Countering Hindutva

By Anil Nauriya THE HINDUTVA phenomenon of the last few years has been causing increasing concern. There is no reason, of course, to think that the trend is irreversible. The secular and humanist resources in India are too deep-rooted to be overwhelmed by the communalist tendency. Even so, the Hindutva phenomenon is looming large on the Indian horizon. Those countering it lack neither dedication nor industry, but they have not yet made the impact they would have liked to see. How should the challenge be met? It entails long years of constructive work and a non-sectarian organisational attitude. Political parties, as we have known them after Independence, will have to transform themselves. For example, they will need, directly or through associated organisations, to open schools, take up literacy work and launch movements against child labour. This work cannot be left to the state alone, as some political parties assumed after Independence. The task requires the cooperation of several political and other intellectual and academic traditions. The latter may have to reduce their isolation from party politics and also to increase work among people who are not ``like-minded''. Though the parties of the Left may in some ways be ready for the fight, their current strength and influence may not suffice. The groups that make up the Congress tradition as well as the Janata Dal tradition will probably have to participate in finding a way to meet the Hindutva challenge. On the party-political plane this means, as a pre-requisite, that the Congress(I) and the Janata Dal will have to regain their credibility with the people. The Congress, after Independence, withdrew from constructive work as a part of its own programme. This was a reason for its steady decline as it lost direct contact with the people. Three additional factors led to the party receding as a national force, especially since the mid-Seventies, the first being the increased corruption that contaminated it. The biggest single parliamentary leap scored by the BJP so far came when it rode the V. P. Singh anticorruption tide of the 1989 general elections. The second major reason for the waning of the Congress(I) was its loss of credibility on the communal question with the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Maliana- Meerut incidents of 1987 and finally, the Babri Masjid affair from 1987 to 1992. With these incidents and its role in relation to them, the party lost its ideological advantage over the BJP. Its claim to moral superiority came to be questioned. Third, it became increasingly authoritarian internally. Inner-party democracy was stifled. Free discussions such as those between Nehru and his colleagues, many of them old companions from British Indian jails, became rare in the Indira Gandhi years and in the subsequent period. Members of select coteries, not excluding favourite stenographers, became more important than the ordinary party MP, representing an electorate of more than a million people. It is on these issues, rather than the ``foreigners question'', that dissidents within the party might usefully have focussed. Addressing them is essential if the Congress tradition is to recover some of its past elan.

Why did the Janata Dal, for its part, fail to fill the space vacated by the Congress(I)? This breached the last dyke and opened the way for the BJP. Had this political alternative not failed to fulfil its early promise, it is unlikely that the BJP could have emerged as the largest single party in Parliament. To appreciate why the Janata Dal failed to retain a place in the national imagination and reduced itself to a sectional party, one has to go back to the events of 1989-1990. Right-to-work was the initial economic slogan of the Janata Dal Government. Unable to summon the political resolve to implement the change in priorities and redistribution of resources that this would have entailed, the Dal sought two escape routes. The first was to divert the question of right-to-work into a legal-constitutional discourse, which was not really the original point at all and by itself hardly very meaningful. The second was to shift the focus, a few months later, to the question of reservation of jobs in public employment. The fact of the relative numerical insignificance of such jobs was overcome by saying that the real issue was empowerment. Many of us, including this writer, supported the argument. In moving ahead on this road, however, the Janata Dal preferred the Mandal approach to the one that Karpoori Thakur had earlier taken in Bihar. Both the Mandal and the Karpoori Thakur schemes were basically caste-based but differed in some respects. One apparently slight difference between the two made a world of ideological difference. And it came to affect the whole personality of the Janata Dal. As against 27 per cent caste-based reservation provided under the Mandal scheme, the Karpoori Thakur formula had provided 20 per cent. In other words, it provided substantively what Mandal provided. The remaining 7 per cent reservation in the Karpoori Thakur formula was based on gender and on solely economic criteria. The difference between the two schemes in this respect was thus marginal but subtle. The Karpoori Thakur approach could make people from a cross-section of society feel that they had a stake in the scheme. The Mandal scheme did not address this issue. Instead it divided society: a caste excluded from the Mandal list had no further stake in it. The Mandal formula, therefore, made a political gift to the BJP of the social base associated with the caste identities not included in the scheme. This social base is numerically significant in north India. Another constituent of the coming struggle which may have to re-examine its role in the rise of Hindutva, and its place in any attempt to counter this phenomenon, is the intelligentsia. A political challenge to Hindutva will need intellectual and academic support. The striking feature here is that Indian social science and historical scholarship, largely under Anglo-centric tutelage, has been retreating from an articulation of Indian nationalism. Gandhi and Nehru kept Hindutva at bay. But they succeeded in doing so by articulating nationalism and giving it an inclusive character. Current scholarship abandons nationalism and leaves it free to be hegemonised by Hindutva. It overlooks something that Gandhi and Nehru never forgot: that Anglo- centricism too has an agenda - and no stake in India's social unity. It its effort to delegitimise Indian nationalism, Anglo- centricism, therefore, promotes with impunity polar opposites in scholarship: Muslims versus the Indian national movement; the Dalits versus the national movement; peasants versus Indian

nationalism; marxist ideologues versus Indian nationalism. These stereotypes feed into and reinforce the Hindutva stereotypes. The Anglo-centric polarisation, and implicit denial of any commonality of interests among the people, may be understandable up to a point. But it builds primarily on half-truths. It pointedly excludes those Muslims, Dalits, peasants, marxist ideologues and others who do not fit into its stereotypes. Such scholarship broadens the divides and destroys the bridges. It claims to point the way forward but hopes to do so denying the distance already travelled. Thus, it lacks credibility as well. The morrow of Independence, when India suffered the pangs of partition, would ordinarily have provided the most propitious occasion for the growth of Hindutva. Yet, this did not happen then and it even became possible to set up a secular state. At least one reason for this was the public memory of the leading role in the struggle for freedom that personalities such as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Saifuddin Kitchlew had played and the respect and warm feelings such names evoked across the country. There were such resources in every State and district in India. This made it difficult to make people think of Hindus and Muslims as polar opposites with essentially conflicting interests. And it facilitated the creation of a secular state. But stereotyping demands that such Muslims be silently written off unless they can be selectively appropriated in service of the very stereotyping that their politics challenged. So it is memories like these that current scholarship often erases or mocks. It then claims and hopes to fight Hindutva.

(The Hindu, February 26, 2000)