The BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP,  Swapan Dasgupta, in an opinion piece titled The rise of the proud, global Hindu which appeared in the Hindustan Times after the Aug 5 Bhoomi Pujan at Ayodhya, mentioned “the new Hindutva” that seems to have emerged in recent times. He contrasted it with the older Hindutva, identified with V. D. Savarker, describing that as “too ideological for popular taste.”

The new Hindutva, according to Dasgupta, “evolved after the post-liberalisation rise in living standards [and] blended cultural pride with a sense of national assertiveness.” Yet, even when describing the rise of a new Hindutva, Dasgupta employs descriptions and characterisations which have been the old Hindutva’s pet peeve and trope for a long time – the victimhood of the majority. For, Dasgupta marks the emergence of the new Hindutva as consisting in “the transformation of the meek Hindu and the submissive Hindu into a proud Hindu and even a global Hindu.” 

According to Dasgupta’s claim, the enabling conditions of skewed material prosperity, post-liberalization, occasioned the rejuvenation of the Hindu spirit. So much for all the lofty ideals of Hinduism, so much for the exhortations of Hindu icons like Vivekananda who made impassioned pleas for the rebirth of the Hindu spirit based on the inherent greatness of the Hindu faith and culture. It seems it took neoliberal economic policies to release the inner tiger among the Hindus, if Dasgupta is to be believed.

The “meek and submissive” Hindu has been a tired and provocative attempt by Hindutva forces to stress the emasculation and disempowerment of the Hindus, chiefly under foreign rule. Such inaccurate and exaggerated descriptions bear the mark of V. D. Savarkar, who charted the trajectory of Hindus in the vast sweep of history and even held Buddhism responsible for weakening the moral fiber of the Hindus by its stress on no-violence. 

What is to be noted, however, is where Dasgupta locates the hold and emergence of new Hindutva: among those who benefited from the post-liberalization bounty, India’s more affluent, middle and upper classes. In this, he seems to have a pulse of how things have evolved in the Hindutva space and he seems not too far from reality. One must also not ignore Dasgupta’s seemingly anachronistic mention of the weak and hurt Hindu. 

Hurt by History

For, even though the new kids on the block are younger, professionally diverse, and politically perceptive, they still seem unable to shrug off old demons of having been dealt a raw deal in history. 

However, while the new Hindutva and its adherents still nurse old wounds, they exhibit a certain brash confidence in projecting their views and in trying to deconstruct, with a modicum of method and analysis, what they consider as false views propagated till now. They might not openly push the idea of the Taj Mahal actually being Tejo Mahalya, a Shiva temple, as a previous generation of supposed scholars had proposed. But, they will try to chip away with questionable evidence, held up as new and revelatory, at the more established narratives of Indian history, say the story surrounding the king Ashoka.  

In a show of having dabbled in diverse scholarship, presenters from this new Hindutva brigade, with backgrounds such as in finance and business, draw from the edicts on Asokan pillars, from supposed counter-narratives in Hathigumpha (which have a later Kalingan king, Kharavela’s, inscriptions) and entries in the Ashoka-avadana, a northern Buddhist biography of Ashoka which have him put to death members of the Ajivika sect after he had repented about Kalinga. 

All to show that Ashoka was not the “nice guy” we’ve been made to believe in by colonial and modern (leftist) historians. It matters little to such presenters that the very points they accuse the modern leftist historians of ignoring and omitting are the ones that are taken up quite prominently in books authored by those historians! 

In the age of social media, with media pieces marked as “6 minute reads” etc, in an age of the Chetan Bhagatization of Indian literature and the Devdutt Pattanaikization of India’s complex cultural past, people seem to want convenient summaries and rough-and-ready lowdowns on issues that are inherently multi-source and multi-causal. Not too many people will have time or inclination to read books, reports or lengthy analyses. 

The simplistic distillations about matters of history, culture, faiths, belief-systems, sacred texts etc that are provided by many of those on the right who selectively cherry-pick information, often from dodgy sources on the internet and slap it all together, seems adequate to the curiosities of most of the audience. Truth, veracity and multi-layered discussions are not at a premium. 

A striking case-in-point of this attraction of what is termed the “Whatsapp University” standards of information and analysis is a comparison and reception of two recent books on the Sarasvati civilisation. One by an ex-serviceperson, G.D. Bakshi is sloppily written and produced, while the other, written by academic Michel Danino is infinitely better researched and argued. While both authors are very sympathetic to the Sarasvati civilization case, it is Bakshi with his more sensational – and rudimentary – attempt who is the darling of the right-wing crowds, snagging a speaking opportunity at JNU, no less. 

Who makes up the new Hindutva?

That the emergence of the new Hindutva is fairly recent is a correct assessment by Dasgupta. While, in the popular imagination of left-liberals, typical Hindutva elements have been more of the trishul-talwar-brandishing variety, often dismissed as “fringe elements” (even by the Hindutva organisations themselves), other “clone armies” were slowly coming up in different parts of the country and the world. 

These were often constituted by young professionals such educators, doctors, engineers, lawyers and business analysts. These joined forces with the old-guard in this space, who are also a motley crowd: software professionals, politically dead-end figures and even former military officers.  Many of them are the beneficiaries of the post-liberalization economic change India witnessed, as Dagupta has observed. This is in addition to the usual posse of godmen and godwomen, of whom India never has any scarcity. Only, the current crop of these godly-persons have also amplified their reach via social media and readily provide the byte-sized, seemingly profound, nuggets of wisdom to confirm Hinduism’s ancient and incomparable character – with all kinds of modern relevance – to their audience, who are convinced they are hearing authentic traditional wisdom. 

The new batch of the Hindutva-curious and Hindutva-adherents are primarily social-media savvy. Having endlessly griped about the media space being taken up by the left-liberals till now, they have set up a wide-variety of their own media outlets on popular social media platforms. Gone are the days when the Organizer or the Panchajanya had to bear the burden of broadcasting the Sangh’s views.

Now there are any number of youtube channels, facebook pages, and even podcasts and websites that openly engage with the broad concerns of Hindutva or some form of religious nationalism.

While organisations like the RSS and the ABVP have provided opportunity for the younger aspirants of the right from a very long time, what marks the new Hindutva is the extra-party nature of much of the efforts by the younger generation. These people frequently espouse the BJP and its leaders, yet they are often grouped into their own collectives, taking advantage of a kind of autonomy that social media allows them. 

The battle over intellectual space

We’ve all heard of the vicious and ubiquitous right-wing trolls that have bedeviled the Indian online space. But the new Hindutva is a slicker, more polished operation. It borrows not one but many leaves from what they see as the playbook of the left.

Primarily, this new Hindutva is taking aim at intellectual space as already mentioned above, which they feel has been dominated by “leftist historians and intellectuals.” This is a sentiment that gained currency when the issue of Ayodhya shifted to the courts, and matters of evidence came to the fore. Since the evidence sought and produced was of a nature that involved historical documents, details of material artifacts like buildings and architectural styles, and the results of archaeological explorations to determine the genealogy of the disputed site, it necessarily included the role of “area experts.” 

This thrust various academics to the fore and two sides arrayed against one another. One argued against the presence of a temple beneath the mosque and connected issues like the actual location of Rama’s birth-place, the historicity of Rama and of Rama-worship. The other side took the opposite view. 

The confrontations between these actors, mainly academics, involved such disciplines as history, architecture, archaeology, epigraphy, languages especially Sanskrit and Persian, and the consultation of religious texts such as the puranas and mahatmayas. 

Those who questioned the contention of a Rama temple beneath the mosque and those who questioned Rama’s existence as a historical figure, among other issues, were dubbed the “leftist historians.” None other than BJP ideologue Arun Shourie authored a book on several of these historians. The idea gained currency that such historians and other intellectuals were deliberately trying to subvert Indian history by questioning the beliefs of the Hindus, and thus were anti-Hindu. 

But what also struck many on the right was a notion of the hold of such leftist historians and intellectuals in the intellectual spaces and their influence in crafting the narratives of Indian history and culture. Books authored by the leftist academics were classics in academic institutions and several of these academics were involved in the writing of school textbooks also. 

The emergence of the new Hindutva

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, in the United States, some Indian-Americans had started challenging the works of Western scholars who wrote on issues dealing with Indian religions, including Hindu deities, and on religious figures (e.g. Ramakrishna). These Indian-Americans used early internet websites and message boards to propagate their views and attack what they saw as Western scholarship’s deliberately disrespectful stance towards the Hindu religion. 

The distrust with academia and the intellectual class, both in India and abroad, soon became widespread in the Hindutva-sympathetic circles. It is a fact that representations of non-West by the West have been a contested issue for a while now. Edward Said’s classic book, Orientalism, attempted to deal with the outlines and the politics of such representation. In India’s case, colonial representations were often problematic as they employed stereotypes to describe several episodes of Indian history and to characterize various Indian practices. 

Incidents like the Ayodhya confrontation and also the perceived transgressions by western scholarship provided the impetus for the next steps in the new Hindutva strategizing. The feelings of unfair representation of the Hindu religion crystallized into plans to create inroads into the so-called liberal bastions, especially universities. 

Dharma Studies, Dharmic faiths and the age of right-wing think-tanks

One such endeavor was initiated under the rubric of various organizations promoting “Dharma Studies” in the United States. Such a program stressed the concept of dharma which undergirds Indian belief-systems and “as the lens through which to view faith and belief systems,” in the Indian context. This was to contrast the Indian systems from the other religious systems, especially the Abrahamic systems; the proponents of Dharma Studies insisted that Indian belief-systems could not be classified as religions in the western sense but must be viewed as “dharmic systems.” 

Alongside, there were gradually constituted other think-tanks and research centers which carried out or facilitated their own studies on a wide variety of topics they deemed necessary for a new presentation of Indian history and culture. With the burgeoning social media, an ever-increasing number of youtube channels and facebook pages undertook their own explorations and knowledge-making, as was mentioned earlier. 

Such efforts often revolved around some key terms that the right has been employing to better convey ideas about Indian civilization and culture: Dharma, of course, but also, terms such as Vedic, Indic, Sanatana, and Indus-Sarasvati. There are also attempts to hark back to supposedly glorious institutions and epochs from the past, hence institutions and think tanks with names like Takshashila, Harappa, Chanakya etc found great resonance. 

The think-tanks were serious affairs, funding and promoting a wide variety of studies, academic research-papers, investigations etc ostensibly focused on building a knowledge base of India “from an Indian point of view” and the bolstering of the Indian position as a “soft power.” The subtitle of one breathless piece in Fortune India in 2015 about this new phenomenon, “How a disparate set of individuals, NRIs, entrepreneurs, who-have-you, is changing the India narrative” tried to explain how the new narrative came about.

Suddenly, the “Khan Market” (and Lutyens’) crowd’s monopoly on spaces like the India International Center, India Habitat Center, sundry literary festivals, convocations, conferences, seminars, panel discussions etc was broken. Parallel spaces came to be utilized and intellectual gatherings organized on the lines of what were considered liberal configurations earlier, such as literary festivals, conferences, webinars etc. 

There were different kinds of “Dialogs,” “LitFests,” “Festivals of Bharat” etc that mimicked the intellectual ostenations of the left-liberal elite earlier. They openly discussed provocative themes such as the left-wing student protests, the so-called selective outrage of the liberals and the difficulty of writing medieval history of India – just as the left sanctimoniously discusses the growing intolerance in the country or the cultural nationalism of the right!

