Communalism today in India

Kunal Chattopadhyay

1. Introduction

Any discussion on communalism in India has to be situated in the wider South Asian context. This is particularly important for two reasons. In the first place, ever since the attacks on the twin towers in New York, Muslim communalism, (often labelled as fundamentalism in the west) has been singled out as the source of problems in South Asia. The imperialist media has portrayed Muslim fundamentalism as the principal threat to modern civilisation, and made any identity linked to Islam the next of kin of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. A gleeful Hindu Right, as well as the mainstream bourgeois parties like the Congress in India, seized on this to attack Pakistan. Second, I would argue that while India has a powerful capitalist class and a Hindu majority population, so that Hindu communalism had been able to transform itself into an aggressive fascist movement, Muslim minority communalism in India cannot expect majority support, nor can it expect support from Hindu capitalists if it makes a call for the destruction of Hindus. In Pakistan or Bangladesh, Muslim communalism can be very dangerous, but lacking a powerful capitalist class, it cannot become fascism.

1. Marxist Views of Fascism

Historically, there were three strands of Marxist arguments about fascism^[i]. The ultra-left model (Bordiga in Italy, the Communist International under Stalin, and the Communist Party of Germany) saw fascism as a tool of the bourgeoisie, denying its specificities, and often claiming that the fascists and social democrats were twins. The right wing Social Democratic model, in the name of stressing the mass nature of fascism, ignored/minimized its bourgeoisie linkage. August Thalheimer, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and Ignasio Silone took a dialectical approach. Presenting his case at the very period when Hitler was moving to power, Trotsky argued that fascism was both a mass movement based on the petty bourgeoisie, and a political force that enabled the bourgeoisie to overcome its structural crisis of accumulation, particularly in countries with powerful working class movements, where it is not possible to uproot trade unions, or other mass organisations of the working class, simply through police action or military dictatorship. Big capital allied with fascism only as a last resort, because in a period of crisis it needed to smash working class organisations at any cost. The price it paid was that fascism politically expropriated the bourgeoisie even while protecting its economic domination.

In the Indian context, this debate has resurfaced. While Sumit Sarkar, Marzia Casolari, Prabhat Patnaik or Kunal Chattopadhyay^[ii] characterise the Hindutva movement led by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) as fascist, Achin Vanaik contests this assessment^[iii]. So we need to discuss why the RSS including its electoral front, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), can be called fascist.

1. Hindutva’s own claims

Historically, the RSS^[iv] and its close allies had openly affirmed their affinity to fascism. This is evident from the writings and speeches of V. D. Savarkar (the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha), M. S. Golwalkar (the Second Sarsanghchalak or supreme leader of the RSS — the RSS always follows the Fuhrerprinzip^[v], [Ek Chalak Anuvartitva]) and other ideologues of the RSS. Both supported the Nazi actions against the Jews and drew a parallel with the status of Muslims in India and what should be done to them.^[vi] Moreover the anti-communist agenda of the Sangh Parivar [the RSS and its fronts] is quite visible when Golwalkar’s argued in his Bunch of Thoughts, that democracy is bad, because it enables communists to compete for power, and forces other parties to compete with them in offering sops to toiling people.

• Hindutva till the early 1980s – a synoptic view

As I am concerned chiefly with the present, I will not discuss in detail the history of Hindutva. Hindu cultural nationalism with Hindu supremacist agenda, identifying Indian with Hindu, emerged in the late 19^th century, and it seldom targeted British rule as the principal enemy. By the early 1920s, Muslims had been fashioned as the “real” enemy of this Hindu nationalism. The Hindu Mahasabha was the first organisation that tried to unite Hindus as Hindus, on a communal basis. RSS leaders like K. B. Hegdewar and M. S. Golwalkar simply took over Savarkar’s aggressive Hindutva as well as developed a strategy of establishing hegemony over civil society before moving on to the struggle for power, distinguishing it from the Mahasabha.

Right from this period, the creation of a core constituency meant creation of a common Hindu identity to bring the lower castes under upper caste hegemony, and at the same time the demonisation of Muslims, and of Islam, as the ultimate enemy. It is also necessary to underscore the fact that gender was central to the Hindutva ideologues’ redefinition of the Hindu. Hindu men were excoriated for having lost their manhood and were asked to regain it.^[vii] A politics of demography also became vital, with claims that conversions, Muslim hyper-fertility, and Hindu impotence would soon lead to Muslims overtaking Hindus. (After independence it would add the rhetoric of Muslim polygamy as a threat, once Hindu polygamy was halted). There was the aggressive male of the “other” race, daily raping and abducting “our” women, who as bearers of children were the boundaries of the Hindu “nation” or “race”. The victimhood of women reinforced the image of a fearful common enemy threatening, not just individual Hindus, but the existence of the Hindu community. Hindu virility was to be manifested by imposing controls on women and by resorting to retributional violence on the Muslim males along with open advocacy of rape and torture of Muslim women (advocated in a particularly frenzied tone by V. D. Savarkar in his Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History). Women were exhorted to replace their eternal weak, vulnerable victim image by that of ‘sisters in arms’ capable of protecting their chastity, and therewith the honour of the community — a response to changing situations and women’s entering the public domains. The Hindu mother and wife would be simultaneously brave women capable of striking terror into the enemy, and of prompting husbands, brothers, and sons to action. Savarkar also defined community as a political entity based on race and the joining of religious dogma, so as to mobilise the majority of Hindus while streamlining all differences, creating a monolithic entity.

