MA Jinnah

Where the Linear Progression of Hindutva Will Take India

Hidden beneath layers of political exigencies for close to a century, the project is now out on full display.

A new idea of India is here for everyone to see. It isn’t a harmonious one but is triumphant at the moment.

At this moment, there are protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act throughout the country and 42 people have been killed in riots in the national capital.

The last nine months – meaning, the period of time when the second term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi began – have seen Hindutva acquire a new sense of urgency. Even the fig leaf of development is a thing of the past.

This, indeed, is Hindutva’s true and unalloyed form, something that was hidden beneath layers of political exigencies for close to a century.

The BJP has Modi at the helm, with a close second-in-command in Union home minister Amit Shah. And a third saffron face on the political firmament is Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath. While the Congress is grappling with a severe leadership crisis, the BJP has its line of succession ready.

Also read: ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Hindutva: Where Has the Category ‘Communalism’ Gone?

However, there is a difference with the BJP of the past. If the previous national leadership of the BJP had former Hindutva strongman L.K. Advani complemented by former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee – who was in many senses admired even by liberals – the present line of succession has nothing to do with moderation.

We have Hindutva charted in a linear progression.

One look at the past of the BJP and its predecessor Jana Sangh makes the point clear. Let us make sense of the present by looking at the political history of Hindutva over the decades since independence.

The 1950s

In the first decade of Independence, the Jana Sangh – the political affiliate of the RSS – was born. And its successes were meagre despite Partition and its attendant anxieties. The Jana Sangh won just three seats in 1952 and four in 1957. Its pet issues were complete integration of Jammu and Kashmir – Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee died in a Kashmir jail after being arrested for crossing over without a permit – with India, promotion of Hindi and opposing cow slaughter.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee.

But success didn’t smile on the party. Jawaharlal Nehru took charge of the Congress and steered it towards a clearly secular policy, marginalising Hindu conservative leader P.D. Tandon in the process. And in the north Indian states – where the Jana Sangh fancied its chances – the Congress had champions of Hindi as its leaders. Congress governments in some states also banned cow slaughter, putting Article 48 of the constitution, a part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, into operation.

The 1960s

Exasperated with its failures, the Jana Sangh embarked upon a two-pronged policy. It sought to make common cause with the socialists, the Swatantra Party, etc., on a plank of anti-Congress-ism. Four Lok Sabha by-elections in north Indian states in 1963 saw joint candidates being fielded, with some success. Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia was elected to the Lok Sabha in this election.

Parallel to this anti-Congress-ism, which entailed some compromise on core Hindutva, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an RSS-affiliate founded in 1964, launched a movement asking for a constitutional amendment to enable the Centre to ban cow slaughter in all states.

The 1966 agitation turned violent and some people were killed. The 1967 Lok Sabha and assembly polls – the last time the two were held together – saw seat adjustments among opposition parties in many states and the Congress suffered reverses. The Jana Sangh became part of short-lasting Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal governments, formed as legislative arrangements, in some provinces. The party did reasonably well in Uttar Pradesh, where the cow protection movement also helped it.

The 1970s

By this time, moderation tactics had come to occupy a legitimacy within the party, as it had tasted some success because of them. The Jana Sangh and RSS joined the JP movement of 1974 – Indira Gandhi’s dominance in the 1971 polls despite opposition alliances had made this crucial – against corruption and an economic crisis.

Also read: AAP: Soft Hindutva or a Bulwark Without Illusions?

The movement started in Gujarat and Bihar, and became national under Jaya Prakash Narayan. Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in 1975 – soon after the Allahabad high court ruled that she had won her last election using unfair means and the Supreme Court did not offer her much relief – and the JP movement continued underground after the arrest of its leadership.

This was the Jana Sangh’s first tryst with civil libertarian politics. Before the 1977 elections, the Jana Sangh, the socialists, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Congress (O) merged to form the Janata Party and defeated the Congress. Vajpayee and Advani became ministers in the Morarji Desai government. But ideological contradictions soon made the Janata Party split, even as Indira Gandhi came back to power in 1980.

