What the remarkable success of the Grand Alliance in Bihar shows is that all secular forces have to be able to work together to defeat fascism in India

Excerpt from the second edition of the book published by Three Essays Collective

Fascism: Essays on Europe and India was published a little over a year before the fateful Lok Sabha elections of May 2014 which brought the BJP and its allies to power following an intense media campaign and blitzkrieg of election rallies, all dominated by the seemingly formidable and largely media-driven figure of Narendra Modi. Although the BJP polled only 31 per cent of the votes, the lowest ever of any party winning the Indian general elections, and its allies a further 7.5% per cent at best, the opposition to the BJP was badly fragmented. The 60%+ anti-BJP vote was thus widely dispersed and ineffective. The result of the Bihar assembly elections shows that this state of fragmentation is not an inevitable feature of parliamentary politics in India and can be tackled in the face of a fascist threat.

What has emerged in the eighteen months that the BJP has been in power is an increasingly overt assertion of the power of the RSS, whose proclaimed vision for India is to make it a Hindu state with or without the trappings of democracy. This is the first government of independent India where the RSS is openly in charge. Having gained power, it now seeks to expand its own power and entrench itself even further. In the long term the most dangerous aspect of this seizure of power will be the wholesale takeover of educational institutions, the rewriting of school and university textbooks, and the attempt to purge the Indian past of its non-Hindu, cosmopolitan strands.

The essays in this book that deal with India suggest that communal mobilisation is the ‘organic strategy’ of the RSS.  This view has been vindicated by the way the present government’s parent (the RSS) and their sprawling network of Hindu organisations have been encouraged by the BJP’s victory and had the freedom to mount hate campaigns[1] that have led to a spate of lynchings and contributed decisively to the sort of political ‘climate’ where outfits operating in the shadow of the RSS can openly assassinate anti-superstition campaigners like Narendra Dabholkar.

Venom-spewing figures from the ruling party who have been conspicuous in these hate campaigns have had a field day in the past year and a half, since neither Modi nor other BJP leaders seem to care that hate speech is a crime and the hate campaigners in their ranks are openly stoking the flames of communal violence.

What has emerged in the eighteen months that the BJP has been in power is an increasingly overt assertion of the power of the RSS, whose proclaimed vision for India is to make it a Hindu state with or without the trappings of democracy. This is the first government of independent India where the RSS is openly in charge

The structured duplicity that characterises Modi’s regime reflects both the division of labour within the Sangh parivar between ‘state’ and ‘movement’, government and mass base, Modi and the RSS, but also repeated reminders to Modi about who he owes his position to and who ultimately calls the shots.  The primacy of the RSS (as ‘movement’) has meant the emergence of a pattern of low-intensity communal warfare that may well spread to new parts of the country in a drive to communalise India. It is possible that before Modi’s term expires the RSS will have succeeded in transforming the Northeast into a new cauldron of communal violence unless the resistance to this is created from now.

Communal conflagrations are carefully organised episodes of violence and every round of ethnic cleansing drives Muslims and Christians into relief camps where they fester with no hope of ever returning to their villages. This pattern, driven by the RSS and its vision of an India where the minorities become second-class citizens, is creating legacies of hatred at the ground level that pile up like the blood-soaked debris of India’s failing democracy.  

It is Modi’s silence about the recent spate of violence that has attracted most attention both from the ‘liberal’ media and from the government’s critics within the intelligentsia. India has just seen a remarkable groundswell of protest among writers, film makers, historians and scientists, and the government’s response, characteristically, has been to attack and vilify the protesters, denouncing them as ‘leftists’, ‘Communists’, agents of the Congress party and even agents of an ‘international conspiracy’ hatched to defame the country!

As if this infantilism was not enough, in a characteristic trope of fascist politics the aggressor emerges as the victim, Modi himself is said to be the object of ‘intolerance’, and every discourse about the growing climate of authoritarianism and hate politics in the country is converted into a sign of the illiberal nature of the opposition. ‘Liberal’ in the BJP’s lexicon seems to mean a willingness to submit to (be ‘tolerant’ of) a deeply authoritarian political culture, one that polices how we think, what we read or how we express ourselves and our eating habits as much it does the clothes women wear, one’s freedom of worship (or the freedom to reject all worship) and, crucially, sexual partnerships.