 Since a major concern of this new Hindutva was the correct representation of history, interest in the antiquity of various aspects of Indian history has been an obsessive feature of such conferences and social media explorations. Numerous talks and presentations have been made on the dating of the Mahabharata, for instance, with clues culled from putative astronomical references within the text. Other contentious issues, such as the origin and identity of the Aryans, and the facts behind the Sarasvati river are actively pursued. 

But, in a sign of the times, and also in reaction to the challenges thrown up by Ambedkarite movements, there are gratuitous mentions of Dr. Ambedkar’s role in and as a maker of modern India. One frequent speaker on these platforms even recommends Dr. Ambedkar’s writings as part of his advice on required reading for his audience – especially Ambedkar’s thoughts on Article 370 and Pakistan, not surprisingly. Additionally, there are panel discussions on “The origins of the caste system,” and on untouchability, clearly demonstrating that the new Hindutva is trying, at least on the surface, to engage with the issue of caste which has been squarely laid at the door of Hinduism. 

It is another matter altogether, that more often than not, such engagements end up in subverting the issue, as when some of their interlocutors seek to turn things on their head and charge Buddhism with creating the institution of untouchability, for example.  

Despite the expected doses of Islamophobia, the time-worn accusations of appeasement of minorities, the non-stop lampooning of secularism, these new Hindutva efforts are at least exploratory. They don’t always exhibit the apoplectic and maniacal style of some well-known TV anchors who believe in browbeating their guests to steer the conversation in the direction they want. That said, even these new Hindutva-vadis always seem to be on a short fuse. The now popular term “whataboutery” is an apt way to describe many of their techniques to shut out arguments they do not like. 

It is a strange mix then, a sort of passive-aggressive mode in which this new Hindutva operates. On the one hand they try to present an urbane, measured, data-driven, fact-based style of argumentation and engagement with thorny issues. On the other, they bare their fangs in moments of whataboutery outbursts when the mode of patient deliberation gets in the way of the points they want to prove.

The proliferation and reach of the new Hindutva 

Regardless, they represent the “rise of the Hindu counter-sphere,” as a research paper terms the public expression of this new Hindutva. And what is more, this new Hindutva and its proponents are to be found in quarters one might have not expected, say, a decade ago. Or at least not have expected open expressions of the Hindutva sentiment in those quarters. But today, top engineering and business schools, social science institutions, research bodies, cultural organizations and the institutions of sports, cinema and theater are home to those whose heart beats to some kind of Hindutva sentiment. The Matrix does seem to be everywhere. 

If the IITs have Ambedkar Study Circles, they also have Vivekananda Study Groups. It is hardly surprising the objection to recitation of Faiz should emerge from an IIT. 

One can of course argue that India has always been a Hindu nation. That the most recent phase is merely a manifestation of a mass sentiment that was largely hidden or dormant earlier. Dr. Ambedkar was very aware of the political authority passing into the hands of a Hindu majority – or at least a Hindu elite – after India’s independence, and he therefore sought constitutional guarantees for the (religious) minorities. 

That probably has a ring of truth to it, as those considered to be lower-caste can easily attest to.  A pride and sense of privilege accruing from belonging to upper-caste Hindu statuses has always been a reality. 

One should also keep in mind that there were projects on the archaeology of the Hindu epics conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India in post-Independence India which blurred lines of tradition and scientific exploration. In fact, it was as part of such archaeological projects that ASI [or, more specifically, one of its directors, B.B. Lal] claimed the existence of a Ram temple beneath the Babri Masjid. 

Such a pride and caste-privilege might not, however, have taken on a sharp nationalistic consciousness, and concomitantly assumed a bitter feeling of historic oppression earlier. It was in the propagation and insinuation of those kinds of emotions – a feeling of defeat, victimization and the resultant need for strident assertion – with the start of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation that the role of “political Hinduism” came to the fore.

That was still old Hindutva in the (ratha/chariot) driver’s seat. However, that tremendous polarization and resultant targeting of dispassionate narratives related to the nation’s history, culture and traditions seems to have fueled the push to carve out new intellectual territory and control. 

According to Dasgupta, relative affluence post-liberalization also helped to inject some confidence into a newer generation. Such a generation mostly from the upper classes with access to the internet, found digital resources, space, and often anonymity on the web and social media to explore areas like their past and connect with like-minded people. One might say, employing language often used in another context, that the online radicalization of this new Hindu had begun. It was this initially small movement of those who could express their unhappiness with extant modes of representation of Indian history and its traditions that gradually burgeoned into the larger, new Hindutva reality that Dasgupta is speaking about.

What must be done

This is not all bad news. One must keep in mind that even in 2019, BJP was returned with less than 40% vote share (overall). Subsequently, it lost various state elections one after another. 

The new Hindutva is an endeavor largely conceived of and managed by a privileged few who are funding institutions and organizations like think-tanks. Their vision is not grounded in the sentiment and ways of masses and they can only end up reproducing the social conditions they find themselves in. 

Sure, they will act in various roles – not only as knowledge disruptors but as knowledge disseminators in a certain narrow band of the intellectual spheres they inhabit. But to grant them the power to fundamentally shift the terms of discourse on issues of identity, belonging, tradition and culture in India is to grant them more than they deserve. 

Can the people who consider themselves progressive in matters of basic human relations and values engage meaningfully with issues of India’s traditions, its social cleavages and the complexities of its historical experiences? Can they talk about notions like aastha – “(religious) belief” – and dharma/dharmic/dhamma without being condescending and dismissive – and not let the right hijack those rich and profound ideas? 

It is the general view that the so-called left has already ceded the space of faith, belief, tradition, etc. at the altar of a supposed godless revolution. But someone as steeped in modern western social and political thought as Dr. Ambedkar understood the inclinations of so many of the people who looked up to him. He did not belittle their spiritual concerns. He evaluated Marx and Buddha. He relentlessly engaged with the Buddhist suttas as he did with the works of social theorists, historians and legal scholars. He dealt with the many meanings and notions of dharma, for example in his piece, Philosophy of Hinduism.  If he was to contend with people who wanted to quote sacred books and concepts in them in their defence, then he was well prepared to see through their chicanery and posturing. 

One need not think of trying to pander to those who arrogate to themselves the rights to interpret history, tradition and culture for reasons of bigotry, historical vengeance and cultural nationalism. But one must try to have the language and intellectual apparatus to be able to articulate terms and ideas grounded in existing realities. This means being able to offer well-reasoned and grounded narratives that can connect with the people and their concerns. In that way the vital space that matters of faith, culture, traditional practices occupy in people’s lives can be engaged with in a balanced and informed way. In that manner common communitarian legacies of discussion, debate and disputation can be revived.  And one can hopefully stop mourning the death of secularism. 

(The author is a writer based in Delhi NCR)

Related:

India’s Long March – Ekla Chalo Re
Shaheen Bagh: You can’t evict an idea
Would such a temple have been acceptable to Ram?
India’s composite culture and Muslim stalwarts

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As in many parts of parts of the world, India is witnessing a hypernationalism on multiple fronts. Through five illustrative cases involving biological claims, Subramaniam explores an emerging bionationalism. The cases are varied, spanning the revival of Vaastushastra, the codification of “unnatural sex in IPC Section 377 (which the Indian Supreme Court recently struck down), the unfolding debates around the veracity of Hanuman and Ram Setu, debates on the geographic origins of Indians through genomic evidence, the revival of traditional systems of Indian medicine through genomics and pharmaceuticals, the growth of and subsequent ban on gestational surrogacy, and the rise of old Vedic gestational sciences.

Moving beyond a critique of India’s emerging bionationalism, Holy Science explores generative possibilities that the rich traditions of South Asian story telling offers us.

The following is an excerpt from the chapter Conceiving a Hindu Nation: (Re) Making the Indian Womb

New Biopolitical Imaginations of Hindu Nationalism

One of the central and ongoing projects that Hindu nationalists have embarked on is to “Hinduize” the nation. Since coming to power in the national government in 2014, they have poured considerable investment into these projects—taking over research institutions, rewriting school textbooks and curricula, and reshaping research and policy agendas. In the realm of biology, Hindu nationalists have sought to modernize and scientize Vedic sciences by reconstructing them in the language of modern genomics. The new Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy (AYUSH) has a separate budget and a higher status than any similar agency has ever had in India’s history. On its web-site, images of Prime Minister Modi in yoga asanas with a large group of followers fill the screen. Over the last year, several efforts at reproductive enhancements using Vedic and Hindu sciences have garnered international attention. These practices and claims have an older history. For example, Lucia Savary (2014) describes what she calls “vernacular eugenics” in India during colonial rule in the early decades of the twentieth century. Known as santati-śāstra (the “science of progeny” or “progeniology”), this emerging branch of knowledge bases its principles on Francis Galton’s “classical eugenics” but has adapted them to Indian eugenics, using Ayurveda or ratiśāstra (ancient texts that deal with conjugal love) as its knowledge base. During this time period, Savary (2014: 381) argues,“western science functioned as a legitimizing source in vernacular texts.” In the more recent projects, what is striking and alarming is the seamless melding of the ancient and the modern to reconfigure Vedic medicine as proven knowledge.

Let’s consider claims of the revival of the ancient Indian tradition of garbh sanskar, or education in the womb. Organizers claim that it “is a scientifically proven fact” and “an amazing way of teaching/educating and bonding with unborn baby in womb during pregnancy.” Its objective is to produce uttam santati, superior children (Sampath 2017). Parents are advised to follow “three months of ‘shuddhikaran (purification)’ for parents, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived, and procedural and dietary regulations” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017). Ashutosh Bharadwaj (2017) quotes a doctor as stating, “The shastras prescribe a specific time to have intercourse for pregnancy. Doctors tell couples when they should become intimate on the basis of their horoscope and planetary configurations.” The program involves “purification of the energy channels” (Gowen 2017) and following the religious scriptures. This project, launched in Gujarat a decade ago, has been promoted at the national level since 2015. Its national convener, Dr. Karishma Narwani, states, “Our main objective is to make a Samarth Bharat (strong India) through uttam santati [superior offspring]. Our target is to have thousands of such babies by 2020” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017). Such training extends to Hindu nationalist camps called Arogya Bharati (Gowen 2017).

Through Ayurveda, the program argues, you can produce superior offspring: “The parents may have lower IQ, with a poor educational back-ground, but their baby can be extremely bright. If the proper procedure is followed, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser height can have fair complexion and grow taller” (R. Mishra 2017). A perfect example of an archaic modernity, the claims originate in both Indian mythology and modern biology. Garbh sanskar (education in the womb), for example, draws on the Indian mythological tale of Abhimanyu. In the Mahabharata,  Abhimanyu is described as having learned the art of breaking the “chakravyuh” (a circular trap) inside his mother’s womb as his father narrated the method (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017). Alongside this mythological insight, the project introduces bioscientific language. Repeatedly in the numerous projects that have proliferated, one sees the mingling of Indian mythological stories alongside bioscientific language that often proves nonsensical if one examines it carefully. For example:

Garbh sanskar enables “genetic engineering in vivo or inside the womb.” (Indiatimes 2017)

This procedure “repairs genes” by ensuring that genetic defects are not passed on to babies. (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017)

Ayurveda has all the details about how we can get the desired physical and mental qualities of babies. IQ is developed during the sixth month of pregnancy. If the mother undergoes specific procedures, like what to eat, listen and read, the desired IQ can be achieved. Thus, we can get a desired, customised baby (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017).

