India After Gandhi (111 page)

The events of the 1990s confounded these predictions. For the big
story of this decade was in fact the rise of Hindu communalism, as manifested most significantly in the number of seats won by the BJP in successive general elections. Beyond the formal theatre of party politics, there was also a transformation occurring on the ground. In towns and villages across northern India, relations between Hindus and Muslims were being redefined. Once, members of the two communities had lived next to one another, traded with one another, even befriended and played with one another. True, there was also competition and conflict. Each community thought itself theologically superior, each had memories – real or imagined – of being scorned or victimized by the other. However, the compulsions of living together meant that these divisions were deflected or subsumed by activities conducted in common. But with the riots sparked by the Ayodhya movement, the ambivalences had been replaced by an unambiguous animosity. Hostility and suspicion were now the governing – some would say only – idioms of Hindu-Muslim relations.
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Fewer in numbers, and generally poorer in economic terms, the Muslims had more to lose from the souring of relations. In most riots more Muslims died than Hindus, more Muslim homes were burnt than Hindu ones. The whole community had become prey to a deep insecurity. The taunts of Hindu chauvinists that they should move to Pakistan made them feel vulnerable and victimized. The sentiments of the ordinary Indian Muslim, circa 1995, were movingly expressed by the Telugu poet Khadar Mohiuddin. On the one hand, he wrote, the Muslim is told by the Hindus to think that

My religion is a conspiracy

My prayer meetings are a conspiracy

My lying quiet is a conspiracy

My attempt to wake up is a conspiracy

My desire to have friends is a conspiracy

My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy.

On the other hand, said Khadar,

It’s no conspiracy

[for the Hindu] to make me a refugee

in the very country of my birth

It’s no conspiracy

to poison the air I breathe

and the space I live in

It’s certainly no conspiracy

to cut me to pieces

and then imagine an uncut Bharat.

The Muslim was being continually asked to prove his loyalty to India. As Khadar Mohiuddin found, ‘cricket matches weigh and measure my patriotism’ When India played Pakistan, it was demanded of Muslims that they display the national flag outside their homes, and that they loudly and publicly cheer for the national side. In the poet’s words: ‘Never mind my love for my motherland/ What’s important is how much I hate the other land’.
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The polarization of the two communities was a victory for the Sangh Parivar, the collective name by which the family of organizations built around the RSS and the BJP is known. Through the first five decades of Indian independence, the
ideology
of the Sangh Parivar had remained pretty much constant. To my knowledge, the best summation of this ideology appears in D. R. Goyal’s authoritative history of the RSS. In Goyal’s rendition, the core beliefs of what the Sangh Parivar calls ‘Hindutva’ are as follows:

Hindus have lived in India since times immemorial; Hindus are the nation because all culture, civilisation and life is contributed by them alone; non-Hindus are invaders or guests and cannot be treated as equal unless they adopt Hindu traditions, culture etc.; the non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, have been enemies of everything Hindu and are, therefore, to be treated as threats; the freedom and progress of this country is the freedom and progress of Hindus; the history of India is the history of the struggle of the Hindus for protection and preservation of their religion and culture against the onslaught of these aliens; the threat continues because the power is in the hands of those who do not believe in this nation as a Hindu Nation; those who talk of national unity as the unity of all those who live in this country are motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes and are therefore traitors; the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour because the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies; the Hindus must develop the capacity for massive retaliation and offence is the best defence; lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity.
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Goyal adds that ‘without fear of contradiction it can be stated that nothing more than this has been said in the RSS shakhas during the past 74 years of its existence’.

