The Vishwa Hindu Parishad's announcement of the second phase of kar seva at Ayodhya on 6 December has dashed any hope that our sorely bruised society will be given a respite to lick its wounds and return to a semblance of tranquillity.
What is still more disquieting is the Goebbelsian finesse with which it intends to use Hindu symbols to achieve its ends. The ashes of those killed in the police firings of October 30 and November 2 are to be carried to every village in India. No one knows exactly how many were killed, and no one will know just how many urns are voyaging through the country. But no one will open them to examine their contents either. The VHP's purpose will therefore be admirably served.
The VHP clearly intends to continue stoking the communal fires till a wave of Hindu religious passion sweeps the Bharatiya Janata Party to power.
Fiftyseven years ago in two elections held six months apart, the vote of the National Socialist Party in Germany jumped from less than one to six millions. That sudden wave of passion swept Adolf Hitler to power, destroyed the Weimar Republic and led inexorably to the holocaust (in which six million Jews lost their lives) and the second World War.
India could easily travel down that same road in the coming years. The threat is not imminent but it is near enough, and serious enough to be ignored only at our peril.
What is the VHP feeding on Fundamentalist passions are often shortlived. This would be all the more so in Hinduism, whose eclecticism, lack of Messianic doctrine and a religious "Book" make a fundamentalist interpretation extremely difficult to sustain. What we are seeing is the beginnings of a neo-fascist movement whose goal is the capture of state power and the replacement of a democratic state with an authoritarian state.
The VHP and more recently the BJP are exacting Hindutva. Their favoured epic is of course the Ramayana and the symbols they are exploiting are taken from this great epic. Thus Mr. Advani's Ram Rath evokes the image of the Ashwamedh Yagna. Whoever dared to stop it had to be prepared to battle against the king. The Bajrang Dal refers to Rama's army of monkeys in the battle against Ravana. The despatch of urns containing the ashes of kar sevaks killed in Ayodhya evokes not only the image of martyrdom but touches a potent nationalist nerve.
The VHP is harping on humiliations heaped on Hindus by the Muslims over six hundred years, in particular the destruction of their temples, to destroy the Hindu identity. The "relocation" of the Babari Masjid or for that matter the mosques at Mathura and Kasi, is designed to wipe out this humiliation. And just as the Nazis exploited antisemitism and focussed hatred on the Jews, the VHP is exploiting the latent distrust of Muslims after the partition of British India and focussing hatred afresh on Muslims. And while the Nazis had then storm troopers - the SA - the VHP has its Bajrang Dal.
For the VHP, Ayodhya is not an end but the means to an end. It has become both the justification and the rallying point for a coldly calculated bid to mobilise support under the banner of recalcitrant, vengeful Hinduism. What it is doing is not to defend Hinduism - the very idea that this is necessary in a country where 85 per cent of the population is Hindu is ludicrous - but to hijack the symbols of Hinduism to serve the political end of creating an authoritarian State.
Four out of five acts of provocation, if not more, have been by the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. These range from deliberately taking religious processions through sensitive areas, to attacks on and desecration of mosques and idols, to the burning of shops, to the stabbing of individuals simply because they are Muslims. In the last twelve months in particular, the Shilanyas at Ayodhya (October - November, 1989) the sending of the Ram Jyotis to the villages (September 90) and the kar seva of October have been the main modes for fanning communal passion. Each of these has left a trail of dead bodies in its wake.
Why have the communal fires begun to burn brightly once again. The answer lies not in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or the excesses of ruling parties bent on capturing the Muslim vote banks. It is to be found in the forces unleashed by capitalist industrialisation.
Fascism was born in Europe to a very large extent out of the attempt to fight back against the forces of modernisation.
It is no coincidence that the leaders and cadres of the BJP and the VHP are drawn by and large from precisely the threatened small business classes as were those of the European fascists and the French Poujadistes. It is also no surprise that the BJP's economic platform... has the blend of market-oriented populism that is best designed to protect the interests of this intermediate class in our society.
The paranoia that makes credible the assertion that Hinduism is in danger in its own homeland is the paranoia of this threatened class and the anger and hatred that the VHP seeks to turn against the Muslim community is 'the diverted rage of people who see that economic forces that they cannot fight are conspiring to bring about their inevitable end. The Hindu chauvinist upsurge needs to be taken seriously because at its base lies the battle for survival of a substantial threatened economic class. This threat will not only not go away but deepen. Since Indian economic growth is slow and since policies are heavily biased towards creating more and more small and insecure entrepreneurs, the numerical strength and economic muscles of this class will continue to grow. The threat to democracy and to unity will therefore get more and not less serious. It can only be fought if the danger is recognised early and all democratic and secular forces, which have a vested interest in the continued pluralism and in political decentralisation, come together to crush the BJP at the polls. Postponing elections is a recipe for disaster, for it discredits the democratic forces while giving the VHP time to continue its mobilisation.
(Source: The Hindu, Madurai, 17 November, 1990)