Often the personnel have a mixture of traditional and bioscientific training. For example: “Narwani and Jani hold Bachelor’s degrees in ayurveda, medicine and surgery, and Varshney obtained a PhD in biochemistry from Allahabad University in 1986” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017).

All of the projects share a few features. The primary advice seems to be the control of the pregnant woman—making her a happy, docile, accommodating individual. They promote being “good” and religious, reading religious scriptures, listening to the Ramayana, and following austere Hindu values such as eating vegetarian food. The recent trend of violence against meat eaters is significant given that vegetarianism is a cultural practice of only a minority of India’s population (Natrajan and Jacob 2018). The advice is decidedly puritanical in its prohibitions against desire and passion (albeit not against sex!).

Pregnant women have been advised to stay away from “desire or lust”, avoid non-vegetarian food and have spiritual thoughts. . . .

Pregnant women should detach themselves from desire, anger, attachment, hatredness [sic], and lust. Avoid bad company and be with good people in stable and peaceful condition always. . . .

The [government-funded] booklet has also suggested that expecting mothers read about the life of great personalities, keep themselves in “peace” and hang “good and beautiful pictures” in their bedrooms for a healthy baby. (Times of India 2017) The programs and website make grandiose forecasts, including a higher IQ, fair skin, and tall stature for the baby and an easy labor for the mother, as one of the other quotes suggests: “If the mother chants shlokas and mantras, it helps in the mental growth of the baby . . . if she leads such a life, there will be no labour pain and the baby will gain up to 300g more weight” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017; Gowen 2017).

Lest we think these are a few fringe groups, it is important to remember that promotional materials and information are often government funded and featured on government websites. For example, the government-funded Central Council for Research in Yoga and Naturopathy produced a booklet released by the minister of state for AYUSH that contained much of this information (Times of India 2017). Information to produce uttam santati (superior children) has made its way into textbooks in some states. Controversial teachings on how to produce a “superior male child” through diet and melted gold and silver have found their way into the curriculum for a Bachelor of Ayurveda, Medicine, and Surgery (a five-and-a-half-year degree) third-year textbook in the state of Maharashtra (R. Mishra 2017). While these ideas have long circulated in India, with a Hindu nationalist government at the helm promoting such knowledge as Vedic science, these projects are increasingly finding national reach.

The projects and their goals are ambitious. One claims to have already ensured the delivery of 450 “customised babies,” and its target is to have a Garbh Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra (a facilitation center) in every state by 2020 (Indiatimes 2017). They have also begun to incorporate garbh vigyan sanskar (pregnancy science rites) into college curricula.

Most alarming are the hopeful claims linking their projects to the successes of Nazi Germany. Several organizers have repeated the narrative that the project was inspired by the advice a senior Hindu nationalist (RSS) ideologue received over forty years ago in Germany from a woman he called the “Mother of Germany.” The woman is quoted as telling him, “You have come from India, have you not heard of Abhimanyu (the son of Arjuna in the epic Mahabharata)?” Varshney commented, “She told him that the new generation in Germany was born through Garbh Sanskar and that is why the country is so developed” (Ashutosh Bharadwaj 2017).

Banu Subramaniam is a Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes on social and cultural aspects of science. She supports activist science aimed to create knowledge about the natural world while being aware about how it is embedded in our society and culture. In 2016, her book Ghost stories for Darwin won the Ludwik Fleck Prize for science and technology studies.
 

These are excerpts from Holy Science written by Banu Subramanium, published by Orient BlackSwan. Republished here with permission from the publisher.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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Written by KS Komireddi, Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India is a blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present. Through the book, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India’s past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi’s decisive electoral victory.

An excerpt from Malevolent Republic

The following is an excerpt from the chapter “Coda” of the book.
 

Coda

Reclamation
When, finally, we reached the place
We hardly knew why we were there.
The trip had darkened every face,
Our deeds were neither great nor rare…
—Nissim Ezekiel

India under Modi has undergone the most total transformation since 1991. Hindu chauvinism, ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, has become so untameably wild that it cannot be challenged on terms other than its own. Hindu rage that once manifested itself in localised violence has metastasised into a pan-national cancer. Anti-minority vitriol that once lurked on the peripheries of high politics has deluged the mainstream. Democratic institutions have been repurposed to abet Hindu nationalism. The military has been politicised, the judiciary plunged into the most existential threat to its independence since 1975. Kashmir has never more resembled a colonial possession. And an incipient yearning for disaffiliation has crystallised in peninsular India.

The hoax of a technocratic moderniser crafted by an ensemble of intellectuals and industrialists collapsed early on under the burden of Modi’s incompetence, vainglory and innate viciousness. Five years later, we have more than a glimpse of the New India he has spawned. It is a reflection of its progenitor: culturally arid, intellectually vacant, emotionally bruised, vain, bitter, boastful, permanently aggrieved andimplacably malevolent: a make-believe land full of fudge and fakery, where savagery against religious minorities is among the therapeutic options available to a self-pitying majority frustrated by Modi’s failure to upgrade its standard of living.

And it is only in its early stage. All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

India’s tragedy is that just when it is faced with an existential crisis, there exists no pan-Indian alternative to the BJP. What remains of the opposition is bleached of conviction. The values of Hindu nationalism have become the default setting of Indian politics. The centre has oscillated very far to the right. Five years ago, Modi went to great lengths to manufacture the impression that he had shed his ideological baggage; over the next five years, Rahul Gandhi expended tremendous energies to give himself a religious makeover. The Congress presidenthas toured temples, brandished his Brahmin caste and posted photos of himself on religious pilgrimages. In 2018, when the management of an ancient Hindu temple in southern India defied the Supreme Court’s order to open its gates to female worshippers, the party of Nehru again fell behind the faction of clerical reaction. Later that year, Congress stitched together a governing coalition in Madhya Pradesh, pushing the BJP from power in a state it had ruled for fifteen years. The change of guard was greeted as a new beginning, hailed as a blow to the Hindu-nationalist project. One of the first acts of the Congress-led government was to allocate Rs 450 crore for cow shelters.Its next act was to invoke the National Security Act against three Muslim men accused of slaughtering cows in the state.

Fifty years before Modi became prime minister, the Congress leader Lal Bahadur Shastri, the republic’s second prime minister, was invited by a journalist to talk about his faith. Shastri’s answer was curt: ‘one should not discuss one’s religion in public.’3 Today’s Congress has no such compunctions. Acquisition of power is the principal objective of a party that now seems to exist solely to provide subsistence to those who feed off it. And so it has taken to mimicking the BJP and annexing its most explosive causes. In the Hindu heartlands of the north, its leaders accuse Modi of not evincing sufficient ‘passion for Lord Rama’4 and promise voters that a ‘Rama temple will come up in Ayodhya only when the Congress comes to power’5. If a temple rises on the site of the Babri mosque, it will be as a tombstone for the secular state. When the party that claims to be the ‘secular’ alternative champions the temple, is it triangulation or treachery?

India will leap to a point from which return will become extremely difficult if Modi remains in power at the head of a government with an absolute majority in parliament. Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution to brutalise Indians. Modi will seek to write his ideology into the Constitution to bisect them. If he succeeds, Hindu nationalism will become the official animating ideology of the republic. There will be separate classes of citizens in law. Bigotry will not then be a deviation from the ideals of the republic: it will be an affirmation of them. India will become Pakistan by another name.

If Modi loses?

The defeat will spur a great deal of commentary on the redemptive qualities of Indian democracy. But a post-Modi government, whether it is a coalition led by Congress or a Congress-free bricolage of regional forces, will be in danger of suffering the same fate as the post-Emergency government in 1976: an unwieldy alliance lofted into power on account of what it was not—it was not Indira, and it was not Congress— before collapsing in short order because it could not agree upon what it was. The Hindu-nationalist project will neither dissipate nor die if Modi is defeated. It will go into remission. Its leaders, cadres, believers will regroup and recrudesce. They are incompetent in government: they are peerless in opposition. Modi’s pre-prime ministerial career is a lesson in how India’s shameless elites can be co-opted to pimp for their cause: a commitment to the market is all they ask in return for their services. And on any given day, there are tens of thousands of activists of the RSS, spread out across India, preaching the gospel of Hindu nationalism and fomenting a revolution from the bottom-up. They believe in their cause. Their adversaries long ago abandoned theirs.

That is why we are here.

We inhabit the most degraded moment in the history of the republic, the culmination of decades of betrayals, the eruption of a long-suppressed rage. But the good thing about bad times is that they are great clarifiers. We can see where we stand. The past five years have shattered so many illusions, dispelled so much fog. We can begin to accept how we arrived here: a journey lined with corruption, cowardly concessions to religious nationalists, demeaning bribes to the minorities, self-wounding distortions of the past and wholesale abandonment of the many for the few.

Modi has drawn out the very worst in many Indians. But his reign has also smashed the complacency that governed our attitudes and activated citizenly antibodies across the country. It has belatedly awakened us to what we may be poised forever to lose. It has revealed to us that the republic bequeathed by the founders was not a sham. It was an instantiation of ideals worth fighting for: rising from the inferno of Partition, it defiantly rejected the baleful idea that national unity could not be forged in the crucible of human multiplicity, that permanent political division was the only resolution to the predicament of religious variety. Modi, an affront to that idea, is also the result of the disfigurement of that idea. Those who preceded him fostered the conditions for his breakthrough; and he has dragged India, already heavy with the vices of yesteryear, to depths from which recovery may take generations. Can we give up on India? Seven decades after the holocaust of Partition in the name of religious nationalism, can we throw away the improbable unity for which so many good people sacrificed their everything?

A year before Modi was born, at a time when Muslims were still fleeing or being driven out of India for Pakistan, the poet Abdul Hayee, who wrote under the name Sahir Ludhianvi, made the contrariwise journey, leaving Pakistan for India. It was an audacious act of reclamation.

One of my most cherished possessions for many years was an old cyclostyled copy of Sahir’s poems, beautifully annotated by hand. I don’t know from whom I inherited it, but there was in it this verse, written after Pakistan had waged yet another war in the name of religion to validate the divisive logic of its birth, which its previous owner had underlined:

Woh waqt gaya, woh daur gaya jab do qaumon ka nara tha,
Woh log gaye is dharti se jinka maqsad batwara tha.
Ab ek hain sab Hindustani,
Ab ek hain sab Hindustani.
That time is past, that epoch is bygone,
When there was the clamour of two nations;
From this land are gone the people whose dream was
segregation;

Now all Indians are one, now all Indians are one.

Sahir spoke for a generation of people who did more than believe in India. They placed their lives on the line for it. They willed India into existence merely by being present in it. Whenever I went to Bombay, I stopped by Sahir’s final resting place to say a prayer. But there is no trace of Sahir today in his beloved city: some years ago, his grave was razed, its remains disinterred and destroyed, and a thick new layer of earth poured over it to create a fresh grave. If we do not reclaim it, there will be no trace of his India in the not too distant future.