While its ideology was unchanged, in time the
organization
of the RSS grew enormously in strength and influence. Once an all-male body, it opened a separate women’s wing which both schoolgirls and housewives were encouraged to join. Once limited to northern India, it setup active branches in states where it previously had no presence at all. Everywhere the core ideology of the Sangh was adapted to the local context. Thus, in Gujarat, the rebuilding of the ancient Somnath temple was celebrated as a manifestation of a united and assertive Hinduism. In Orissa the focus was on the great Jagannatha temple, used by the RSS to build bridges between the local and pan-Indian Hindu identities. There was a particular emphasis on work in tribal areas, on ‘reclaiming’ the adivasis and ‘returning’ them to the Hindu fold. Schools were opened where tribal youths were taught Sanskrit and acquainted with Hindu myths and legends. The RSS worked hard in times of natural calamity, bringing grain when the rains failed and rebuilding homes after an earthquake.
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As its organization grew, the RSS’s ideology found even fuller expression through a new
campaign strategy
.M.S. Golwalkar had thought that cow-slaughter was the issue on which the Sangh Parivar would launch a countrywide struggle. That failed, but then the egregious mistakes of the Congress delivered an even more emotive issue into their lap. When Rajiv Gandhi’s government appeased Muslim fanatics and overturned the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, the Hindu radicals could claim, more convincingly than ever, that (
pace
D. R. Goyal’s words above) the present rulers were ‘motivated by the selfish desire of cornering minority votes’, that to counter this, ‘the unity and consolidation of the Hindus is the dire need of the hour’. That ‘non-Hindus are invaders or guests’ was further proven by the stubborn reluctance of Muslims to hand over the Babri Masjid. The monument itself was a standing insult to Hindu pride, a nasty reminder of the slavery of past times that had not yet been fully overcome. That they were not allowed to construct a shrine to their beloved Lord Ram was only because ‘the Hindu people are surrounded on all sides by enemies’; enemies within, as in the politicians who appeased Muslims, and enemies without, as in the malevolent Muslim nation (Pakistan) which had fought three wars against them. To build the Ram temple, but also to
protect themselves more generally, the Hindus had to ‘develop the capacity for massive retaliation’ , to realize that ‘offence is the best defence’.

To the phrases already quoted from D. R. Goyal’s summation, let us now add the critical last line: ‘lack of unity is the root cause of all the troubles of the Hindus and the Sangh is born with the divine mission to bring about that unity’.

In the Ram movement, the RSS’s mission was furthered by its sister organizations, in particular the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which had taken up the issue in the first place. Then there was the Bajrang Dal, named after Ram’s great monkey devotee Hanuman (who was also called Bajrang Bali). This was composed of angry youths, equipped not so much to ‘protect’ their idol (as Hanuman is supposed to have done) but to beat up anyone who stood in their way. Finally, there was the Shiv Sena, actually another party altogether, and whose ideas and methods were even more extreme than the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. They were prone to calling Muslims ‘poisonous snakes’ and ‘traitors’, and advising them to move to Pakistan.
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By the 1980s the RSS could no longer be called a male or north-Indian body; it had reached out to women and to other parts of the country. However, it was only through the Ram movement that it successfully overthrew the tag of being a ‘Brahmin-Bania’ organization, led and dominated by the elite, traditionally literate Hindu castes. For the first sixty years of its existence it had been guided by a Maharashtrian Brahmin – first K. B. Hedgewar, then M. S. Golwalkar, finally Balasaheb Deoras. Then in March 1994 a non-Brahmin from Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra Singh, was appointed head of the organization. This was a bow not only to the Mandal debate, but also an acknowledgement of the major role played by the backward castes in the Ayodhya movement. The cadres of the Shiv Sena and the VHP were mostly drawn from the middle castes, and there were a fair number of Dalits as well.

Through this broadening of the base – in terms of region, gender and, above all, caste – was created what might justly be called the ‘mother of all vote banks’. In the early days of the Ayodhya controversy, circa 1985-6, VHP leaders were liable to refer to the issue as one which affected the ‘sentiments of sixty crore [600 million] Hindus’. As time went on, and the issue remained unresolved, demographic change caused a natural inflation in numbers: ‘sixty crore’ became ‘seventy crore’, even ‘eighty crore’. This was, of course, a conceit. The VHP and the RSS did
not speak for the majority of Hindus. But apparently they spoke for enough Hindus to allow their political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party, to emerge as the largest single party in the Indian Parliament.

