HINDU CHAUVINISM

Neo-Hinduism: An Agenda for Political Disintegration and Social Conflict

I.K. Shukla in the Mainstream, 18 November, 1995

Passion and purpose culminated in hell's fire that charred India in the wake of Babari Masjid and Rath Yatra. The trail of blood and tears that these twin genocidal enterprises blazed across the length and breadth of an ancient land was unique in many ways. Conceptually bold, it was an act of desperation. Borrowed from its European forbears this was fascistic terror in instalments with the implicit threat of more to come as and when needed. Ostensibly "rectifying" the past it was geared to controlling the present and conditioning the future. its triumphalist orchestration was primed to intimidating the minorities (Hindus and non- Hindu alike) and reassuring the parasitic and privileged plutocracy. It was, too, rejection of democracy and a multicultural society. To that extent, it was virulent strain to tribalist assertion. By extension, a violent repudiation of civic norms of a modern society. Force, not claims of justice, would be the arbiter henceforward in the polity that would be shaped and steered by the resurgent neo- Hinduism - this was the message. It did not go well with the minorities, or if they did not understand, that under the Indian sun, subservience will be their station.

There are a lot of paradoxes and contradictions involved. But reason and logic being subversive, they have been pre-empted and effectively barred. Therefore, it would not do to discuss the manifest incongruities and glaring dysfunctions. However, some of them can be jus: mentioned: fusion of Dark Ages with state-of-the-art communication technology, the much ballyhooed Hindu tolerance, and its feral reality, selecting only Muslim monuments and landmarks for desecration and demolition but leaving unharmed those of the Christian conqueror's (the British), equating vandalism with virility and 'cleansing' with rape and arson, seemingly all this nullifying the impotence and inferiority of the generations past (or, attesting the impotence and inferiority of the present one?), etc. To use the democratic appurtenances in pursuit of fascistic aims is too evident and historically, too, recurrent to bear any amplification.

Why this autopsy, why now, and why not only for the benefit of the minorities so-called (in any configuration all of them together would constitute the real majority of the nation and this is the delirium treinens of the status quoists, the predatory patricians) but also for those yet regarded within the mainstream, the 'other' Hindus, secular and otherwise?

First, it may not be all that premature. With elections around the corner, and ambitions of the fascistic fringe swirling, there would be no more opportune a time as now. Here is still the time and the space, relatively unmuddied by the turgidity of instigated emotions of mob fury and fundamentalist fervor, wherein the national collectivity - the intelligentsia and the general populace - can reflect on the ogre of neo-Hindu Frankenstein, threatening not only to shred the past but also to subvert and disfigure the future. The time is now or never.

 Secondly, the neo-Hindu recidivism poses a serious threat to India as an entity political and cultural. Its tribal bent augurs ill for a nation as multifariously constituted as India. There is no nation on this planet which accommodates the bewildering variety of autonomous cultural aggregations as does India. The neo-Hindu hegemony of the superstructure will aggravate and exacerbate the cross-cultural and cross-regional tensions precipitating splintering and sanguinary secessionism.

 With strife consuming the populace, with neo-Hindu hegemons and hierarchs safely ensconced in power, the nation will regress to ethnic warfare and tribal bloodletting, harking back to primitivism and hailing the European paradigm of former Yugoslavia rendering us a 'former India'. With the egalitarian imperative of modern polities cast aside, the populace deflected from mobilizing to demand the basics of a civil society, destitution will dig deep and the nation would be thrown into the abyss of massive misery and social degradation. This would be the neo-Hindus' revenge against the Muslim rulers who had given India a central administration, a territorial integrity, a cohesive civil society and a protracted period of peace and prosperity (with) no wealth repatriated abroad.

 The theme of revenge is a constant is any such drive. In one form or another it will abide. Women being burnt alive by the caste Hindus for the crime of wearing blouse and forgetting that they were low-caste, heads of members of a wedding procession chopped because the bridegroom had the effrontery to ride a horse (the privilege reserved for only the upper caste Hindus), demands for better wages drowned in blood and blaze, mayhem meeting the refusal to be bludgeoned or bribed. into a vote-bank and thus defying a hoary tradition which tempers frayed by claims staked as citizens to a fair share kept the lowly in their appointed place and function, in the national dispensation, peace disturbed by the assertion that the agenda of the emaciated and oppressed cannot be the same as that of the pot-bellied exploiters and freeloaders all these qualifying for punitive reprisal the list will ever remain tentative. New 'crimes' of the victims of age-aid repression would continue cropping up and boiling the adrenalin of the pampered lotus-eaters anointed in perpetuity as the 'chosen ones' who are beyond the pale of law, humanity and morals.

Seen in this light, Babari Masjid and Rath Yatra will recur in various guises and various locations. A soft state would mask its complicity by feigning somnolence - no see, no hear, no speak, confirming, in this instance as in many others, that it has become obsolete, that with it at the helm, democracy is in danger, secularism is in shambles and national security is under siege by enemies home-bred and distant. Masjid and Yatra were coercive and violent pleas by the neo-Hindus to the minorities to be their permanent vote-bank, or else. Fifty-two per cent of India was being put to sword and fire so that it sees light and switches its electoral loyalty en masse to the neo-Hindu diktat. Mandal Committee Report, was not, per sec very objectionable. Otherwise its recommendations would not be incorporated now in the political platforms of all the parties including the rabidly communal ones... That they were outsmarted and pre-empted was the shooting pain that convulsed the neo- Hindu aspirants to power. This Report and its recommendations were the only statutory carrot that could be credibly thrown to the 'minorities' to lure them in the fold. V.P. Singh had whisked it away and made Delhi 'too distant'. More, he adopted it flauntingly, without any condescending hedges and convoluted chippings or dilatory deferments. By assigning it again to some parliamentary committee to examine its viability. V.P could yet have won some political laurels, and the committee could yet have buried it in deliberations long and deep. That would be the standard 'parliamentary practice' as post-1947 India has known and 'permitted". Flouting this convention was a crime for which the transgressor had to pay a heavy price. Perhaps V.P. Singh had reckoned with it as he took the plunge. Indian politics, or its electoral variant, has not been the same since. It could not be. V.P. Singh had decided right then that it should not be.

There is a more potent reason why the neo-Hindus should be kept at bay. With Pakistan as its geo-political outpost in the region, it would suit the hegemonic ambitions of the US never to let a democratic regimen. thwart its designs. Propping up the military and fundamentalist extremism to checkmate any such stirrings will accord with the ever-burgeoning 'needs' and vintage reflexes of the United States. This irritant will be one prong of its bid to "contain" India. The other prong will be the neo-Hindus who will be aided and abetted in keeping India simmering with disaffection and upheaval It is thus that India would be "contained". Punjab and Kashmir will be made to breed more Punjabs and Kashmirs. If not India, at least Kashmir can be made a phantom state... Just as Afghanistan has been made one under the joint auspices of the US and Pakistan, just as Palestine and Bosnia are being (un-) made thanks to the US-UN, just as banana republics in Latin America and Central America have been (un-) made.