KS (Kapil Satish) Komireddi was born in India, and educated there and in England. His commentary, criticism, and journalism – from South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East – have appeared, among other publications, in The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator, TIME, Foreign Policy, and The Jewish Chronicle. This is his first book.
This is an excerpt from Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, written by KS Komireddi and published by Context. Republished here with permission from the publisher.

Courtesy: Indian Cultural Forum

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The return to power of Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) creates uncertainty about the future of advocacy in India.

This 13-year-old boy from India’s Bihar state who worked 15 hours a day making bread was rescued by the workers of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan or Save Childhood movement in 2014. India’s far-right BJP is taking aim at NGOs. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Since 1976, civil society organizations have faced multiple operational challenges as successive governments have tried to undermine their work with accusations of “anti-nationalism” and “sedition.”

It’s important to examine the role of Hindu nationalism — also BJP’s founding ideology — since it regards NGOs as undemocratic and anti-Indian. But it’s equally critical to remember there are provisions guaranteed under international law to protect NGO activity in India.

Hindutva politics and NGOs

BJP’s Hindutva ideology is based on the advancement of a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu kingdom. The underlying tenet is to regulate the working of civil society through Hindu religious doctrine that imposes vigilantism, violence and punishment on those who defy order.

Hindu nationalism reinforces the glorification and revivalism of Hinduism, the supremacy of a nation and invokes intolerance towards other non-Hindu groups that seek sociocultural change and justice in society.

The BJP views NGO activists as defiant because they challenge conventional notions of power, social structures and hierarchies that conflict with the idea of Hindu majoritarianism and status quo culture.

For instance, the Modi government targeted faith-based organizations in 2017 for their alleged involvement with religious conversions.

Compassion International, a foreign-funded Christian charity group, was shut down and asked to partner with other religious organizations apart from Christians if it wanted to re-register as a legal enterprise again.

Similarly, several local as well as transnational NGOs seeking justice for Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 were threatened with investigation and bank account closures if they continued their work.

While previous governments have been intolerant towards NGOs in the past, the BJP is taking it further, polarizing civil society with far-right politics. Transnational NGOs have been targeted for “serving as tools for foreign policy interests of western governments,” but local NGOs that don’t fall under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) mandate are also experiencing repression and harassment.

In 2018, 13 activists were killed during the Sterlite protests in Toothukudi, Tamil Nadu.

Indian activists hold placards during a protest against Sterlite Industries outside the company’s office in Bangalore in May 2018. Police opened fire on protesters demanding the closure of a south Indian copper plant, killing 13 of them. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

In Pune, several lawyers, academics and poets were arrested for their alleged involvement as “[Urban Naxals]” practising unlawful activities last year. Additionally, recent amendments to the Forest Rights Act proposes restoring authoritative powers to forest authorities. This will deny land ownership rights of forest dwellers and reduce accessibility to tribal land through force and vandalism.

Systematic dismantling of NGOs

The BJP has meticulously orchestrated a systematic dismantling of NGOs (non-governmental, non-profit organizations) that has put the future of Indian advocacy surrounding socioeconomic and environmental issues in jeopardy.

Congressional amendments to the FCRA in 2010 made it clear that there would be stricter oversight and monitoring of foreign-funded NGOs that engage in critical discourse.

These amendments included:
 

1. Regular registration renewals;
2. Setting up of separate bank accounts for foreign and domestic contributions;
3. Prescribing various offences and penalties for defaulters, including suspension and cancellation of registration licences.

In effect, the FCRA crippled the NGO sector, subdued critical dialogue and restricted transnational partnerships in civil society deemed crucial for effective policy-making.

However, with the BJP in power, the scope of transnational advocacy has been even further reduced.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the media after meeting with the president to stake claim to form the government in New Delhi on May 25, 2019. Newly elected lawmakers from India’s ruling alliance led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party elected Modi as their leader. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

Since 2014, local activists have been finding it difficult to obtain financial, technological or capacity-building support from abroad or from local officials because external NGOs and local philanthropic organizations are reluctant to aid rights-based advocacy. While the FCRA curtails foreign funding, philanthropists currently shy away from supporting critical activity for the fear of appearing anti-government.

Activists are now concerned about the prospects for activism in India, and are worried about their day-to-day survival in the state as the BJP continues to penalize dissenters.

In this light, what can international and local organizations do to safeguard the interests of NGOs in the future?

International intervention is crucial

In 2016, the United Nations Special Rapporteur pointed out that India was placing unreasonable restrictions on transnational advocacy networks by silencing them on obscure grounds. It asked the Indian government to repeal the FCRA, which didn’t happen.

This is because currently, UN regulations aren’t rigorously enforced to prevent governments from dismantling civil society operations in the Global South. If enforced, they could guarantee and promote NGO rights surrounding freedom of assembly and association. Sanctions should also be imposed to keep non-compliant and exploitative governments in check.

A common platform for discussion can help NGOs review government policies and deal with repressive actions. For instance, certain South African states allow NGOs to gather once a year to discuss issues of common interest. In India, that doesn’t happen.

There’s also a need for change in the culture of Indian philanthropy to ensure NGOs are supported and not questioned about their credibility. Activists must be treated as equal stakeholders in society so that money is distributed for civic education, legal literacy and accountability-related work.

Amid this cultural ecosystem change is the need for NGOs, in turn, to be fully transparent about their funding and operations.

Now that the BJP has won the election with a majority, it gives the Indian government the legitimacy to act freely and bend laws without being questioned because acquiring an electoral mandate by the state means complete adherence to government policies and structures.
But democracy isn’t just about winning elections. It is about equal participation. Socioeconomic and environmental reforms cannot be left exclusively for the government to manage. The international community must help ensure that civil society and the citizenry are being heard to counter India’s conservative policies and right-wing politics.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Image Courtesy: PTI

However, this time around, some have raised doubts about whether the BJP will be able to repeat its 2014 performance. Gujarat is home to two of BJP’s top campaigners and major leaders–Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party president Amit Shah. Both have campaigned extensively in Gujarat. Shah, who is running for a seat in the Gandhinagar constituency, held roadshows in Ghatlodia, Kalol, Naranpura, Sabarmati, Sanand, Sarkhej, and Vejalpur, as well as four group meetings with residential societies, per the Ahmedabad Mirror, which noted that Modi spoke at rallies in Amreli, Anand, Himmatnagar, Junagadh, Patan, Songadh, and Surendranagar. A top BJP leader told the Ahmedabad Mirror, “We won all the 26 seats in 2014 LS polls. Then in 2017 Assembly polls we got only 99 seats, the lowest ever in more than two decades. Hence, two of our best faces – Modi and Shah – camped in Gujarat longer this time for maximum impact.” Indeed, an editorial in The Hindu in December 2017 noted of the Gujarat assembly election results, “Whatever the BJP leaders may say, the victory — by an extremely slim majority and well short of the 150-plus seats it aimed to win — is a setback.” 
 
Gandhinagar has been the constituency of BJP veteran LK Advani, and although Shah has been campaigning across the country, per ThePrint and NDTV, a backroom team has been conducting his campaign in Gujarat’s capital, even going so far as using life-sized cutouts of the BJP president. While some believe that the constituency will be an easy win for Shah, his opponent, the Congress’s CJ Chavda, who is a veterinarian and ex-bureaucrat, told ThePrint that the “battle isn’t tough at all. I do not think there is any challenge to winning.” 
 
Congress president Rahul Gandhi spoke at five public meetings across Gujarat, and one of the party’s most popular campaigners, Navjot Singh Sidhu, also campaigned there on the last day before campaigning had to be stopped, The Week reported, noting that although the BJP had said it would win all the Gujarat seats, “on Saturday, Congress leader Ahmed Patel exuded confidence that his party would win 10 to 15 seats.” The Week highlighted that BJP has relied on the central government’s accomplishments, the Balakot air strike, and “Modi’s emotional appeal,” while the Congress “has tried to exploit the anger among the farmers and small businessmen.” 
 
Per FirstPost, which cited the Pocketbook of Agricultural Statistics of 2017 that is published by the Union agriculture ministry, almost 43% of the 39.31 lakh agricultural households in Gujarat are in debt. Moreover, Adivasis, which comprise 8.6% of the state’s population have grown increasingly angry with the BJP government, Outlook India reported in March. Dr. Praful Vasava, a local tribal leader, told Outlook, “As per the law, the gram sabhas have to agree to give away land, but they were not asked either before the Narmada weir or the statue were built. In 72 villages, 75,000 tribals were affected: they neither received compensation nor land elsewhere. The promised jobs have also not come. It’s a fight for our jal-jameen-jangal (water, land and forests). The government probably feels we don’t matter. But our protest is going to impact the results.”
 
LiveMint has highlighted the divide between urban and rural Gujarat, noting that more than half of the 99 seats the BJP secured in the 2017 assembly election were in cities, and emphasising that the major causes for the BJP’s lacklustre performance that year, including unemployment, farm distress, and the negative impact of the GST and demonetisation, still persist. In fact, the Business Standard highlighted how both parties’ campaign events have been in rural areas, and away from Gujarat’s major urban centres. Gandhi’s public speeches were delivered in the primarily agricultural areas of Kutch-Saurashtra, in Bhavnagar and Rajula, as well as Navsari and Bhuj. 
 
Multiple rural farmers criticised the BJP government when speaking to LiveMint’s Darshan Desai, who is based in Ahmedabad. In the Jesar village in the Amreli constituency, Mansukhbhai, a farmer, said, “Please understand clearly. We want a government for the poor, for us farmers, not for a handful of people. I don’t want to hear about all this desh-bhakti (nationalism). We want an MP (member of Parliament) whom we will get to see and who will sort out our issues.” When asked about the Rs. 6,000 aid proposed for all farmers, Hardasbhai of the Kadegi village said, “They seem to be merely mocking our situation,” adding, “We will get a paltry amount of ₹2,000 first. It would have been better if this was not given. We have not received adequate support prices for our groundnut and cotton crops. The government should have looked into that”. 
 
Meanwhile, the drumbeats of nationalism seem to have reverberated in Gujarat’s urban areas. LiveMint pointed out that slogans at Amit Shah’s roadshows had little connection to his constituency, Gandhinagar, or even Gujarat; a commonly used one was ‘Kashmir hamara hai (Kashmir is ours)’. “Across urban Gujarat, large hoardings of Narendra Modi’s face with the accompanying slogan ‘Attacked terrorists inside enemy’s homes’ dot the landscape,” LiveMint reported, adding, “Several cities have witnessed special screenings of Uri: The Surgical Strike”. Arjun Modhwadia, a senior Congress leader in the state, told LiveMint, “In the state’s rural regions, people are not interested in the nationalist rhetoric…We don’t see anything less than ten seats… all drawn from rural and Adivasi dominated regions”. 
 
While agricultural distress, and an underwhelming performance by the state administration came in power after Modi has upped Congress’s advantage, it too has suffered some setbacks. In 2017, as the Times of India noted, the party made gains in North Gujarat–which has a significant population of Dalits, members of Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and the Patidar community–because of Alpesh Thakore, Hardik Patel, and Jignesh Mevani, two of whom were elected to assembly seats. However, Thakore quit the Congress just earlier this month, and Mevani, a Dalit leader, has aspirations for national role, the Times of India noted. Meanwhile, the Gujarat High Court denied Patel’s plea for a stay on his conviction in a 2015 rioting case. However, Patel, who officially joined the Congress in March 2019, is still a major campaigner for the party; per The Week, he addressed more than 50 rallies in the state. 
 