The immediate pre-partition years saw all communalisms grow rapidly. But once the immediate crisis of partition was tackled, the Indian ruling class had little use for the RSS and the Mahasabha. Till the mid-1970s, the Sangh Parivar remained restricted to certain classes and groups of people. Facing illegalisation after Gandhi’s murder (30 January 1948), the RSS promised to keep out of politics (by which it only meant keeping out of elections), and therefore created frontal parties – first the Jana Sangh, later the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), known till the early 1980s, as a Brahmin–Baniya party, lacking genuine all India social base. It favoured unfettered access to domestic markets combined with restrictions on international competition. It opposed trade unions and workers’ struggles and promoted reactionary and jingoistic nationalism. The rise of Hindutva began seriously in the 1980s, especially with the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign a major mobilizer of aggressive petty bourgeois youth (to destroy a four century old Mughal Babri Mosque and put up a Ram temple in its place, based on the spurious claim that the mosque had been put up by destroying a temple).

1. The Convergence with the Ruling Class

The capitalist state in independent India had a strategy of providing protection to petty commodity producers while keeping them subordinate to capital. This made possible their survival and ruling class hegemony. But since the 1980s, a range of movements, by powerful intermediate as well as oppressed castes (dalits), and adivasis, from regional identity based politics, all making demands upon the state for various kinds of community based protection. This undermined the ability of the state to balance between claims and weakened the Congress hegemony. At the same time, Indian capitalism, by this time relatively strong enough to swallow up much of the petty commodity producing economy, was demanding a shift from a protected economy to liberalization. This was the period when Hindutva grew rapidly, displaying features more appealing to the Indian bourgeoisie. Moreover Hindutva organizations, (the RSS and its wider family) displayed remarkable ability to mobilize masses, while opposing the “subaltern” mobilisations of Mandal and the regional parties and highlighting Hindu Rashtra [state] as a “nation” that exists as an organic and harmonious unity between “Hindus”. It also opposed state intervention for lesser communities, projecting the Hindu nation as the sole legitimate and moral community. Its ideological make up reduced social processes to individual choice. The Parivar aims to solve Hindu society’s problems by inculcating ‘correct values’ in upper caste men. Its resolution of class conflict is restricted to, for example, Golwalkar’s suggestion that everyone should be called aap, instead of the class divisive aap and tu. Divisions within this collectivity are unnecessary and pathological; the only division that is of importance is the line between “society” and its “other”, the foreigner. Thus, for the RSS, class difference is artificial, but community and gender are essential identities. Malignant foreigners are seeking to break up the unity and harmony of the Hindu nation.

In a number of ways, neoliberalism found a resonance in Hindutva. Indian capital endorsed Hindutva because, as a hegemonic project, it not only sought the breaking down of the collectivities (intermediate castes, regional groups, ethnic groups, etc) that the 1980s’ movements had made the central feature of Indian politics, but also sees organisations like trade unions in a corporatist manner. The Bhratiya Majdoor Sangha, (RSS trade union) is the one trade union that observes the Viswakarma Puja (worshipping a god of artisans) instead of May 1.

The triumph of neoliberalism has been incomplete in India. While all major parties, including the left when in power, have been forced to accept its demands, popular resistance has been very strong. Democratic politics and the existence of parties based on various social groups, regional interests, etc, have meant slow implementation of neoliberal reforms. As a result, the first decade of the 21^st century has seen direct assaults, attempts to expropriate direct producers, using the judiciary, colonial laws, as well as new laws, along with brutal attacks on rights of anyone critical of super-exploitation concomitant of the neo-liberal agenda. But unlike other mainstream parties, the BJP, notably under the chief minister, Narendra Modi in Gujarat, won elections despite open support for neoliberalism and his role in the Gujarat carnage in 2002. The gradual growth of the alliance between Hindutva and neo-liberalism in the 1990s shows how Hindutva ideology fits in with neoliberal goals. Neoliberalism too reduces social processes to individual consumer choice and sees the state as the guarantor of the market, not the protector of subaltern groups. Finally the civil society is legitimised as the sole overarching institution, brushing aside caste, class, gender. The Sangh Parivar, by offering a social network, appeared as a saviour to many socially and economically deprived groups in Gujarat, who were facing the assault of neoliberalism. As a result, despite heavy bankrolling by big capital, the BJP in Gujarat could also portray itself as the voice of common people – a unified Gujarati people, repeatedly invoked by Modi with his rhetoric of Gujarati asmita [pride]. As with Nazism, the BJP in Gujarat simultaneously projected itself as the party of the people, the nationalist party par excellence, as well as the party that would deliver the goods to the big bourgeoisie.

At the same time, in order to go forward to power, the Sangh Parivar has decided to keep its more aggressive Hindutva slogans in the background, even while repeatedly affirming that once they get full power that programme will be implemented, as indeed they came close to doing in Gujarat.

1. Gujarat Pogroms, Hindutva and Capitalism

This growing convergence between fascism and neoliberal capitalism has found attempts at creating a common praxis, and in this, Gujarat has been a model. Though widely reported and condemned, Gujarat-2002 events were sometimes seen as an aberration that is over. In fact, what happened from 28 February 2002 was no aberration, but the consequence of a systematic communalisation of state and civil society for several years. An independent inquiry team, Report to the Nation, one of the earliest reports emphasised that suborning the Gujarat government to carry out its ideological and political agenda was crucial for the Sangh Parivar. Without it they could not have planned, instigated, mobilised, and implemented the communal pogrom. There was a communalisation of the police, with Muslim officers shunted off to duties that would not enable them to take charge against rioting mobs. In the five years prior to 2002, some 12,000 VHP cadres had been recruited into the Home Guard.