The 1980s

This decade began badly for the BJP, founded in 1980 as the successor of the Jana Sangh. Under Vajpayee, the BJP made Gandhian socialism and the legacy of JP as its creed. Meanwhile, with Sikh militancy on the rise and Hindus in Punjab bearing the brunt of it, Indira Gandhi was able to breach the Jana Sangh’s core vote base. Her assassination in 1984 also led to a wave of sympathy towards her, despite riots in Delhi killing scores of Sikhs.

The Congress under Rajiv Gandhi won a record 415 seats in the 1984 elections and Vajpayee’s BJP was reduced to two. This marked a temporary eclipse of Vajpayee and Advani soon succeeded him as the party president. The VHP, meanwhile, began the Ram temple movement with a series of yatras.

Also read: BJP’s Kapil Mishra Has Issued an ‘Ultimatum’ to the Delhi Police. But Who Is He?

Rajiv Gandhi tried to appease both Muslim and Hindu fundamentalisms by reversing the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgement through legislation, on the one hand, and facilitating the opening of the locks of Ram Janmabhoomi, on the other. He was also hit hard by the Bofors scam. The newly-founded Janata Dal of VP Singh, supported from outside by the BJP and the left parties, came to power. The BJP alone won 85 seats.

Advani turned to hard Hindutva, making statements in support of a Ram temple at Ayodhya. V.P. Singh announced implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations and, apparently in counter to that, Advani started the Ram Rath Yatra, drawing huge crowds but also polarising society enough for riots to take place. The BJP withdrew support to the V.P. Singh government after Lalu Prasad as Bihar chief minister got Advani arrested in Samastipur.

The 1990s

The BJP grew from strength to strength amid polarisation. It won 120 seats in the 1991 Lok Sabha polls, which saw the Congress coming back to power under Narasimha Rao. In 1992, the Babri mosque was demolished.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Photo: Sanjay Sharma/INDIAPIX NETWORK

The BJP’s rise, however, had its limits. The party was powerful only in northern, central and western India and was weak in the south, the east and the north-east. It now needed alliances to convert its improved tallies into a majority.

In 1995-96, Vajpayee, the moderate face, returned as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. In 1996, the BJP tasted power for 13 days, but could not win the trust vote. In 1998, the BJP with a coalition government under Vajpayee tasted power for 13 months. And in 1999, the Vajpayee government came to power with a coalition of more than 20 parties for a full five-year term.

Lessons from the BJP’s rise

The BJP could convert its Hindutva surge under Advani into an NDA majority only under Vajpayee. The reason: allies having Muslim voters needed a moderate face to rationalise their support for the BJP, made largely for power.

This led to the BJP acquiring a two-pronged leadership: Vajpayee as the acceptable face and Advani as the hardliner. But the acceptable face alone could bring it to power. In other words, Hindutva’s surge also, paradoxically, meant its dilution.

Also read: There Is Communalism – Not Islamophobia – in India

Advani could not fit into Vajpayee’s shoes despite attempts at moderation and the BJP could not return to power under him in 2009. Now, the Congress seemed to be well-placed, with two consecutive victories under Sonia Gandhi in 2004 and 2009.

However, the UPA was hit by corruption charges in its second term. Social activist Anna Hazare led public protests in the capital, undermining the legitimacy of the central government. Adverse CAG reports did the same, and the media stayed critical of the government.

The vacuum and Modi’s rise

The vacuum thus created had to be filled by someone. In this case, it was filled not by the BJP but one man, Narendra Modi, whose public oratory and PR machinery made him seem like a saviour when everything was chaotic. His Hindutva image acquired a new layer – the transformative, no-nonsense leader.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: Twitter

This new BJP rode to power on the populist promise of a new India and all moderation was a thing of the past. Regional parties were willing to work with a BJP with no moderate face in a position of prominence. The 2019 victory was a re-affirmation that public mood now demanded hyper-nationalist rhetoric with Muslims as the thinly-veiled other.