Per The Telegraph, the Lok Sabha election has generated little interest in Gujarat. A paan seller, Panditji, in Navrangpura in the Ahmedabad West constituency said, “Maahaul bilkul thanda hai (the election is absolutely dull)”. Moreover, The Telegraph noted that “crowds had to be ‘managed'” for Modi’s rallies in the states. “No one ran out of their shops and homes when his chopper landed. People had to be brought to the rally,” went an oft-repeated phrase following the Prime Minister’s rally in Surendranagar, Saurashtra, which has been dealing with drought. 
 
Analysis from the Economic Times indicates that the race is a narrow one in Gujarat, with the BJP keeping hold of major urban constituencies, but the Congress also appearing as a strong contender in Sabarkantha, Patan, and Banaskantha in northern Gujarat, and its candidate Bharatsinh Solanki “in a strong position in Anand”. The Economic Times noted that, in 2015 and 2016, Mahesana was the epicentre of protests seeking quotas for the Patidars, who “were strong BJP supporters” ahead of the demonstrations, but “may be splitting their votes” this time. The votes of the Thakore community could also be divided in north Gujarat, per the Economic Times, which also noted that while the tribal vote in the state is also typically divided, a majority of voters in the Dangs, Chhota Udaipur, and Panch Mahal areas have complained of water scarcity. 
 
While the BJP has had a strong hold on Gujarat for years, it must be noted that in 2009, the Congress won 12 of the 26 parliamentary constituencies, repeating its performance from 2004, the year that the NDA government’s major ‘India Shining’ campaign failed to draw votes, and resulted in the formation of the UPA government. With the current race seeming to be a delicate balance, it remains to be seen whether Modi’s party will retain power in his home state. It seems, however, that Prime Minister has high expectations of Gujarat voters. Speaking in Patan on Sunday, April 21, he reportedly said, “The duty of the people of my home state to take care of the ‘son of soil’ and give all 26 seats in Gujarat to me,” per NDTV. 
 
Kachchh has been a BJP stronghold since 1996, according to FirstPost, which said that although the Kachchh district has a majority of Hindus, it is also home to almost 4.42 lakh Muslims, and nearly 2.59 lakh people who belong to Scheduled Castes. 
 
Banaskantha is noted for its mineral reserves, including granite, limestone, and marble, per FirstPost. The constituency also regularly gets funds from the Backward Regions Grant Fund Programme.
 
Mahesana has a majority Hindu population, 92.6%, with 6.7% Muslims, FirstPost noted, adding that the Patidar community has a strong presence, and there are 3.5 lakh people from the Thakur community. “OBCs and Dalits also have a sizeable presence but it is the Patidars who play a crucial role in deciding who wins from the constituency,” FirstPost said. 
 
Gandhinagar is a key constituency, with BJP president Amit Shah contesting from it. The majority of its population is Hindu–94.81%. 
 
Surendranagar in Saurashtra has a majority of Hindus, but also has a significant Koli population, FIrstPost noted, adding that it supplies almost 25% of the country’s salt, and is also a textile centre. 
 
In Rajkot, three communities have been key in influencing political outcomes, according to FirstPost; these include the Koli community and two sub-castes in the Patel community: the Kadva and Leuva groups. 
 
Anand encompasses the entire Anand district, which is home to nearly 21 lakh people, per FirstPost. The majority of the population, 85.95%, is Hindu. It is known for being home to Amul, and the centre of the milk revolution. In fact, dairy farming has become a major election issue, per ThePrint, with farmers complaining of drought, low prices, and no support from the government.
 
In 2014, current Prime Minister Narendra Modi contested from the Vadodara constituency, and won with a sizeable margin. The constituency covers parts of the Vadodara district, which is home to more than 41 lakh people, primarily Hindus. However, per the 2011 census, there are more than 3.85 lakh Muslims in the area, FirstPost reported.
 
The Chhota Udaipur constituency includes parts of the Narmada, Panchmahal and Vadodra district, and the latter has a large population people belonging to Scheduled Tribes–11.49 lakh people, per FirstPost.
 
The Surat constituency includes parts of the Surat district and is home to around 60.81 lakh people, per the 2011 census. It is a hub for diamond manufacturing, and has been the constituency of former Prime Minister Morarji Desai of the Janata Party.

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That Minor Girl abduction, rape and strangulation, a particularly gruesome crime, aroused a virulent response from Jammu High Court Bar Association, as well as the Kathua Bar, in the name of “sentiments of the (Hindu) people”, invites attention to a phenomenon which has long been there but rarely acknowledged. The case was investigated by the SIT constituted and supervised by the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir, when J&K police bungled the initial investigation, in lieu of money according to the charge-sheet. The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Kathua was reluctant to accept the charge-sheet and relented only after five hours when orders were issued by his superiors. All this went on while the Hindu Ekta Manch supporters had a field day staging protests inside the Court premises unhampered by the J&K Police. There were no preventive detentions, lathis charge, tear gas, pellet guns and guns, which is the norm in Kashmir. And now comes the news that the authorities are going to appoint Sikh prosecutors to ensure that Hindu-Muslims divide does not widen. In other words, starting from January 23 when HEM was formed by RSS supporters to now, this vicious campaign was allowed a free run. No police force displays such generosity towards people protesting atrocities and persecution as they do towards rabble-rousing Hindutvawadis for imagined “hurt”.

The High Court and local Bar’s demand of handing over the matter to CBI rested on the argument that gruesome abduction, rape and killing of the 8-year-old girl ought to be investigated by Hindu police personnel, because SIT’s credibility is suspect as it comprises of more Muslim personnel in the team, was led by a Muslim police officer and which then pinned the blame on eight accused all of them Hindus, including four police personnel. The High Court and local Bar Association could carry on with their vituperative campaign, strike call, ‘bandh’ etc because they enjoyed the patronage of Jammu-based BJP, Congress and the National Panthers Party as well as BJP ministers in the state and at the Centre, especially the Minister in PM Office Jitendra Singh. Lending legitimacy to the demand for CBI inquiry the Minister in PMO reportedly said on February 22 that “If people feel that they do not have faith in the police or crime branch investigation and the case needs to be handed over to the CBI, I don’t think, there is any problem in handing over the case to the CBI”. But why carry on with the protest when charge-sheet has been filed and the veracity of the evidence presented by the SIT will be determined during the trial. Samar Halarnkar writing in Scroll.in [12/04/2018] is right when he says that India is being pushed into becoming “an apartheid state, a Hindu Rashtra where the Hindu has first claim to everything”, and evidently want the criminal justice system to favour them.

The sight of remorseless ‘Hindutvawadis’ waving the tricolour flag and mouthing abuse & provocative slogans, indulge in arson, plunder, molestation and even lynching in the name of “Gau Mata” or “Bharat Mata” or some imagined “hurt” represents the new ‘normalcy’ manufactured by pseudo-patriots of ‘Sangh Parivar’. That these luminaries of Hindutva in Kathua have been covering their crimes using the national flag to agitate in favour of perpetrators (which included four police personnel) of heinous crime against a girl child, promote ethnic cleansing by ridding Kathua district of Muslims and can carry on their murderous politics, is evidence of the official patronage and clout they enjoy. That the Union Government and its security apparatus still point fingers at Muslims of Kashmir and ignores the danger posed by Hindutvadis, illustrates that the religious radicalization Indian Government focuses on studiously ignores the radicalization of Hindus and the vicious politics they engage in India and in particular in Jammu.

In the aftermath of 1947 massacre of Jammu Muslims by the Dogra Maharaja’s troops, backed by RSS and the Akali Dal, the emergence of Sheikh Abdullah, led National Conference to power in 1947-48. The agitation by the Praja Parishad and then Jana Sangh was a thinly disguised attempt by the old ruling class under Dogra Rule (1846-1947) to retrieve what they had lost with the demise of the kingdom. In the process, they kept alive the communal fault-lines in J&K, while claiming to be represent the “nationalist force”.

These faultlines got exacerbated in mid-1990’s when Village Defense Committees were set up in Doda and Kishtwar comprising 95% Hindus as Special Police Officers mostly drawn from Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena. They still function and carry weapons. Lest we forget the entire Jammu and Kashmir Division has been declared as “Disturbed”, with extraordinary powers provided to the soldiers under AFSPA andto the police force. The charge-sheet filed in the Kathua case speaks of the crime meant to terrorise Muslims to vacate Kathua, which in a “disturbed” area would have invited extraordinary laws to be invoked. Not in this case. Although in border/LOC areas, sedition charges have been filed byJ&K Police on migrants for merely condemning the BJP government and PM Narendra Modi for betraying the border residents! Likewise, there are severe restrictions onownership, use and display of arms, being a “Disturbed Area”. However, in Jammu, the Army itsel fhas held weapon training camps for Bajrang Dal and such rabble-rousers. Authorities have also allowed Hindutvawadis to carry and publicly display weapons under the name of religious ritual. In a manner of speaking for the ‘Hindutvawadis “Disturbed” conditions has been an enabling condition for self-perputuation whereas for the rest of the population encumberances and restrictions are the norm, their constitutional Freedoms virtually suspended.

In 2008 too, Jammu surpassed itself by emerging as the centre for regressive ideas and promoted not only hatred and hostility towards Kashmiri Muslims, including of imposing economic embargo (an act of war under International Humanitarian Laws), targetted on the “National Highway’ anyone they suspected of being a Kashmiri Muslim. Then too, Hindutvawadis carried national flags, while they committed crimes. Lest we forget, in 2008 the only criterion for Lt General (retd) S K Sinha and also for Governor of J&K, to characterise the agitation in Jammu as “nationalist” and the one in the Valley as “anti-national” was because in Jammu “agitators have been carrying (the) national flag” whereas in Kashmir “they have been carrying Pakistani (actually they were green) flags”. The then National Security Adviser, M K Narayanan, not to be left behind, opined that security forces could not accept the Indian flag being abused by the agitators in Kashmir. However, then as now neither the sentiments of security forces nor the Government apparently got “hurt” when rape, lynching and plunder were carried out or being carried out by flag waiving criminals. So the subtle message to Hindus is that all will be fine if they commit heinous crimesso long as it is carried out in the name of “nationalism” and they keep waiving national flag. Unsurprisingly, this denigration of the tricolour goes on without anyone finding anything wrong with it. One wonders if the ‘sangh parivar’ which always derided the tricolour and wanted saffron colour as national flag now encourages its rank and file to carry the tricoulr flag to terrorise people, a clever way to demean and abuse the tricoulur they never wanted?

As in 2008 so even now the authorities treat agitation by Hindutva groups with kid gloves. Security Forces always claim that they use force as per the scale of provocation. What the forces do not say, however, is that while they used live bullets and pellets on the protesting civilians in Kashmir, they handle rioters gently in Jammu. Notice that none of the leaders of Hindu Ekta Manch was prevented from carrying on with their campaign in defiance of Public Order and clearly aimed at impeding the course of justice. They were inciteful which invites registering a complaint and possible arrest. Contrast this with Kashmir where at drop of a hat Kashmiri protestors are subjected to bullets, pellets, tear gas, lathicharge, detention, roughed up or tortured, booked under dreaded Public Security Act for years on end or accused of cognisable offence with years of gruelling trial. After such display of partisanship, there ought to be nothing surprising about what is taking place in Jammu where Hindutvawadis have had a free run.