Penetration of civil society had been even more insidious. Since 1998, there was a systematic development of hate literature. As evident from Communalism Combat magazine Sangh cadres have been systematically using the print/electronic media, including massive use of the internet, to whip up anti-minority hatred. Circulars sent out by the DG intelligence asked the police to gather information about Christians and particularly Muslims. This kind of state support emboldened the activists. The Gujarati newspaper Sandesh prepared and published a list of names of Muslim hotel and shop-owners in 2001. According to one estimate, some 1150 hotels have been destroyed in 2002. Health professionals, according to two reports, were so indoctrinated that often they decided whether or not to treat patients depending on their religion.^[viii]

Thus the state and society provided fertile ground for the Hindutva discourse. Savarkar’s equation of Hindus and Indians, and the claim that Muslims, Christians and communists were external elements to the nation, meant citizenship was reserved for Hindus. Since Islam per se is a threat to the Hindu nation, therefore revenge may be taken on any Muslim anywhere for anything that any Muslim could do or had done. This is crucial, for it alone explains Modi’s action-reaction theory: Muslims of far-away Panch Mahal (eastern province) or Ahmedabad justifiably paying for an action done at Godhra^[ix]. (It also allows the repression of any Muslim anywhere in India for the crimes of Ajmal Kasab, the sole living terrorist among those who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008).

The sexual violence on Muslim women and children and the slaughter of children in front of mothers could not be simply treated as the work of a lunatic fringe. This is nothing less than a practical application of the argument that unless Muslims accept Hindu supremacy they must be destroyed. The act of burning was not just an act to destroy evidence, but also to impose the Hindu cremation on the Muslim dead, in a final gesture of contempt for their religious beliefs.^[x]

When Maitree, the West Bengal-based women’s network took out a peace rally in Calcutta, as late as May 1, 2002, our meeting was confronted in a place by large numbers of Hindu communalists by attacks about our being funded by the ISI, and it was proclaimed that in exchange for every Hindu life lost, it was legitimate to take many Muslim lives. Parenthetically, this happened in West Bengal, where at that time the Left Front had been ruling for 25 years, implying a failure of secular (and even left) forces to combat Hindutva at the level of civil society.

In this context, I want to make a point about how the Sangh Parivar has attempted to capture NRI support, as well as the tussles before the alliance between Hindutva and big business was sealed. Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee’s sharp reaction to the cautious of the Confederation of Indian Industries’ criticisms of the carnage shows how strong he and his RSS mentors were feeling. Besides a large Gujarati capitalist chunk opposed this, threatening to walk out of the CII.^[xi] This highlights the fact that the newly emerging Gujarati capitalist class including its NRI component, delinked from traditional community culture, found an alternative ethos of a terrible kind in the preaching of the RSS, the Viswa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. At the same time, the threat posed by much more powerful U.S., European and Japanese capital is compelling Indian big capital to seek ways of destroying trade unionism and driving down wages and eliminating all job security. No wonder a number of India’s business icons like Anil Ambani, Sunil Mittal and Ratan Tata lauded Modi’s dynamism and virtually hailed him as India’s next prime minister.

1. Beyond Gujarat

Gujarat was hailed by the RSS as the laboratory of Hindutva. The results of the laboratory model were then applied in a number of provinces, either where the BJP held/co-shared power, or where it aspired to come to power — like Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Orissa. But while it has taken to the streets, its opponents all too often rely on the state, wait for overt violence before moving into action, or even use soft Hindutva politics, hoping to pre-empt the hard variety.

In Rajasthan, by the turn of the century, the VHP and the BD were terrorising Muslims and Christians, even as they started making inroads among the adivasis with great deal of state support.^[xii] Assimilation of tribals to Hinduism has been attempted by numerous methods, including assimilating space for tribal gods in Hindu pantheon and whipping up frenzy against Christians and Muslims in order to mobilize a Hindutva mob. Thus, repeated allegations are spread about Christian priests getting young women pregnant and the girls committing suicide, or about Christian priests sodomizing young boys. Occasional real or partially real incidents have been used to target Christians in a violent manner, like the case when the body of a young woman reportedly raped and strangulated to death was found in a mission compound in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. The incident was immediately used by RSS forces in Rajasthan’s Banswara district, preaching the need to teach the Christians a lesson – a campaign fortunately deflated when it was reported that a Hindu had been arrested by the police, in BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh. The Sangh also organized tours of ‘oppressed’ tribals from the North East of India (e.g., 13 girls from refugee camps in 2000, showcased as proof of Christians’ atrocities against ‘Hindu’ tribals) to recount horror stories of Christian misdeeds against Hindus, stories that the tribals have no way of cross-checking. The BJP regime in Rajasthan, which took over in December 2003, was of great help to the Hindutva brigade. Backed by the state tribal area development minister, Sangh activists could go around threatening the Christians, saying it was high time they re-converted or else they would be deprived of their ST status.

On August 14, 2004, the VHP organised a trishul deeksha [distribution of tridents] programme barely a kilometre away from the state secretariat in Jaipur, protected by uniformed policemen. The state home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria announced a lifting of the ban on trishul deeksha. In the same year the government in its attempt at providing asylum to all Hindu extremists started withdrawing cases against those accused of indulging in arson, attacks and looting against the minority community. Around 150 cases had been withdrawn by mid-September 2004 and the process continued despite vociferous protests from civil rights organisations.

Equally serious has been the experimentation in Hindutva-ization in Karnataka. The BJP first broke through when H. D. Deve Gowda, the former Prime Minister and leader of the misnamed Janata Dal (Secular) decided to form an alliance with the BJP in 2006 which resulted in open state support for extreme communalism. The combination nominated Hindu Yuva Sena leader Yashpal Suvarna, prime accused in Udupi communal violence in March 2005, to the Udupi Town Council. On March 13, 2005 two residents of Mooluru village near Udupi were paraded naked and brutally assaulted in front of an audience of more than 100 people by fascist Hindu right wing forces for supposedly taking part in cow slaughters. Within a week of the incident, the Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike [Communal Harmony Forum], with the perspective that communalism was not merely an onslaught on religion but rather an attack on democratic processes brought together all progressive movements in the state and organised a massive demonstration in front of the then Udupi deputy commissioner’s office.