Meanwhile, in rally after rally across the state of Bihar [during the Assembly elections], Modi himself is scarcely ‘silent’, he fuels communal phobias with references to the ‘Darbhanga module’ (subtext: Bihar’s Muslims are terrorists, potentially) and to the incumbent chief minister of the state (who has now won a third term) having designs to deprive Dalits, Mahadalits and OBCs of reservations meant for them in favour of Muslims.

Wearing his election hat, the prime minister of the country has no compunction pitting one community against another on the basis of pure falsehood. This is the same political figure who, in his official avatar, is on his best behaviour as he interacts with world leaders like Obama (recall that he had mocked Obama unconscionably while campaigning in April 2009) and with royalty in Britain!          

At another level, the past year has seen a gradual disenchantment with Modi and his government in business circles (key funders of Modi’s campaign), fuelled both by the BJP’s defeat on the Land Acquisition front and by the growing sense of a paralysis at the level of government. The leadership cult that was the BJP’s main strategy in the Lok Sabha elections  has thrown up a style of governance (post election) characterised by massive centralisation of power in the hands of their ‘leader’ coupled with a serious lack of expertise at the level of the PMO; hence paralysis.

But resistance within the bureaucracy may well be a second factor. The economy was a major area of the campaign Modi had mounted in the months preceding the general election and this is where the sense of disquiet among his elite supporters has been most visible. At the end of July a major business daily could write: ‘India has…shown its steepest decline in a decade over the last year in AT Kearney's FDI confidence index, dropping out of the top 10 for the first time since 2002’ (Business Standard  29 July, 2015). Manufacturing remains sluggish, there has been no major inflow of foreign investment into manufacturing in spite of innumerable ‘summits’ and international trips.

For the present regime propaganda matters vastly more than policy, growth figures are reworked to sustain the illusion that India is actually doing well economically when the world economy is in recession and exports are falling, credit-rating agencies are lambasted if their warnings about growing ‘intolerance’ seem damaging to the country’s image (‘anti-national’), and domestic businesses realise that there is a charmed circle of industrialists who gain vastly more thanks to their closeness to the prime minister than most of them are ever likely to.[2]

More disturbingly, Modi’s government, driven by an extreme version of its one-sided commitment to capital (‘neo-liberalism’), is quietly engaged in dismantling even the minimal welfare provisions introduced by the two previous governments, witness the attempt currently underway to sabotage the functioning of MNREGA by withholding funds scheduled for wage payments under the scheme; or the slashing of the country’s public health budget from its appallingly low levels to an even more shocking one percent of GDP, which risks plunging India into major health disasters, even as pulses, a major protein source for the poor and middle class,  become unaffordable for the mass of the population.     

One aspect not taken up in these essays is the way what Wilhelm Reich called ‘organised mysticism’ is used to mobilise mass support for political figures like Modi.  Reich used the term to refer to religious ideologies and their patriarchal-authoritarian hold over the masses.  These themes are of pivotal importance to the nature of the emerging fascism in India, not least because of the light they throw on the repression and control of sexuality. Moreover, the spate of killings of rationalists starting with Dabholkar shows how deeply invested in these ideologies the right-wing in India remains.

The structured duplicity that characterises Modi’s regime reflects both the division of labour within the Sangh parivar between ‘state’ and ‘movement’, government and mass base, Modi and the RSS, but also repeated reminders to Modi about who he owes his position to and who ultimately calls the shots. 

‘Godmen’ like Ramdev and Asaram Bapu are publicly associated with support for the BJP.  Indeed, in Modi’s case a major role was played by the Hindu leader Asaram endorsing Modi’s political ambitions. In 2006 the then chief minister of Gujarat repeatedly invoked the ‘blessings’ (ashirvad) of this religious scamster whose ashram would soon become embroiled in scandals involving rape, murder and black magic, and who would himself be arrested a few years later on charges of sexually assaulting a minor.

It is hard to imagine any other major democracy in the world electing a prime minister with these past connections! Yet elected he has been, thanks to the role of the sangh parivar in building a ‘mass base’ through decades of molecular work (a labour of fascism) and deploying that base decisively for electoral purposes. As the preface and introductory essays in this book have shown, fascism only succeeds as a mass movement. ‘Ideology’ plays a major role in that process but ideology here has to be understood as a material force grounded in what Reich saw as the ‘psychic structures’ moulded from childhood by family, ‘tradition’ and the repression of sexuality in the young.[3] These are not aspects of fascism developed in the essays above but they deserve much more attention, especially in India. 