So the point is we can continue to live in a state of denial and pretend that the problem facing India in J&K is radicalisation of Muslims inspired by Pakistan, when we are reminded again and again of the demon in our midst in the shape of Hindutva. This officially patronised ‘nightmare’ that is India, has been long in making. So we have no one else but ourselves to blame for ignoring this for far too long. Now that its there for all to observe its ‘naked glory’, it is time we connect the dots and see the reality for what its is being turned into.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in
 

The post The Repellent “New” Idea of India at Work appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The post The Wrong Way to Do Manipuri Nationalism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Before we even look at their motives in California, let’s look at the strange sense of deja vu hanging in the air.  When the Hindu right came to power in India, in 1998, the first thing they did was establish an organization called the National Curriculum Framework (NCF). The NCF was a government-funded organization whose purpose was a total rewriting of the contents of Indian textbooks. What began from there, was a broad revisionist project that began to axe away the factual historical depictions of the subcontinent, and replace it with a fundamentalist political framing.

Pretend you’re a Hindu ethnonationalist. Where would you start if you were looking to create a Hindu hegemonist history? At the veritable origin of subcontinental civilization: The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). As expected, IVC history is now succumbing to a whole series of strategies, set up to enact Hindu mythology, as history.

The Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Valley Civilization’s very existence is unwieldy to this undertaking.
 

• A large portion of the IVC lies not in modern-day India – but in modern day Pakistan. This is already a big predicament for the hyper-patriotic, Indian, Hindu nationalist.
• The archeological evidence from IVC sites does not provide evidence to support it as a civilization that was linguistically, culturally, or religiously continuous with Vedic civilizations.
• IVC is dated to more than a millennia and a half, preceding Vedic people.
• The unearthed geography of the IVC is in contradiction to Vedic geographies.

The ethnonationalist vision for itself is Hindu ownership of the entire subcontinent of South Asia. This is the “reclaim your glorious (imagined) past-owned territory” portion of their fascism. Consider that parts of that imagined past are now trapped in a totally foreign nation – a largely Muslim one at that. This is no doubt, unthinkably disruptive to the vision.

Existing distinctions between the IVC and the Vedic period points to aspects of Vedic life as either having arrived from “outside” the subcontinent or as a civilization that was infused with “outside” ideas and/or people. This means that modern-day Hindu ethnonationalist cannot draw this straight line:  People of the IVC (proto-proto Hindus)—->Vedic People (proto-Hindu)—–>Modern Hindus. It means the modern day upper-Caste Hindu cannot claim indigeneity to the subcontinent. This severely weakens the nativist portion of their fascism.

To “correct” the course of history accordingly, many new projects were undertaken.

The first of these is to force a link between the Vedas and the IVC. But this thrust, results in an anachrony in the dating of the Vedas which now has to be reestablished at over 1500 years before its scholarly verified existence. The artifacts of the IVC were then actively “Hinduized” with overeager interpretations. So images of an IVC person in a meditative pose were labeled the image Hindu God, “Shiva”. Engravings of cows, an animal reared by the people of IVC, were seen as evidence for cow worship and so on. Flimsy evidence, flashy conclusions.

When loose interpretation did not suffice, fraudulent evidence was actively placed. One such controversial event occurred when horse seals were planted at the site by Hindu ethnonationalist “archeologists”.  Historians like Prof. Michael Weitzel and others were quick to spot these as frauds and publicize the occurrence of these insidious attempts to circumvent scholarship.

The idea behind the placing of the horse seals was to fill a gap. No horses have been recorded in IVC archeology, but it is well known that the Vedic civilizations revered and centered horses in their culture. A planted horse seal was meant to bridge this.

Bringing mythological rivers to”life”
The placing of Saraswati river in the IVC period, a mythological river named in the Rig Veda, is the amongst the latest series of attempts to “indigenize Hindus” to the region.

Frantic government-funded archaeological projects began, desperate to find evidence of the Sarasvati not only existed, but having existed 1500 years before the first time it was alluded to in the Vedas. When efforts failed, a modern-day attempt to “recreate” the mythological river began. The Hindu right-ruled government of the state of Haryana began a massive project, using taxpayers money, to “reconstruct” the Saraswati. When no source for the reconstructed river could be conveniently located, they hesitated, then connected it to a local drain. A move that was no doubt, severely minimizing to the river’s mythological grandeur, said to have a source in no less than the mighty Himalaya.

Legitimate scholars who have contested the historical veracity of these actions or called these efforts propaganda have been severely attacked.  They have been intimidated, their lives threatened, public calls for their heads have been issued, and the Hindu ethnonationalists have used their political apparatus to attack both their scholarly work and physical being. Eminent historians, including Romila Thapar, D. Jha, Wendy Doniger, Michael Weitzel, and others with a commitment to truth and process, have persisted regardless. A National Commission of concerned historians condemned these myth-makings as “not different from the periods in time when Nazi Germany attempted to rewrite European history”.

Mythology in History Books
In comparison to peer-reviewed research, false narrativizing is much easier in the textbook processes and especially so when the government is run by your own fundamentalist machine. The same myths of the “Saraswati” are now the proud feature of textbooks in many states, including Gujarat, Prime Minister Modi’s former stronghold state.

These revisionists projects are underway, not only in India but in the diasporas, where they have gained much traction in the last ten years.  In particular, in California where in the past decade, there has been a strengthening of an American Hindu ethnonationalist diasporic base vis-a-vis the American mirror organisation arms of the RSS (HSS) and VHP (VHP-A). Organizations like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) are an offshoot of these organizations. They feature the same leaders, the same founders, and the same ideology as their more radical arms. But they soften the thrust. They are a muted saffron. They front fascist organizing with performances of pluralism, LGBTQ-friendliness, and feign concern for Bangladeshi Hindus (while expressing no concern for Muslims and Dalits being lynched and killed in India every day).

They co-opt the language of social justice, the borrow victimization performances from Zionist playbooks and front to the California Board of Education as if they were a group whose religious sentiments are being severely wounded. They bring droves of their children to testify. Children who can’t even pronounce words like “Caste” (some even pronouncing it “Keh-ste”) or “Saraswati” and who are handed pre-written testimonies and asked to read. They tell us that their children’s feelings being hurt is sufficient reason to erase history.

But behind their posturing is the truth of their intentions. To erase the rich, diverse, flawed, and fascinating history of the sub-continent, and rewrite it instead with a Hindu fascist plot.
 
Unfortunately, the California Board of Education has given into the guise of neoliberal pluralism to support the creation of alternative facts. We will be resisting.

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

The post Mythologizing History : How to spot a Hindu Ethno-nationalist appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The interview focuses on the Pasmanda movement, on the issues of secularism/communalism and on the upper caste hegemony in all political, cultural and social fields in India. The interview was conducted by Kuffir, Contributing Editor, Round Table India, and produced by Gurinder Azad.
You can watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWeeaXADPBw

Continued from here
~

Kuffir: Yes, definitely a time to re-think, but there is also the question of a larger Muslim victimhood not being a totally invented narrative. It is also a reality and Dalit victimhood is also a reality. And there have been lots of riots in the thousands, which have been almost genocidal in nature.
As you were discussing the Pasmanda and how they are affected by all these larger politics, is there a kind of awareness among all the Pasmanda, at least in Bihar-UP, that they have been used and they are being used and they are not getting any representation? Even if you start with the question of representation at least, you get a certain number of MLAs, a certain number at least in the Municipal Corporation as corporators….panchayat representatives – is this happening? Is it converting into any kind of real terms? Because they have not been guaranteed even the reserved seats. What do you think of that? What is the situation rather?
Khalid: There are two things. One, continuing with this communalism; there is a realisation that whether by default or by design, that this entire communalism discourse, whether the manufacture of communal riots, manufacture of islamophobia – it has worked to their disadvantage. Of the broad bahujan groups across religions. Whether it is Hindu Bahujans, whether it is Muslim Bahujans. Mostly the Muslim Bahujans have been at the receiving end, but because of this secular-communal discourse, their core issues – the issues of bread and butter, are absolutely side-lined. So there is that realization, and that realization is being circulated; more and more Pasmanda people are sharing this sentiment that we need a political brand, or that we need a political articulation that helps us in transcending this secular-communal binary; in transcending this majority-minority binary, and if we are not able to transcend this, then our core concerns will never be placed on the table. And Pasmanda movement is a very early, tentative articulation from the Pasmanda Muslims. It’s an attempt to really transcend these binaries, so that at least our real issues, our core issues, might be addressed. The issue of representation, the issue of land; how is land allocated in India, who gets what – those are the key issues. Issues of power, issues of representation in media, the question of women. And unless this communalism and islamophobia, unless it is displaced as the ‘master discourse’, these issues will never get recognition in the public sphere. On that count, Pasmanda movement has attempted a number of conceptual inversions in order to achieve that.

One is the entire idea of solidarity. While the elite of all religions always focus on the question of religious solidarity – solidarity on the basis of faith, Pasmanda are saying that while that is one kind of solidarity, other kinds of solidarities are also possible. Solidarities of pain. Solidarities of common experiences of stigmatization, common experience of caste exclusion. And why not work with those solidarities?

Kuffir: And common experiences of exploitation. Because that should have been the strategy of the Left, but they have been the biggest proponents of the religious binary.
You were discussing the mainstream political responses – the Left discourse, the Congressi discourse, and the Dalit-Bahujan discourse as well. How have been their responses? How can we gauge the degree of their sensitivity to the Pasmanda demands? Has there been reaction? Summing up in a way, looking back?
Khalid: If you look at these movements, I don’t want to say much on the left movement, which has not gone beyond minority politics; not only on the political level but even on the social level. There is some lip service, but in terms of substantive support to the movement, I don’t see it forthcoming there. When we come to the Bahujan movement, I would differentiate it into the political trajectories and the social trajectories. While the political trajectory has all its problems which are associated with the Indian politics – so Bahujan politics, Bahujan political movements also face those problems, which emerge from the First-Past-the-Post system; so they are in the election to win, and when you are in the election to win, you try to capture as many votes as possible. Every Bahujan party tries to speak to every constituency, and when it comes to the Muslims, they are aware that the so-called Muslim ideological structures, whether they be the mosque, whether they be the madrassa, or the civil-society Muslim organizations, NGOs, media, even ‘alternative’ media platforms – they are all dominated by the sharif Ashrafia class. So they have this sense that it is the sharif culture, it is the sharif class which actually manages the Muslim body politic, including the Muslim lower castes. So they are satisfied at this point of time to just engage with the sharif class and let them speak on the behalf of all the Muslim community and get as many votes as possible from there. That is true for all the major political parties, including the Bahujan parties.