Fascist onslaughts became rampant once the BJP was strong enough to form a government of its own in 2008. Recent attack (January 24, 2009) on women for going to pubs in Mangalore, a city in coastal Karnataka was organised by Pramod Muttalik’s (expelled from the BD in 2004) Sri Ram Sene. And it is of course no coincidence that moral policing targets women. The State administration, police, and political leadership, reacted in a tardy way, and some of them dismissed this as a ‘minor incident’. It is evident that in this instance the attackers were emboldened to carry out the unprovoked assault in a political environment that supports a particularly narrow and fanatical view of Indian culture as also a repressive attitude to women. This has come in the wake of numerous efforts over the past years to communalise the situation in Karnataka. Thus, the media has been used to whip up anti-Muslim feelings. The issue of “morality” is couched in all-out attack by the Rama Sene on westernisation and so-called “pub culture”. This has been buttressed by National Commission for Women member Nirmala Venkatesh (formerly a Congress MLA in Karnataka) who deviously attempted to “shift the debate from the criminality of the assault to the legality and functioning of the pub”. This fascist kulturkampf has, as usual, targeted women’s bodies as the “repositories of an imagined homogenous Indian culture.”^[xiii] As women’s organisations in Bangalore, like Vimochana, pointed, out that Mangalore is an experiment, just as Gujarat was. Alternative Law Forum’s (based in Bangalore) survey shows that more than 80 attacks and cases of moral policing have been reported from all over Karnataka in the last six months. Series of onslaughts against cow-slaughter, Churches, mixed religion couples, women in pubs are perpetrated to keep a continuous tempo to create a climate of intimidation and fear^[xiv].

In Kandhamal, Orissa, the violence that broke out in 2007 and 2008 is a significant pointer. When a VHP leader named Lakshmanand Saraswati was murdered by unknown people on 23 August 2008, the VHP, Bajrang Dal, and other outfits responded by rapidly targeting Christians, while the government authorities claimed the killers were Maoists without any inquiry. As with Godhra, secular forces were condemned by Hindu communalists for supposedly not condemning the murder of Saraswati at par with condemning the planned mass violence that followed. It has been a long standing argument of the Hindu communalists that Christian churches use their social welfare programmes to carry out conversions. There has been a sustained demand for something called reconversion, which is being projected as something morally different from conversion. When a tribal, whose ancestors had worshipped gods in no way identifiable with Hindu religious figures, is converted from Christianity to Hinduism, it is called reconversion. On the other hand, Christians, especially the churches, are major targets, in a number of tribal areas, as the Sangh seeks to consolidate the tribals into its fold, using the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (had assistance programmes for adivasis in a number of provinces) as well as the VHP and the BD. The BJP, as a member of the governing coalition, supported the Sangh Parivar’s call to 12-hour bandh on August 24, and the government of Orissa ordered that educational institutions across Orissa remain closed. Hindutva affiliates asked the BJP to sever its alliance with the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and contest the forthcoming elections from an immoderate Hindutva platform.

Both in December 2007 and in August-September 2008 anti-Christian riots, the Sangh Parivar prioritised extralegal intervention, authorising its militias to mob violence. Churches, homes, businesses and Christian organisations were attacked in Kandhamal. They torched 4,000 homes across 200 villages. A Catholic nun from Nuagaon was raped. A 19-year-old Hindu woman cook was burnt alive at a church-operated orphanage in Bargarh district. More than 12,539 people sought shelter in 10 relief camps. While this might be proven the work of a Maoist group, Maoists are largely not operational in the area which witnessed an upsurge of Hindu communalist groups in recent years. Hindu activists charged Maoists with the December violence as well. Ideologically, Maoist groups do not have reason to target Christians. The whole point of the Kandhamal violence was to use a starting point, an alliance with a supposedly secular party to pitchfork aggressive, fascist communalism centre-stage.

The Rape of the nun, sister M, has a longer background. This is not the first time that Hindutva forces have targeted nuns. In Jhabua, the rape of four nuns in 1998 was followed by the argument that it was the result of anger by patriotic Hindu youth. Being Christian was therefore unpatriotic, and raping nuns, who had vows of celibacy, was a particularly pleasant manner of teaching lessons in patriotism. Thus rape as a systematic political strategy of mobilisation, opposing conversions and uniting Hindus, has found a space in Sangh politics across India.

I would like to make a few brief and inadequate comments about the sustained Hindutva targeting of NRIs.^[xv] Diaspora Indians, located a long way from home, alienated from the local culture but also cut off from home, fall easy prey to an imagined India and are therefore relatively soft targets. Myths circulate as truth – myths about Muslim polygamy and the threat to Hindu national existence; Muslim educational institutions and the training of terrorists; the assertions that the call for the trifurcation of Kashmir is legitimate or that Ayodhya is a defensible expression of national-cultural pride. As fund raisers for Hindutva, as lobbyists for the Hindu Right in the corridors of power in the developed countries, they serve as witting or unwitting assistants to the rise of authoritarianism and tyranny in India. Those on the left or liberal positions, often sustained by the memory of a left of centre past in India, need to plan better strategies to combat Hindutva, and to forge alliances with both the forces fighting in India, and with radical forces in the countries where they live. I hope the present conference will serve as an important step in that direction.