Also read: Weaponising Shaheen Bagh, the BJP’s Last Resort

It is this shift that has brought Hindutva to the core like never before. The second Modi government is all about a hard line on Kashmir and about the CAA, which many see as discriminatory towards Muslims.

Protests in every corner of India have been in news over the past few months. And Delhi has now seen the worst riots since 1984, as mobs attacked Muslim localities after a provocative speech by BJP leader Kapil Mishra. The police are being seen as lax in containing the violence, which has led to about 40 deaths till now and global bad press.

This is the high-point of Hindutva, where cultural polarisation is the politics of the day. There is no alternative voice within the BJP for any other shade of national opinion.

The project of Hindutva never had it so good. Unfortunately, harmony never had it so bad.

Dr. Vikas Pathak, who has a PhD in modern history from JNU, teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.

‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Hindutva: Where Has the Category ‘Communalism’ Gone?

The term ‘communalism’ served an important conceptual purpose. It made the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva amply clear.

A series of recent events are making many wonder whether the BJP alone is determining the template for politics these days and whether the Aam Aadmi Party is the latest to adopt that template.

The AAP has, in recent days, taken to lord Hanuman in a major way. Arvind Kejriwal visited a famous Hanuman temple before and after the Delhi assembly polls and AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj announced that the party would hold Sundar Kanda recitals in various localities in the capital. The Sundar Kanda is a part of the Ramayana that is dedicated to Lord Hanuman.

Also read: AAP: Soft Hindutva or a Bulwark Without Illusions?

Meanwhile, the BJP has shown no signs of moderation after its defeat in Delhi. It had fought the elections on the Shaheen Bagh protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Party leaders had made a variety of provocative statements that targeted the protesters, among whom large numbers are Muslims.

Even as home minister Amit Shah said that these statements may have damaged the BJP, Union minister Giriraj Singh has yet again courted controversy by saying that Muslims should have gone to Pakistan in 1947.

Union home minister Amit Shah at an election campaign before the Delhi assembly elections. Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore

The BJP’s hate speeches are being seen by many as hard Hindutva and AAP’s calls for public religiosity as soft Hindutva.

While it is entirely possible that AAP is trying to wean away sections of Hindus from the BJP by tactically employing Hindu symbolism, the question is whether this can be called soft Hindutva.

All religiosity isn’t soft Hindutva

The entire confusion springs from two related factors: the meaning of Hindutva isn’t as well known as it should be, and communalism as a term has fallen out of vogue in political commentaries after the rise of the BJP in 2014.

Coming to the first point, Hindutva isn’t the same a practised Hinduism. It is basically a modern ideology that seeks to organise Hindus by projecting the Muslim as the Other. Translated as Hindu-ness, the term Hindutva was popularised by V.D. Savarkar in 1923. In his text Hindutva, he argued that all those whose fatherland and holy land were in India were Hindus. This marked a sharp distinction between Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, on the one hand, and Muslims and Christians, on the other.

Also read: BJP’s Kapil Mishra Has Issued an ‘Ultimatum’ to the Delhi Police. But Who Is He?

What is crucial here is that the distinction between soft and hard Hindutva is not one between public religiosity and hate speech. At its very core, Hindutva is about organising Hindus against the ‘Other’, primarily defined as Muslim.

Mahatma Gandhi was far more religious than Savarkar. But this does not make Gandhi a practitioner of soft Hindutva. He was a devout Hindu who rejected Hindutva.

The term communalism helps

The other reason why the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva has become blurred in the eyes of many is that the term “communalism” has gone out of fashion.

From the late 1980s to 2014, this was perhaps the most common term used by commentators when they wrote on politics. And they used it as the antonym of secular.

How did the term come about and what did it mean? There is considerable historical research on this.

Historian Gyanendra Pandey researched its origins. He argued that till the 1920s, service to one’s religious community was seen as part of service to the nation. The reason: many early nationalists had internalised colonialist historiography that said that religion was the moving force of Indian history, something that marked it as different from the west.

However, Pandey argues, this investment in service to community was taken as a threat to national unity because many Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in India between 1923 and 1926. Some of them were particularly devastating. Pandey says that this made Indian nationalists coin the term communalism, a pejorative word aimed at denouncing the idea of investing solely in one’s religious community as the Other of nationalism, which implied service to the nation, a collection of all communities and citizens.