On the level of social, there are a number of new organizations; even old organizations, who have been very sensitive towards the Pasmanda movement, including Manyawar Kanshiram ji. The initial days, almost all the Muslims who joined DS4, or who joined the BAMCEF in the early 1980s, almost all of them were lower caste Muslims – when the movement was not successful in terms of politics. Because they could relate to what Kanshiram ji was speaking about. They could relate to what Behenji was speaking about. They were facing the same problems in their own communities. They were facing the caste-based stigma, the caste-based humiliation. But with time, one there was a split in 1986 between the political and the social; there was a political trajectory to the BAMCEF and there was the social trajectory. So there was one group which said – it’s a typical old social political binary – Manyawar Kanshiram ji articulated that politics was the master key, and the social would follow. And the second group which was led by Khobragade ji or…I don’t recall his name, when the split happened in ’86, he articulated that the social was equally important, and we should right now concentrate on the social, in contrast to the political. That has been a consistent theme even during the nationalist struggle before independence. The unique binary of the social and the political has been persistent in the Indian discourse.

Now if you look at the social side, especially various new formations; whether it is BAMCEF, those little magazines which are run by various Bahujan groups in UP and Bihar – there is a magazine known as Social Brainwash which is published from western UP, there are other little magazines which are published in Bihar – they have really played a very good role in circulating the Pasmanda discourse. So they have published articles on the Pasmanda politics, on the Pasmanda movement, Pasmanda people; raised very interesting questions, and even within the BAMCEF – there are at least two major formations; one is the one headed by Waman Meshram ji, the second one is headed by Shreeram Maurya ji – so the BAMCEF group headed by Shreeram Maurya ji; it has a very interesting rotation policy; the president is changed every two years. When we compare the two BAMCEFS, then probably the one headed by Shreeram Maurya ji has been especially sensitive to the Pasmanda articulation and the Pasmanda discourse. In the last 8-10 years, they have constantly given space to Pasmanda activists to come and speak from BAMCEF, to have a dialogue. And I would even acknowledge the work of Round Table India, because when we started in 2008-09, you were one of the very few websites; when I used to send my articles, most of my articles were rejected – I won’t name the major (publications) – you were one of the first websites who really published my articles, really encouraged me to write further on that.

So on the level of social, I see great hope; a great sensitivity towards what the Pasmanda activists and ideologues are raising. On the level of political I think there are constraints. And those constraints cannot be located in the figure of Behenji, or the figure of Ram Vilas Paswan. I think those are larger structural constraints, and unless we really challenge the First-Past-the-Post system in a substantive manner, unless we talk about a proportional electoral system which would probably be more democratic and just, under the present scheme of things….

Kuffir: Some kind of proportion.
Khalid: Yes, some kind of proportion; we can argue and contest about the various models that are available. Whichever is more appropriate for the Indian conditions, we have to chalk out some kind of proportional electoral system. Unless that is done – it is not only about the Pasmanda; it is about 60 percent of subaltern communities in India who have no hope of representation in this system for the next thousand years!

Kuffir: It is actually over 95 percent of communities which will never ever get any representation. 150 communities out of 6000 go to legislatures – what about the other 5850? And many Muslim communities are not even named or recognized as such by the State, so there is a huge problem unless there is some kind of recognition. And it is very deleterious to the resource-crunched Bahujan parties, whether from Muslim or Hindu side, so it is not always possible to participate in this kind of competition which are called elections. That’s my view.
Now going by what you said, we are talking about UP-Bihar, UP-Bihar, and it’s not even stretched to Bengal as it had been in the earlier days. The geography of the Pasmanda space has shrunk.
But we do see some articulation of angst by the Muslim writers in Telugu – from the Pasmanda Bahujan writers. There had been a kind of outpouring and we have tried to publish some of those in the Shared Mirror and Round Table India.  
So why has this ideology not spread beyond Bihar and UP? Politically…
Khalid: I think politically it is weak even in UP and Bihar. And if you look at it historically, Dr. Ambedkar pinpointed very clearly that so long as this ‘communalism’ is there…every riot produces the Hindu and the Muslim. So the riot is the chief mechanism which is used by the elite classes in India to actually create the Hindu and the Muslim as identity. Those are produced constantly, and those identities cannot be interrupted unless there is a big subaltern movement of the lower castes. And it is this dilemma that has to be sorted out.

Kuffir: A big subaltern movement across religions?
Khalid: Absolutely.

Kuffir: Unless that happens, the Pasmanda is kind of doomed…
Khalid: That is what the Pasmanda is saying. Because the Pasmanda slogan is ‘Dalit Pichda Ek Saman, Hindu Ho Ya Musalman’ – all Dalit Backwards are alike, whether they be Hindu or Muslim. Ali Anwar also says – it’s a very interesting conceptual inversion – that 'Hum shuddar hain shuddar. Bharat ke moolniwasi hain. Baad mein musalman hain.' (We are shudras, first the mulniwasis of bharat, muslims later). 
People interpreted that as running down on faith or something. But Ali Anwar is not talking about faith. He is talking about a particular identity. And that identity cannot really be conflated with faith, which is a much larger category. The critique against that identity is not because it derives from some understanding of faith, but because it is an identity which is hegemonized by the Muslim elite Ashrafia classes. And because that identity does not work for the majority of lower suppressed Muslim castes, that identity has to be critiqued. And it is critiqued through the vantage point of the ‘Sons of Soil’ arguments, from the vantage point of the Mulnivasi identity. There are problems with that nomenclature itself – that is a separate issue altogether – but there is an attempt by the Pasmanda Muslims to somehow contest the politics around the Muslim identity. And just like subalterns anywhere, they latch onto whatever articulation is possible in a particular spatial and temporal context. So it’s a counter-hegemonic exercise; it must not be really understood in terms of scientific precision. Because in any case we are talking about politics. We are not talking about biology or science. So it’s a particular kind of articulation.

Kuffir: It will hone itself in time.
Khalid: Yeah, absolutely. So this is counter-hegemonic solidarity of subaltern castes across religions. Because those are the caste groups which actually act as foot soldiers in the ‘riot-apparatuses’ which have been created across this land; that is the term Paul Brass uses, but he hadn’t gone further: why are these riot apparatuses there in the first place? what role do these riot apparatuses serve in consolidating a big savarna capitalist empire? So one has to understand this riot apparatus as a form of ‘restorative violence’ which basically consolidates the position of savarnas across religions, away from the democratic assertion that is coming from the grassroots.

Kuffir: So do you think the stake in creating and sustaining this religious binary of Hindu-Muslim – how much of the responsibility would you attribute to the Sangh?
Khalid: I would attribute the responsibility to all the elite classes. I won’t really go into the question of measuring which is what. I think it’s a symbiotic relationship. Hindu nationalism and Muslim nationalism – they co-produce each other. With the result that the voices of the vast mass majority are crippled. That would be my interest. I won’t go into the question of who is more responsible and who is less responsible.

Kuffir: Because this question is raised again and again…
Khalid: Yeah, it is the master discourse! Between slave owners! ‘My master is better than your master’! I’m not interested in that! I’m a slave, you are a slave, and we have to talk about slavery! Which master treated you better than my master – that is not my concern. It’s a master’s discourse.

Kuffir: We can’t choose between masters because we don’t want masters.
Khalid: Absolutely. We have to get rid of masters altogether!

Kuffir: So in a situation wherein this polity is so dominated by two kinds of political formations and other national parties are just hangers-on, and there are a lot of regional parties which do negotiate these identities on a more concrete basis at the grassroots. In a way, the Sangh and the Congressi formations don’t even have to deal with the Pasmanda Muslims, because in a way, they just have to deal with the Ashraf and also the Brahmin on the other side. Also the riot apparatuses are switched on or off whenever they need to.
So if this has to be carried forward; we have recognized that there has to be solidarities across Bahujan communities; across faith. There also has to be a certain kind of recognition that the regional parties may play a much more practical role in diffusing or addressing the Pasmanda questions. What do you think of that?
Khalid: One, I would say, the ruling class in India, that is, the caste-elite across religions; we should be very clear that its methodology in politics is very similar. So it will try to appropriate the new dissenting voices within their jurisdiction, it will create whispering campaigns, it will resort to character assassination – the methodology is very similar. I’ll give a practical, empirical example. In 2005, Lalu was the Chief Minister – he had ruled Bihar for 10-15 years. And then Bihar was going into elections. Now, Nitish, who was an ally of BJP, they (his party) approached Ali Anwar sir, and they formed this Mahadalit – Ati Pichda – Pasmanda alliance. Initially, Ali Anwar was hesitant, but when Nitish went to his house and there was a discussion and conversation, this alliance was gelled and came into existence. When they went into the elections – obviously Lalu was wiped out – and Nitish’s party JDU and the BJP combine won handsomely. It happened because the MBC vote, the Mahadalit vote and the Pasmanda vote, which were obviously feeling excluded under Lalu’s brand of politics. Lalu used to say ‘our alliance is M-Y alliance’, M-Y sameekaran.

Ali Anwar critiqued that it was not M-Y alliance but FM-Y alliance – Forward Muslim-Yadav alliance. So that is the kind of critique which Ali Anwar advanced. At that point of time, in 2005, the Ashrafia organizations dubbed Ali Anwar as a BJP agent. When Nitish Kumar won the elections, he was made a Rajya Sabha member, he was sent to the higher house. Now, Ali Anwar, who was a so-called ‘RSS agent’, Nitish Kumar who was a BJP ally –  Lalu Yadav was obviously the saviour of all Muslims – now they (Ashrafias) repositioned themselves. And later, I won’t name, but most of the big Ashrafia organizations in Bihar got very close to Nitish Kumar and convinced him that ‘now the Muslim vote will come towards you, we will ensure that’, and in the next elections also, Nitish won. And one of those people, who critiqued Ali Anwar as being a Sangh agent, his daughter stood for elections from the JDU ticket. So within five years, this entire understanding; that Ali Anwar was a BJP agent, and Nitish was a BJP ally – all that went into the dustbin. The Ashrafia class in Bihar repositioned themselves, they went over to Nitish Kumar – and Nitish stopped using the term Pasmanda. Immediately after winning the 2005 elections, when he came out of the airport, he said, “I won this battle because of the MBC, Pasmanda and Mahadalit vote”. Nitish Clearly acknowledged that, and Praful Bidwai also wrote an article in frontline at that point of time, reflecting on this. But in five years, what happened? The entire Ashrafia brigade got very close to Nitish Kumar. Now Nitish felt that ‘I no longer need the Pasmanda community because the entire Muslim community is coming to me’. Again, Ali Anwar is still the JDU MP, but Nitish is no longer talking about the Pasmandas. So, their ability to reposition is because of their control over the ideological propaganda machinery, over the so-called community institutions, etc. It gives them more leverage.

Kuffir: Whose ability are you talking about?
Khalid: The Ashrafia. The elite Muslim ability. So, from Lalu, they shifted to Nitish Kumar.

Kuffir: They obviously don’t derive their strength from numbers, so they derive their strength from traditional caste-capital structures.
Khalid: Also colonisation. I mean, their discourse colonised the Pasmanda. Just like the savarn-Hindu discourse has colonized the vast majority of the Hindu castes.