In this connection, let me mention two issues that are very important weapons of all India, as well as international campaign and mobilisation by the Hindutva forces. The Saffron Consortium hijacked the campaign for a Uniform Civil Code, a feminist demand since the 1930s, by stressing that Muslim women were deprived, oppressed (due to polygamy, the triple talaq, and so on). This on one hand consigns to the trapdoor of memory the fact that Hindutva forces had fought against the abolition of Hindu polygamy (and that illegal Hindu polygamy is more prevalent than Muslim polygamy in India, as per the census of 2001), and on the other hand ignores the fact that Hindu personal Law has been codified but by no means turned into gender just laws. From the Shah Bano case of 1985 to the Sarla Mudgal case of 1995, communally-tinted court verdicts arguing that laws on marriage, divorce, maintenance etc were biased against Muslim women, were used to launch campaigns for a fraudulent UCC, which would simply be an imposition of Hindu laws on Muslims, rather than gender just laws for all.^[xvi] At the same time, through their organisations like the Rashtra Sevika Samity or the Durga Vahini, the Sangh combine offered women a safe form of public space that did not challenge patriarchy but allowed women to be active in public areas. But participation in this fold came with a price tag. Feminism was not only opposed, but blamed for violence on women. Asha Sharma, a member of the Rashtrasevika Samiti, the women’s wing of the RSS, told historian Tanika Sarkar that rapes occur because “women have forfeited their older modes of honour and motherhood status by being addicted to struggles and enmity with men.”

The other issue is falsification of history. It has been a major part of the Sangh political project of desecularising civil society, without which, at the merely political level, the fascist form of communal politics cannot succeed. In 2000, the NDA Government put pressure on the Oxford University Press to halt publication of two volumes of the Towards Freedom project, edited by Sumit Sarkar and K. N. Panikkar, two of India’s most eminent Marxist historians. The real reason was that these volumes show with great clarity that the RSS played absolutely no role in the freedom struggle. In 2001 Hindutva forces made a hue and cry over D.N. Jha’s book The Myth of the Holy Cow (2001), and his Indian publisher was forced to pulp the book. Using  Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina religious scriptures, Jha argues that the flesh of the cow played an important part in the cuisine of ancient India, rather than being an Islamic intrusion, and  abstention from it cannot be a mark of ‘Hindu’ identity^[xvii]. A few years later there was the attempt to shut up Romila Thapar, India’s most respected historian of Ancient India, when she was appointed the first holder of the Kluge Chair in the Library of Congress in the United States (2003), because of her commitment to scholarship and refusal to accept the myths spread by Hindutva (e.g., the Indian origin of Aryans, the degree of India’s antiquity, etc). These are not stray incidents. Since Hindutva’s central claim is that Hindus constitute the nation, and that struggle between communities/nations has been central to Indian history, alternative, particularly progressive views of history have to be silenced by them. This makes history a sustained battleground. The reason NRIs come into a discussion here is that because they are cut off from the quotidian reality of India, they are more prone to an imagined history. But of course, this is a struggle that is going on all the time, in schools and universities across India. When the NDA was in power, it tried to impose text books on students that downplayed the Russian Revolution, while in Gujarat there are text books that have highlighted Hitler as a nationalist who wanted the upliftment of the German nation. Hate campaigns captured the social mindset in such a way that even in Left-Front ruled West Bengal, with leftists leading teachers’ organisations at all levels, a routine question in history is, ‘Write an essay on Muslim Politics 1906-1940’, whereas Hindu communalism is never taught. Savarkar is shown as a freedom fighter.

The all-pervasive attitude, that communalism is actually a feature of Muslims, naturally assists the Hindutva ideology in becoming virtually the common sense of the country. Another example of this is to hold all Muslims responsible for any terrorist violence. Every time a terrorist attack occurs, all Muslim organisations are expected to issue separate statements. After the November 26, attacks, celebrities who were Muslims, whether film personalities like Shah Rukh Khan or Amir Khan, or players like Sania Mirza, were constantly asked to appear on television, give interviews to newspapers, all on their attitude to what India was doing. As Nasiruddin Shah, a veteran actor, asked, why must Muslims constantly prove their credentials as Indians?

• Minority Communalism Terrorism and Left Strategy

Years of British colonial discourse of ‘backwardness’, majoritarian violence, soft Hindutva peddled by the liberals, frustrations and dehumanised conditions generated by the neo-liberal onslaughts combined to push individuals, particularly among the minorities, more and more to their community identities. While in theory the left has always opposed all communalism, in practice, electoral compulsions have sometimes led the Left in power to compromises with Muslim communalists. Even the Maoist organizations or left intellectuals (who are not participants in electoral politics) defence of minority rights have sometimes been confused with defence of minority communalism instead of addressing their lived realities. This may intensify Muslim communalism, or for that matter can lead to embracing terrorism by some of those forces. Unlike the Sangh Parivar, they cannot hope to turn this terror into eventual state sponsored terror. But its existence, and links with Muslim communalism in Pakistan, is in fact desirable for the RSS and its allies. If the Bangladesh government’s aggressive anti-minority postures lead to Hindu-migration to West Bengal or Assam, it helps the Sangh combine in whipping up anti-Muslim chauvinism as well as anti-Bangladeshi sentiments, so that any Bengali speaker of Muslim origin living anywhere outside West Bengal becomes an automatic target of attack, as has happened in Mumbai and Delhi at times. If we look at recent developments, since the terrorist attacks on Mumbai on November 26, 2008, the picture that emerges is terrifying. War is threatened on Pakistan and a jingoistic atmosphere was whipped up as a pre-election mobilisation by the UPA, thereby virtually strengthening the Sangh agenda. Within 3 weeks of 26/11 the Indian Parliament unanimously passed the draconian Unlawful Activities (prevention) Amendment Act and the National Investigation Agency Act restricting civil liberties.^[xviii] Terrorism has been so defined that majoritarian violence is excluded. However the same government has not shown same promptness in tackling communal violence by pushing the proposed Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill, gathering dust in the Parliament since 2005. The tardiness of the government becomes more glaring when the insidious linkage of the majoritarian terrorism was revealed in the investigation of pipe bomb blast in Malegaon (September 29, 2008) killing 6 persons on, the eve of Id celebrations in the month of Ramadan^[xix].

