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Hindu nationalism in India a century in the making

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India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks with the media during his visit at Janaki Mandir, a Hindu temple dedicated to goddess Sita, in Janakpur, Nepal on 11 May 2018. (Photo: Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar.)

In Brief

Since 2014, observers have been perplexed by the Janus-faced nature of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. While Modi’s reformist, outward-looking agenda wins praise, increasing violence against religious minorities attracts condemnation. The contradictions grow directly out of the century-old political tradition to which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) belongs: Hindu nationalism.

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Rhetorically and tactically, Hindu nationalism has long alternated between pragmatic coalition-building and religious polarisation. Its consistent threads are cultural homogenisation and antipathy toward Muslims. Doctrinally, this militant ethno-nationalism was first articulated by ‘Veer’ Savarkar, a self-styled atheist and revolutionary who was imprisoned for abetting terrorism and tried for complicity in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Savarkar identified Hinduism as the cultural tradition indigenous to the subcontinent. He recognised minority religions indigenous to India, but treated Muslims and Christians as outsiders and alien. The term Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’), widely used to refer to Hindu nationalism today, comes from the title of his book.

India’s diversity along linguistic, regional and caste lines means defining a ‘Hindu culture’ is problematic. Partly for this reason, Hindu nationalism is organisationally differentiated. The ‘parent’ organisation of BJP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), presents itself as an apolitical cultural organisation but sponsors other organisations collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, the ‘family’ of Hindu nationalist organisations. These groups focus variously on religion, youth, students, women and electoral politics.

Electoral support for Hindutva, once largely confined to elites in the Hindi-speaking north, spread across the country after 1980 in three stages. First, the BJP broadened its geographic base by absorbing the Swatantra Party, a rival conservative party. Second, when a local judge reopened a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya that some Hindus claimed had been built after the destruction of a Hindu temple, the Sangh Parivar seized on the issue to mobilise support for the construction of a temple on the site. Third, in 1990 the BJP exploited divisions over proposed quotas in government jobs and universities for artisan and peasant castes known as Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

OBC quotas, opposed both by upper caste elites and prosperous peasant castes, proved the turning point. Avoiding a frontal assault that would have alienated OBC voters, then president of the BJP L K Advani launched a march to build the Ayodhya temple. Within weeks the government, which relied on BJP support, fell and the rich farmer castes began to gravitate toward the BJP.

Advani personified Hindutva’s dualism. Urbane and educated in English, he claimed to defend ‘genuine secularism’ but dressed in warrior costume to lead the Ayodhya march. The destruction of the mosque by Hindu nationalist mobs in 1992, coupled with subsequent nationwide sectarian riots, handed the BJP leadership back to Advani’s rival, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee’s moderate image allowed him to form a coalition government in 1998.

While Vajpayee’s government during 1998–2004 downplayed inflammatory sectarian issues like Ayodhya, the larger Hindu nationalist agenda continued to advance. India developed a nuclear arsenal, history textbooks were rewritten from a Hindu nationalist perspective and the notion of Indian identity as synonymous with Hinduism became a mainstream idea. When state BJP units struggled to address poverty and caste, they eventually divided the OBCs by appealing to the most disadvantaged OBC communities with the promise that they could assimilate into elite Hindu identity.

In 2002, these tactics came to a head in Gujarat, where Narendra Modi was chief minister. A horrific, multiple-day, city-wide pogrom against Muslims, ostensibly a retaliation against the killing of Hindu nationalist activists returning from Ayodhya, was believed by many to be aimed at state elections. The killings may have contributed to the BJP’s national defeat in 2004 — but Modi, an OBC son of a tea-seller and life-long RSS activist, won elections in Gujarat in 2002 and 2007. In 2014, after ten years in opposition, the BJP chose Modi as its national leader and he led it to its first parliamentary majority.

Like Vajpayee, Modi focusses publicly on development and diplomacy, decrying provocations by Hindutva activists. But the spate, intensity and spread of current provocations far exceed those of the Vajpayee era. Cow protection vigilante groups have become ubiquitous, and have lynched Muslims for allegedly selling or eating beef. Attacks on Christians, rare in the past, are more frequent and widespread. Most disturbing, the BJP chose a notoriously anti-Muslim cleric as chief minister after winning elections in India’s largest state.

Sectarianism aside, the Modi era is witnessing concerted assaults on dissent not seen since the 1975–77 Emergency. Laws against sedition have been used to arrest student union leaders for protesting the execution of a convicted terrorist. The same laws facilitated the arrest of Muslims accused of cheering for Pakistan in a cricket match. Journalists have been killed, subjected to legal harassment and attacked by police. Civil society leaders associated with secular values have been assassinated. Statues of leaders associated with secularism have been torn down.

It would be easy to see in these developments the breakdown of civic order. But placed in historical context, they appear to be yet another part of a century-old project to construct a homogeneous national identity for India.

Ironically, Savarkar himself was contemptuous of cow worship but his insistence on treating Muslims as second-class citizens was absolute. Modi’s celebration of Savarkar’s birthday in May 2016 spoke louder than his condemnation of cow vigilantism, but did not contradict it. With its scapegoating of minorities, penchant for violence and romanticisation of a mythic past, Hindu nationalism more closely resembles European fascism than religious fundamentalism.

Arun Swamy is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Guam.

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