Kuffir: So do you say this kind of recognition of the Pasmanda – even if temporarily – is happening within the nationalist discourse of the national parties?
Khalid: Haan. It is there. People are still confused about how this will play out. Everyone acknowledges that this is a new constituency. This is a new subterranean movement, that is emerging. But no one is actually sure how this will pan out. So there is a sense of ambiguity and there is a sense of anxiety. Because there is an experience of the Dalit politics. In the 1980s, no one took Mayawati and Kanshiram seriously, but they changed the entire chessboard and the chess game altogether. 1994, BSP came to power in UP, and even then they (the opponents) kept on underestimating; they thought they will manage, but in 2000, Mayawati came back with a majority. So there is something which the Dalit politics has established – which is the fear of the unknown. Don’t take these people lightly! Mayawati ji has established something, that the Dalit-Bahujans can be politically ambitious, they can also play the game to their favour, they can also negotiate, they can also reposition themselves. So as far as the Pasmanda is concerned, if you look at the last 10 years, every major party has paid lip-service. Even Modi ji has used the term Pasmanda in one of his speeches – I have that copy somewhere. Rahul Gandhi has had negotiations with the Pasmanda activists. So almost all parties are talking to them, are engaging with them – but not, in a sense, to emancipate them, but to gauge which way the movement is moving. What is the right time to really take over…

Kuffir: The first goal is of course, representation. Who has given more representation to the Pasmanda? The regional parties or the national parties? As you said, Nitish did try…
Khalid: Nitish tried, but across the board, I think the story is the same.

Kuffir: You had also mentioned that Kanshiram saheb had also tried to an extent in UP…
Khalid: Again, whatever happened to Nitish Kumar, that is what happened to Kanshiram ji. Once he became powerful, the entire UP Ashrafia class went to him. So right now if you look at Behenji; if you look who is on the left side and who is on the right side, you’ll find people from particular caste locations, whether Hindu or Muslim.

Kuffir: They say that if the Dalits and Adivasis have 121 or so reserved (parliament) seats, there are around 125 seats across the country wherein only the upper castes are always chosen and elected.
I mean, these should also be considered reserved even if not named officially. So, these are also reserved for the upper castes. And the competition for the rest is not very tough for them either. Because the remaining are only the OBCs, among which the Muslims also fall, and the OBCs have right now only 18 percent or so.
So how do you think the Pasmanda will ever reach Indian parliament?
Khalid: There are no shortcut solutions. They’ll have to work just like all other subaltern communities have worked. They’ll have to study, they’ll have to research, they’ll have to organise, they have to struggle. There is no shortcut.

Kuffir: There is only Ali Anwar we can speak about right now.
Khalid: There also others, but the movement is still very nascent, and probably in the next 5-10 years, many more voices will emerge, many more institutions and organisations will emerge.

Kuffir: I’m talking about the larger structures, of how this electoral system is and the polity is…
Khalid: One thing, like you said about the reserved constituencies that needs to be mentioned here; most of the Dalit reserved constituencies, if you look at the data, are reserved where there is a majority of Pasmanda population. That’s one. And because of the 1950 presidential order, Dalit Christians and Dalit Muslims have been excluded from the SC list.

Kuffir: That is the question I want to ask. We keep hearing about agitations and protests demanding that, but the voice from the Dalit Christians is more than the voice from the Dalit Muslims in some ways. That’s what I found.
Khalid: I think it’s because of the church. Because they have an organized church, and Muslims don’t have an organized body of that sort.

Kuffir: And they have been consistently asking.
And the voice from, any caste voices from the Muslims; those who are vocal publicly – there has been more of a rise in demand for religious reservations on the basis of their being a Muslim, as a whole marginalised category. What do you think of that?
Khalid: Those voices that say reservations for Muslims as a whole community, those are usually raised by those organizations that are in any case dominated by the Ashrafia Muslims. Pasmanda Muslims are already getting reservations. Even in the Central OBC list and the State OBC lists. Now the question is not reservation.

Kuffir: No, how do you understand if the Pasmanda, who are the majority, are getting reservation – well, not the majority, but they have been formally recognized for it, so the castes also had to be notified and made aware of on many places – so what is this new recognition of only the whole Muslim category as a backward…
Khalid: That is a ploy by the Ashrafia castes to get included within the OBC list for reservations.

Kuffir: Is it just to further deter or stop the reservations for the Pasmanda?
Khalid: Absolutely.

Kuffir: Because that’s what it has resulted in, most times. Whenever the issue was raised in AP, it went back again to the Backward Class Commission and it went back again to court and it’s still hanging around in court in some ways. So that’s what is being raised again in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and other places. So it is actually stopping these entitlements from reaching the most backward.
Khalid: Yeah.

Kuffir: So I see this also as an attempt to dilute the primary truth or reality that caste is the primary divide in Indian society, and to again bring back the religious divide, even if it doesn’t yield any results practically to the Pasmanda or the Ashraf Muslims. It does serve the Brahmin needs.
I would like to understand the need for the so-called religious minority – the Ashraf leadership – to create a ‘Hindu’. Why is there a need to create the Hindu?
Khalid: (Laughs). It’s a cause and effect relationship. It’s a symbiotic relationship where both win. Both get from the State larger benefits, when compared to their population.

Kuffir: To create the Hindu when it’s is obvious that the non-Hindus are Dalits, Adivasis, and the Lingayats and several such communities; and the Sikhs and the Buddhists and Jains. These are not Hindus. But broadly speaking, they are all categorized as Hindu. Apart from that, there are, in the Backward Classes 90 percent of them – actually speaking 100 percent of them – don’t have access to the scriptures, access to any gurus or whatever. And acceptance of the Brahmin either way, has been very recent. So this need to create the Hindu is justified to create the Muslim as another category.
Khalid: Absolutely. If we look, there are more than 650 lower caste groups within Muslims. They have their own mythologies of origin, their own occupational specializations, they have their own culture, they are linguistically different, they are regionally spread out. Now if these 650 communities mobilize, organize and bring their concerns to the public sphere, it will be impossible for the ‘minority’ category to really accommodate them. Similarly for the ‘majority’ category; 4000 caste groups.

Kuffir: The majority will break down.
Khalid: The majority will break down!
So the majority-minority duopoly is actually a very savarn invention to consolidate their own position within a democratic game. And unless we do away with the majority-minority category, unless we radically redefine, or transcend, or re-understand…whatever… I’m not very sure of the words to use here. I’m using the term ‘post-minority condition’ for this. So I’m saying there is a need to revisit how the secular-communal duopoly, how the majority-minority category has played at the hands of the savarnas and actually excluded the mass majority.

Kuffir: The only thing this baggage – secular, communal, Muslim, Hindu – comes well along with the whole design of the Indian nation. It helps set discourse – secularism-communalism, good elements-bad elements – in India we divide politics and people into good-people-bad-people (laughs); there is no stratification, only good people and bad people… as a friend was saying.
So this kind of politics doesn’t promise emancipation even in the distant future, because this discourse can go on and on, – any time the Pasmanda makes a demand, or the Backward Classes make a demand about reservations, or the Dalits make a demand that our rights as human beings be recognized – they will bring in the Hindu-Muslim-communal-secular divide; they will bring in the other kinds of multifarious divides. Even in the distant future it seems very bleak, that a Pasmanda would enter parliament…
Khalid: It is very bleak, but there is also hope.

Kuffir: Which means, actually speaking, let’s look at the reality of what I had just said. It actually means that 85 percent of Muslims will never be represented in the Indian parliament.
Khalid: Also 85 percent of Hindus.

Kuffir: No, let this also be recognized, because that is already recognized. Let this also be emphasized, that they will never ever – under the present conditions and under the present structures.
Khalid: Why I’m saying there is hope; because this early imagination of the nation and its related conceptual assemblage, whether it is the majority-minority, secular-communalism and so on and so forth – all of this conceptual assemblage is now under increasing pressure from all quarters. The Nation is being reimagined, majority-minority is being reimagined, secular and communalism is being reimagined, but, it is being reimagined in the interest of, and from the vantage point, of the elite classes. Now the onus is on the Bahujan classes; how to really challenge this rethinking process, and bring their own concerns into reconfiguring these categories, so that they are more pro-subaltern, pro-Bahujan. It’s a discursive battle. Nation-State is an empty signifier.

There is clarity; Dr. Ambedkar was very clear that this ‘nation’ is a collection of nationalities. It’s not really a nation, but a ‘nation to come’. It will become a nation hopefully. On that there is clarity. And there are two interesting volumes, one published by G. Aloysius which says Nationalism Without A Nation, another published by Christophe Jaffrelot, Pakistan: Nationalism Without A Nation. So, there are two volumes – one for India and one for Pakistan. So it is very clear that this is still a ‘nation to come’. We have to create a nation.

We have two guiding principles – from what I could distill from Dr. Ambedkar, whatever little I have read about him – one, that the ‘nation to come’, will be a form of an associational democracy. So there is great clarity on that; it is not only about liberty and equality, but it is about fraternity. At least people should be able to talk to each other, they should be able to marry each other, they should be able to love each other, across religious boundaries, across caste boundaries and so on and so forth. So that is the fundamental; the core principle, which I see in Doctor Saheb. This idea of an associational democracy, this idea of fraternity.

Secondly, he also says, even when equality might be a fiction, at least it should be a guiding idea. It should be the guiding principle of all our politics. Once we are clear on what kind of nation we have to envisage, or what kind of nation we have to build – the guiding principles are very clear. Second, affective change and structural change – in the earlier vocabulary it was articulated as social and political, like we discussed earlier. So, structural change has to go in a dialectical movement with affective change. If there is structural change, and people’s emotions, people’s sensibilities are not ready for it, it will collapse. Unless there is affective change, meaningful structural change is not possible. So it’s a chicken-egg question.

Kuffir: I agree totally with you. I see it this way, that the moment has arrived, which means it’s not so far ahead – utopia -it’s a possibility.
Beyond this, to form these solidarities – it is very necessary, it is not just a question of electoral alliances – as you rightly pointed out, we have to build social institutions.
Khalid: At least we have to get a conversation going. The very reason that you have come all the way from Hyderabad, and I drove seven hours from Saharanpur, just to discuss this – that is a good beginning, isn’t it!
So this will keep on happening. It will be built inch by inch, brick by brick, slowly, but surely. And the Bahujan will have to reclaim the universal. Just like Dr. Ambedkar said, that even when equality is fiction, it must be a guiding principle. Now the Bahujan must start seeing itself as the governing class in India. And governing class not in order to get the benefits of a future regime, but a governing class which can really bring about the values of liberty, equality and fraternity into the body politic, into the nation, to the maximum level possible. It could be an ongoing process, there could be no timelines – freedom, equality, fraternity have to be fought for each day. But now the Bahujan has to see itself as the universal class, and the class that will govern the destiny of India from now onwards. At least that confidence should be there, and we should not be pessimistic or under-confident about it.

Kuffir: Practical bhi hona hai!
Khalid: We have to be practical, we have to talk about it, and that confidence should be there. And I see great hope. The young people across the board, in the campuses and everywhere outside the campuses – they are discussing these issues. And that is a good sign. Once we start discussing, once an idea has found mention somewhere, it will become a reality, sooner than later. And that is a good sign.

Kuffir: Yeah of course. Without hope, as you said, we won’t be meeting!
Khalid: Absolutely.

Kuffir: So on that very positive note, I thank you for agreeing to talk with us and thank you very much and all the best to you. Jai Bhim, Jai Pasmanda.
Khalid: Thank you so much Kuffirda. Jai Bhim, Jai Pasmanda.   
~~~        
 
Transcribed by Myneni Deepu.  

Courtesy: Round Table India

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