This in fact brings us to a consideration of India-Pakistan relations and the place of communalism and terrorism within that. We who are located in India are of course regularly bombarded by information saying how much Pakistan promotes terrorism in India, whether in Kashmir, or in other parts of the country. I am not disputing the fact that there are forces in Pakistan who do support and sponsor Muslim communalism, whether in Pakistan or in India. But I do question the assumption that but for Pakistani intervention we would have had an untroubled existence. For sixty years, India has rejected the right of Kashmiris to self-determination, and has consciously targeted those who talked of Kashmir’s independence and a unified Kashmiriyat, curtailed the original autonomy given under Article 370, forcing Kashmir repeatedly under Delhi’s direct control, and choosing to strengthen those who see the Kashmir issue more in communal terms. Moreover, as the Sachar Committee report (June 2006) shows, Muslims in India are in a state of extreme marginalisation. If India keeps Muslims badly educated, economically among the most deprived, if India pushes Muslims towards communal leaders, and if at the same time India continually uses state violence on Muslims, arresting them whenever any perceived terrorist threat looms, India generates enough internal forces to push Muslims in the direction of communalism and terrorism.

This deprivation among Muslims is a widespread phenomenon, not restricted to states ruled by the BJP or states normally identified as communalised. The Sachar Committee Report brought it home that we in West Bengal, who have proudly claimed our secular mantle, have really done very little. The share of Muslims in government jobs is 4.2% against a population of 25.2% in the state, expenditure by Muslims is less than that of Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes, Muslims in judicial services in the state are merely 5% and there are no Muslims in higher positions in state PSUs. Once again Left Front’s lip-service to secularism and vote-bank politics are exposed when it appeased the minority patriarchs in the name of protecting the minority rights in the Taslima Nasreen issue. A part of her autobiography, Dwikhandito, was banned by the Left Front government in 2003 on the ground of hurting religious sentiments. The repeated attacks on the rights of freedom of expression and mobility of the secular feminist author including offers of money for her head, or allowing All India Minority Forum to hold Calcutta to ransom on November 21, 2007 and her subsequent removal from the state on the next day, can only create the impression that the Left has succumbed to Muslim communal threat in connection with a person who does not have a single vote. After Nandigram^[xx], the Left Front was apprehensive that it might be losing the support of Muslims. She was then asked to move out of India in March, 2008 by the UPA government, after being virtually held a prisoner. To take a more general case, “secular” forces have often allowed organizations like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board to decide the pace and agenda of reforms, including gender related reforms. Thus, even laws on adoption, proposing that one need not declare one’s religion in order to adopt, have been opposed in the name of Muslim Personal Law, though in this case, the proposed law was simply an enabling law, and was not targeting any religion. The argument, that Muslims must not be allowed to adopt, is therefore an argument about so-called community heads proclaiming their right to control all members of their community in every possible way. When Muslim women’s network like Awaaz-e-Niswan mobilised women to pressurise the Muslim Personal Law Board to adopt a standardised Nikahnama [marriage contract] drafted by many women, explicitly containing women’s right to divorce and proper maintenance and when Christian Women’s organisations such as Joint Women’s Programme or Bailancho Saad sought the implementation of revised, gender just personal law codes for Christians they were not merely asking for law reform, but were taking upon themselves the role of describing the kind of changes that would pave the way for women’s equality. Their positions were of course very different from some secularists, such as Flavia Agnes, who also talked about law reform from within, but who by this meant reforms acceptable to communalists of the minority type.^[xxi]

If the RSS and the Sangh combine are a clearly fascist force, what does it mean in terms of developing a leftist response to them? I would like to argue that class, community and gender rights are all issues that need to be viewed very seriously in developing our strategies. I have been arguing that Hindutva in recent years has been developing very close relationships with the Indian big bourgeoisie. This means that any political strategy that seeks to combat the fascists by envisaging an all embracing anti-fascist alliance extending up to “democratic” bourgeois forces would be a chimera. Such a strategy was in fact tried out, when the major left parties in India supported the United Progressive Alliance (Congress led neo-liberal coalition) from 2004 to mid-2008. The policy of the UPA is best described as neo-liberalism with occasional space for some small popular gains. But its overall thrust has meant inflation, loss of jobs, increasing exploitation, eviction, competition between small commodity producers and big (indeed, giant) producers, small traders and big ones like Reliance Fresh, Metro Cash and Carry, or huge shopping malls against local stores. Neither working class, nor urban or rural petty bourgeoisie and peasants have really felt any warmth for the UPA, despite its occasional sops, such as writing off peasant loans. The UPA is almost sure to collapse in the elections of 2009, which are currently under way. Even if they do not, the UPA of 2009 will be openly more right wing. For example, in West Bengal they are allied to the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamul Congress, which has a single agenda of removing the CPI (M) from power and which in the past was allied with the BJP. Left strategy must seek allies within minorities by looking at the fracture lines, of class, gender, so that these can eventually be alliances in the struggle against neo-liberalism and Fascism, instead of serving repeatedly as foot-soldiers in the Congress’ attempts to remain in power by using the threat of a Hindutva. And when confronting the fascists, this means stressing more the need to fighting them on the streets rather than in the parliamentary space. Only by building an independent left pole can we get out of this crisis. For this very reason we cannot not make us amenable to the strategy adopted by some of the Maoists in West Bengal to forge an united front with Trinamul to defeat the Left Front, which has moved considerably to the right even alienating the peasants which has been its core constituency for three decades. But to argue that there is no difference between Social Democracy which is moving right and Fascism is to echo the same kind of pseudo-leftism of the Comintern which helped Hitler seize power.