Also read: There Is Communalism – Not Islamophobia – in India

Historian Bipan Chandra offered a definition of communalism. He argued that communalism was the flawed belief that the material, or secular, interests of co-religionists converged and those of people belonging to different religions diverged, and were even in conflict. Chandra called communalism a form of “false consciousness”.

This term acquired currency since the 1920s and was the defining feature of an inclusive Indian nationalism that informed the freedom struggle. Before Partition, it served as a critique of the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha.

After Partition, when Muslims became a small minority – ranging from 10-% in 1951 to 14-% in 2011 – the term communalism was used as a counter to Hindutva, which was seen as divisive.

In its own worldview, however, Hindutva was Hindu Nationalism rather than communalism. It was a narrow, exclusivist, vision of the Indian nation while secular nationalism was a broad and inclusive vision of it.

The use of the term communalism to confront the BJP peaked after 1992 and most parties in opposition to it – apart from most columnists – used the term freely to denounce exclusivist Hindutva politics that made Muslims the other.

Also read: Weaponising Shaheen Bagh, the BJP’s Last Resort

The term “communalism”, while it was a construct of the 1920s, served an important conceptual purpose. It made the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva amply clear. Mahatma Gandhi, in other words, was deeply religious but not communal. His religiosity was positive – one choice among many for a free citizen, who can choose to be religious, agnostic or an atheist – and was not aimed at opposition to another community.

On the contrary, M.A. Jinnah and Savarkar, while they were not religious, were communal, as they used religion in an instrumentalist manner to divide society on religious lines.

Is AAP’s Sundar Kanda recital communal?

If we revive the term “communalism” as a central category to make sense of politics, the problem gets solved to a great extent.

Then we can ask pointed questions to discern the politics of the BJP and AAP. Is Kejriwal’s visit to a Hanuman temple communal? It isn’t, as he didn’t use the visit to target any other community. Is Bhardwaj’s announcement of Sundar Kanda recitals communal? Again, the answer is in the negative, because there is no hint that these recitals are to be used to target Muslims. Political scientist and co-author of the Everyday Communalism, Sajjan Kumar made this distinction clear in a conversation with me.

Let us now pose the same questions in relation to the BJP. Is Giriraj Singh’s statement that Muslims should have gone to Pakistan in 1947 communal? Here, the statement is clearly aimed at targeting a minority and thus falls under the definition of communalism.

Similarly, was the BJP slogan “desh ke gaddaron ko” in relation to the Shaheen Bagh anti-CAA protests – largely led by Muslim women – communal?

In this case, too, a protest against a law – peaceful protest falls within freedom guaranteed under Article 19 (1) of the constitution, subject to some reasonable restrictions mentioned in Article 19 (2) – was targeted by Union ministers and BJP leaders, who not only took part in hate sloganeering but also painted protest as treason. Ironically, the BJP as we know it is partly a product of protests during the JP movement of the 1970s.

Hate speeches coming from within the saffron party against the Muslim-heavy Shaheen Bagh protests open it to the charge of adopting communalism as a polarising tactic.

Also read: Bhagat Singh and Savarkar, Two Petitions that Tell Us the Difference Between Hind and Hindutva

The term communalism has gone out of fashion, but has been replaced by alternative words lacking precision. These days, many use terms like “identitarian”, “cultural politics” and “Indic”, which is used as distinct from the Semitic, or pertaining to Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

These terms – while relevant for academic analyses – obfuscate the central difference between the politics of the BJP and AAP.

The fact is that BJP and AAP politics isn’t organised around a single template. These are two different templates – one has an anti-Muslim message and the other doesn’t.

Whether one sees secularism as atheistic – like Bhagat Singh did – or something compatible with religious faith – as Gandhi did – is a matter of choice. None of the two is communal.

It is time critics of AAP understand this central, conceptual, difference.

Dr. Vikas Pathak, who has a PhD in modern history from JNU, teaches at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.