stand that India is a Hindu nation in a speech on Sunday, its chief, Mohan Bhagwat, made it clear that the Hindutva forces are in no mood to relent. In fact, he sought to widen the social divide by raising a new slogan, “One language, one God, one religion”, which is a total negation of India’s cultural diversity. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 11, 2015

Playing for high stakes

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Soon after the Bharatiya Janata Party named Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, noted Indian writer and educationist UR Ananthamurthy said he wouldn’t live in a country ruled by him.

Ananthamurthy was voicing his concern over the nomination of Modi, who bears the stigma of facilitating the anti-Muslim riots of 2002, for the high office by the main opposition party. In an orchestrated response to his remark, Modi fans started sending him money orders to buy a one-way ticket to fly out of the country. Several other writers immediately rallied to his defence.

The episode is indicative of the secular sections’ misgivings over Modi’s emergence on the national scene and the Hindutva camp’s scant regard for their concerns as it plays for high stakes.

The BJP heads the National Democratic Alliance, which ruled the country from 1998 to 2004 and is the main opposition in Parliament. It is approaching next year’s elections with high hopes as the ruling United Progressive Alliance, led by the Congress, will be facing the electorate with the burden of double incumbency and grave corruption charges. Having lost two successive elections, the BJP desperately needs a win.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Hindutva’s ideological powerhouse, had planned to declare Modi its prime ministerial nominee last June. It could not accomplish the mission then as Lal Kishen Advani, the party’s tallest leader after former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and the chairman of the NDA, remonstrated. As a first step, it made Modi the party’s chief campaigner. This month, it proclaimed him prime ministerial nominee.

Criticism from outside the party notwithstanding, Modi appears to be the best candidature the BJP could find. Advani had led the party unsuccessfully in the elections of 2004 and 2009, and, at 85, age was clearly against him. None of the other leaders at the national level could claim to be his natural successor. Among the state-level leaders, Modi was the one with the most national exposure, even if he received attention for the wrong reasons.

The BJP has been declining continuously for years, and Modi faces an uphill task. Its popularity peaked in 1998 when, with a poll share of 25.59 per cent, it secured 182 seats in the Lok Sabha and emerged, for the first time, as the largest party in the House. This enabled it to attract a number of small parties and cobble up enough support to form the first NDA government.

The Congress party bagged 25.82 per cent of the votes polled in that election but got only 141 seats.

When fresh elections were called in 1999 following the collapse of the NDA government, the BJP’s vote share dropped to 23.75 per cent but it managed to maintain its strength of 182 seats and retained power. The Congress party’s vote share went up to 28.30 per cent but the vagaries of the electoral system restricted its strength in the House to 114 seats.

After the second NDA government completed its five-year term, the BJP went to the polls with the catchy slogan “India Shining” but was rebuffed by the electorate. Its vote share fell to 22.16 per cent and the number of seats dwindled to 138. The Congress party’s vote share fell too, to 26.53 per cent, but its Lok Sabha strength rose to 145, making it once again the largest single party in the house.

In 2009, the BJP’s poll share fell further to 18.80 per cent. Modi has to reverse the declining trend and push up the party’s vote share. A rise of five percentage points can take it back to the 1999 level and possibly once again make it the largest party in the Lok Sabha.

However, the party cannot expect a replication of the old scenario. During 1998-99 it could draw towards it many small parties since they disliked the Congress more than they disliked it. Besides, in Vajpayee it had a leader who had a wide measure of acceptability across the political spectrum.

The first thing Modi did on taking charge of the party’s election campaign was to dispatch his close associate, Amit Shah, to Uttar Pradesh, which has the largest bloc of 80 seats in the Lok Sabha. In 2009 the BJP won only 10 seats there, and was way behind the Samajwadi Party (23 seats), the Congress (20) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (20).

This month 48 persons were killed in communal riots in the Muzaffarnagar district of UP. The Congress and the Left parties have attributed the violence to the BJP strategy of communally polarising the society ahead of the election. Such a strategy may help win more seats but render the task of forging post-election alliances difficult by reviving memories of Gujarat 2002.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, September 24, 2013.