[i] See for a detailed analysis Dave Renton, Fascism

[ii] Sumit Sarkar (1993), ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’, Economic and Political Weekly; M.Casolari (2000), ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence,’ Economic and Political Weekly; Prabhat Patnaik (1993), ‘The Fascism of Our Times’, Social Scientist; Kunal Chattopadhyay, ‘The Fascist Upsurge’ in Kunal Chattopadhyay (Ed) The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism.

[iii] Achin Vanaik, Communalism Contested (published outside India as The Furies of Indian Communalism). Vanaik that fascism arose as a response to a specific kind of post-world war I crisis of capitalist accumulation, and that the label therefore cannot be extended to today’s neoliberal offensive. He fears that the label can be used to justify opportunistic alliances with bourgeois parties.

[iv] The RSS originated as a Hindu “revivalist” organisation, committed to ensuring a form of Hindu unity which would also challenge lower caste assertions, and targeting Muslims as the Other of the Hindu Nation. Despite its claims of being the most nationalist and patriotic organisation, it is significant that the RSS always stayed away from mass nationalist struggles against British rule. For details of RSS history, see Tapan Bose et. al., Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flag.

[v] Obedience to one leader

[vi] “A Nation is formed by a majority living therein. What did the Jews do in Germany? They being in minority were driven out from Germany”. – Savarkar, speech of October 14, 1938. “The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, … and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing… not even citizen’s rights.” – Golwalkar, We, Or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939. “If discipline, organised centralism and organic collective consciousness mean Fascism, then the RSS is not ashamed to be called fascist. The silly idea that fascism and totalitarianism are evils and parliamentarism and Anglo-Indian types of democracy are holy, should be got rid of from our minds.” – Anthony Elenjimittan — The Philosophy and Action of the RSS for the Hind Swaraj, 1946.

[vii] Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community.

[viii] Editorial in Issues in Medical Ethics, and report by the Medico Friends Circle.

[ix] On 27 February 2002, some people set a bogey of the Sabarmati Express on fire, and about 56 people died as a result. It was alleged that all the people killed were kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, and the killers were Muslims. Communal newspapers like Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh reported further lurid and false stories, such as women having been dragged out of the train, taken to a Madrasa and raped and then killed after their bodies were mutilated. In fact, inquiries have failed to establish who set the train on fire. The Press Council of India rejected as false the story about rape and murder of Hindu women mentioned above.

[x] For my analysis of the violence on women’s bodies, I am much indebted to discussion with Tanika Sarkar. Her own views are set forth in the essay ‘Semiotics of Terror’. My analysis, in detail, is to be found in my introductory article in Garbhaghati Gujarat.

[xi] Nasir Tyabji (2002), ‘Has the Bourgeoisie Truly Come of Age in India’, Economic and Political Weekly.

[xii] Communalism Combat, Issue 102, October 2004.

[xiii] Sumi Krishna (2009), ‘Understanding and Responding to the Mangalore Assaults’, http://www.sacw.net/article642.html (accessed on 1.3.2009)

[xiv] Letter by Shakun on behalf of Vimochana, Forum for Women’s rights to Nandita Gandhi, of Forum against Oppression of Women, Mumbai, 27.2.2009 in nccindia@yahoogroups.com

[xv] See further Angana Chatterji, ‘Myths and Dreams: Hindutva Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora’,  Dissident Voice, March 10, 2003, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles2/Chatterji_Hindutva.htm

[xvi] For a relatively recent survey of the UCC debate see Geetanjali Gangoli (1996), The Debate on the Uniform Civil Code, Bombay: Akshara.

[xvii] See for an detailed analysis of an earlier period of Hindutva politics of history writing, Soma Marik, ‘History and the Politics of Hindutva’, in Kunal Chattopadhyay (Ed) – The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism, Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, Vadodara 2002.

[xviii] Prior to this there were the Terrorism and Disturbed Area Act or TADA, used extensively in Gujarat to arrest and harass Muslims. Later the NDA Government brought in the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA — June 2002), following an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. The UPA repealed POTA in September 2004.

[xix] Teesta Setalvad, ‘Hindutva Terror. The terror trail: From Nanded to Malegaon and beyond’, Communalism Combat, February 2009, Year 15, No.137. Investigations traced the masterminds of Srikant Purohit, a serving lieutenant colonel in the Indian army, also connected to an organisation called Abhinav Bharat and a Sadhvi, Pragnya Thakur, whose association with student wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad was not unknown.

[xx] A site of violence by the ruling party throughout 2007, when the government tried to seize land forcibly for constructing a chemical hub. It remained a liberated zone from government interference for months. In a Muslim majority area with Muslims as majority of the victims the CPI(M) faced a challenge from the community, primarily used as vote-bank.

[xxi] For details of Christian law reform initiatives, see Rita Monterio (Ed.), Secular Legal Initiatives by the Christian Community, Bombay, (n.d. 1996?).The documents include a letter from Alan de Lastic, Archbishop of Delhi, writing on behalf of the Catholic Bishops of India that they have no objection to the proposed changes in the marriage/divorce laws submitted in 1994. See also Flavia Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality, pp. 150 – 154, 211-12. Agnes defends the decision of the central government not to introduce the bill in the name of not giving an opportunity to the Hindu communalists to raise a row about Muslim Personal Law.(p.154). The Christian initiative was a model case of reform from within. By all the logic of communitarianism Agnes had been uttering all these years, she should have been vocal in her condemnation of the government for not pursuing it. Instead, by now linking its future to a hoped for decline of Hindu communalism, she asked the women’s movement to stop putting forward demands that would go beyond what “secular” political parties and their governments are willing to throw in the direction of women.