In the 1990s the BJP came to define the political agenda in a way the Congress once did in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, a property dispute in a small north-Indian town came to enjoy an overwhelming importance in the life of the nation. Thus, the political discourse in general came to be obsessed with questions of religious identity rather than matters of economic development or social reform. Losing its hold on the government, winning ever fewer seats in Parliament, the Congress was now merely reacting to debates initiated by the BJP. In desperation, it called upon Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia, then living a reclusive life with her family in Delhi, to head the party. After she took charge as Congress president in 1998, Sonia Gandhi worked overtime to dispel the image of her party as ‘anti-Hindu’. She regularly visited temples, and even went so far as to participate in the great Kumbh Mela, a congregation held every twelve years in which tens of millions of Hindus take a dip in the Ganga at Allahabad.
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While the Ayodhya dispute remained its focus, the Sangh Parivar also took up other campaigns in the 1990s. More sites were identified where, it was alleged, Muslims had usurped a Hindu shrine – in Mathura, in Banaras, in the Madhya Pradesh town of Dhar, in the Baba Budan hills of Karnataka’s Chikmaglur district. Movements were launched, with varying success, to ‘reclaim’ these places from the ‘intruders’. Simultaneously a series of attacks were launched on Christian missionaries, particularly those working in tribal areas. Churches were burnt and priests beaten up in both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. An Australian missionary was burnt alive in Orissa, along with his two sons, the arsonist later identified as a member of the Bajrang Dal named Dara Singh.
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Hindus were a comfortable majority in India, yet the RSS insisted that their pre-eminence was threatened on the one hand by Christian proselytization and on the other by the larger family size of Muslims, this in turn attributed to the practice of polygamy.
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Occurring in different parts of India, sometimes led by the RSS, at other times initiated by the VHP or the Shiv Sena, there was nonetheless an underlying pattern to these campaigns. In every case, a religious minority – Muslim or Christian – was targeted and accused of having offended Hindu sentiment, or of being in the pay of a foreign power. The demonizing of the other was a necessary prelude to mobilizing
one’s own forces, thus to foster a collective spirit of solidarity in along-divided Hindu community. Usually, there was much malice aforethought. Sometimes, however, the issue taken up was farcical rather than diabolical. In the summer of 2000, for example, the RSS journal
Panchjanya
complained that the three leading male actors in the Hindi film industry were all Muslim (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan). The journal saw in this coincidence a dark conspiracy, whose agents apparently were mafia dons who funded these actors’ films and multinational corporations whose products the actors endorsed. To thwart the conspiracy,
Panchjanya
called upon its readers to promote an up-and-coming actor named Hrithik Roshan, the lone ‘Hindu’ challenger to the monopoly of the Khans.
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As a rule, the Muslims in India were poorer than the Hindus, as well as less educated. There were a few Muslim entrepreneurs, but no real Muslim middle class. They continued to be under-represented in the professions, and in government service. Forty per cent of Muslims in cities lived below the poverty line; the situation in the countryside was not much better. The literacy rate for Muslims was well below the national average, and the gap between them and the other communities was growing. Few Muslim girls were sent to school, while the boys were often placed in
madrasas
(religious schools) whose archaic curricula did not equip them for jobs in the modern economy. Meanwhile, the taunts of the Sangh Parivar had inculcated a defensive, almost siege mentality among the Muslim intelligentsia. The young men, especially, sought succour in religion, seeing in a renewed commitment to Islam an alternative to poverty and persecution in the world outside. Nor was this turn to faith always quietist. A Students Islamic Movement of India had arisen, whose leaders argued that threats from the rival religion could be met only through force of arms.
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