 

 

[1] See for a detailed analysis Dave Renton, Fascism

[1] Sumit Sarkar (1993), ‘The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar’, Economic and Political Weekly; M.Casolari (2000), ‘Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-Up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence,’ Economic and Political Weekly; Prabhat Patnaik (1993), ‘The Fascism of Our Times’, Social Scientist; Kunal Chattopadhyay, ‘The Fascist Upsurge’ in Kunal Chattopadhyay (Ed) The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism.

[1] Achin Vanaik, Communalism Contested (published outside India as The Furies of Indian Communalism). Vanaik that fascism arose as a response to a specific kind of post-world war I crisis of capitalist accumulation, and that the label therefore cannot be extended to today’s neoliberal offensive. He fears that the label can be used to justify opportunistic alliances with bourgeois parties.

[1] The RSS originated as a Hindu “revivalist” organisation, committed to ensuring a form of Hindu unity which would also challenge lower caste assertions, and targeting Muslims as the Other of the Hindu Nation. Despite its claims of being the most nationalist and patriotic organisation, it is significant that the RSS always stayed away from mass nationalist struggles against British rule. For details of RSS history, see Tapan Bose et. al., Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flag.

[1] Obedience to one leader

[1] “A Nation is formed by a majority living therein. What did the Jews do in Germany? They being in minority were driven out from Germany”. – Savarkar, speech of October 14, 1938. “The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, … and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing… not even citizen’s rights.” – Golwalkar, We, Or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939. “If discipline, organised centralism and organic collective consciousness mean Fascism, then the RSS is not ashamed to be called fascist. The silly idea that fascism and totalitarianism are evils and parliamentarism and Anglo-Indian types of democracy are holy, should be got rid of from our minds.” – Anthony Elenjimittan — The Philosophy and Action of the RSS for the Hind Swaraj, 1946.

[1] Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community.

[1] Editorial in Issues in Medical Ethics, and report by the Medico Friends Circle.

[1] On 27 February 2002, some people set a bogey of the Sabarmati Express on fire, and about 56 people died as a result. It was alleged that all the people killed were kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, and the killers were Muslims. Communal newspapers like Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh reported further lurid and false stories, such as women having been dragged out of the train, taken to a Madrasa and raped and then killed after their bodies were mutilated. In fact, inquiries have failed to establish who set the train on fire. The Press Council of India rejected as false the story about rape and murder of Hindu women mentioned above.

[1] For my analysis of the violence on women’s bodies, I am much indebted to discussion with Tanika Sarkar. Her own views are set forth in the essay ‘Semiotics of Terror’. My analysis, in detail, is to be found in my introductory article in Garbhaghati Gujarat.

[1] Nasir Tyabji (2002), ‘Has the Bourgeoisie Truly Come of Age in India’, Economic and Political Weekly.

[1] Communalism Combat, Issue 102, October 2004.

[1] Sumi Krishna (2009), ‘Understanding and Responding to the Mangalore Assaults’, http://www.sacw.net/article642.html (accessed on 1.3.2009)

[1] Letter by Shakun on behalf of Vimochana, Forum for Women’s rights to Nandita Gandhi, of Forum against Oppression of Women, Mumbai, 27.2.2009 in nccindia@yahoogroups.com

[1] See further Angana Chatterji, ‘Myths and Dreams: Hindutva Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora’,  Dissident Voice, March 10, 2003, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles2/Chatterji_Hindutva.htm

[1] For a relatively recent survey of the UCC debate see Geetanjali Gangoli (1996), The Debate on the Uniform Civil Code, Bombay: Akshara.

[1] See for an detailed analysis of an earlier period of Hindutva politics of history writing, Soma Marik, ‘History and the Politics of Hindutva’, in Kunal Chattopadhyay (Ed) – The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism, Inquilabi Communist Sangathan, Vadodara 2002.

[1] Prior to this there were the Terrorism and Disturbed Area Act or TADA, used extensively in Gujarat to arrest and harass Muslims. Later the NDA Government brought in the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA — June 2002), following an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. The UPA repealed POTA in September 2004.

[1] Teesta Setalvad, ‘Hindutva Terror. The terror trail: From Nanded to Malegaon and beyond’, Communalism Combat, February 2009, Year 15, No.137. Investigations traced the masterminds of Srikant Purohit, a serving lieutenant colonel in the Indian army, also connected to an organisation called Abhinav Bharat and a Sadhvi, Pragnya Thakur, whose association with student wing of the BJP, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad was not unknown.

[1] A site of violence by the ruling party throughout 2007, when the government tried to seize land forcibly for constructing a chemical hub. It remained a liberated zone from government interference for months. In a Muslim majority area with Muslims as majority of the victims the CPI(M) faced a challenge from the community, primarily used as vote-bank.

[1] For details of Christian law reform initiatives, see Rita Monterio (Ed.), Secular Legal Initiatives by the Christian Community, Bombay, (n.d. 1996?).The documents include a letter from Alan de Lastic, Archbishop of Delhi, writing on behalf of the Catholic Bishops of India that they have no objection to the proposed changes in the marriage/divorce laws submitted in 1994. See also Flavia Agnes, Law and Gender Inequality, pp. 150 – 154, 211-12. Agnes defends the decision of the central government not to introduce the bill in the name of not giving an opportunity to the Hindu communalists to raise a row about Muslim Personal Law.(p.154). The Christian initiative was a model case of reform from within. By all the logic of communitarianism Agnes had been uttering all these years, she should have been vocal in her condemnation of the government for not pursuing it. Instead, by now linking its future to a hoped for decline of Hindu communalism, she asked the women’s movement to stop putting forward demands that would go beyond what “secular” political parties and their governments are willing to throw in the direction of women.