A final word:  there has been a lot of talk about the Congress Party reinventing itself to be able to recover its loss of ground. The same of course should be said of the Left parties which are now close to extinction as national parties. But parties can only reinvent themselves to the extent that they engage in a learning process. In the case of Congress today, it lacks any serious grassroots presence that can counter the mobilising thrust of the RSS.  But it also has to confront the hard reality that much of the blame for the return of the BJP and for the current state of India’s democracy lies with earlier Congress regimes. As Kershaw said about the Nazis, fascism always taps ‘the rich vein of raw anger…opened up by the perceived failure of democracy amid mounting crisis’.[4]

In India this is obvious at three levels. The terrible culture of impunity that has allowed the BJP to get away with the Gujarat massacres is a direct legacy of the Congress leadership’s refusal to prosecute those within its ranks responsible for the horrific anti-Sikh violence of 1984. Failure to carry through prosecutions where they were due legitimised the use of mass violence as a means of political consolidation, a strategy that was fully exploited by the Sangh parivar. It is this that has created the bind that every time Gujarat 2002 is brought up the perpetrators are able to counter that with ‘1984’.
Again, successive Congress administrations showed a singular incapacity in dealing with hate speech and fascist mobilisations (they allowed the Shiv Sena to flourish in Maharashtra, allowed the demolition of Babri masjid, allowed the Bombay pogroms of 1992/3, and so on). Most spectacularly, UPA1 simply failed to make any effort to bring Modi to book on grounds of command responsibility for the violence of 2002. 

Second, the culture of venality that grew up in UPA 2 in particular was a key factor in throwing the Indian middle class into the hands of the BJP. Even if much of the rage and rhetoric against corruption was artificially constructed by the absurd computational exercises of the CAG, the perception that Congress had allowed ministers and allies to get away with massive scams in coal and telecoms fuelled a surge of revulsion that played straight into the hands of the radical Right. Corruption, of course, is more deeply embedded in the bureaucracy than it is in the political class, but it remains the most powerful weapon parties can use to engineer each other’s downfall.

And finally, at the most basic level of all, the failure of the secular parties (the Communist parties included) to make any serious headway in confronting the backlogs of deprivation in the country (widespread malnutrition and landlessness, mounting unemployment and lack of access to public health being the chief among these), inequalities that are also largely related to caste but not confined to it, has provided fertile ground for the right-wing to exploit the accumulated underlying sense of deprivation and injustice.

This is of course equally true of the Left parties where they were in power at the state level, notably in West Bengal, and failed to build popular capacities. This backlog of failure is why ‘development’ has become such a powerful abstraction, one so effectively exploited by Modi, even if in practice he has a dilettantish fascination with new technologies and no conception of economic management beyond exhortations to capital (most often, foreign capital) to invest.  

Having said this, it would be a mistake to write off the Congress either as a party without a future or as one irredeemably compromised by its failure to uphold secularism.  What the remarkable success of the Grand Alliance in Bihar shows is that all secular forces have to be able to work together to defeat fascism in India. This includes the Left parties, which stayed outside that alliance and which, as noted, have never been closer to extinction as national parties than they are today.       

Jairus Banaji
8 November 2015

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The ASI report confirming the existence of a Ram temple  on the site of the Babri Masjid is suspect

The Archaeological Survey of India’s report that it has confirmed the existence of a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid has delighted the supporters of Hindutva. But the report has important failings which render it suspect. The ASI has said that it has discovered the bases of pillars which originally supported the roof of a temple at a layer below the mosque. It adduces the discovery of terracotta figurines at the site to strengthen this claim. And it claims to have discovered a “circular shrine” which it conjectures contained a Shivaling, which it would have us believe, fortifies the claim to a Ram temple at the site.

However, the evidence does not indicate that a Ram temple existed at this site. On the contrary, important evidence which the ASI has not properly examined or accounted for includes animal bones and glazed ware, both foreign to a Hindu Ram temple of medieval times.
Pillar bases which supported a temple?

About the scatters of bricks which the ASI claims are the bases of pillars which supported a temple, the ASI report says: “(the) present excavation has set aside the controversy by exposing the original form of the bases… and their arrangement in rows including their association with the top floor of the structure existing prior to the disputed structure.”

But even the very first lot of scatters of bricks on the west is not aligned as a row, nor is it at a uniform distance from the western wall. Secondly, these scatters are in different strata; pillars emanating from them could not have supported the same roof.

In figures 23, 23A, 23B, the ASI performs what it calls an “isometric reconstruction”, a three-dimensional picture of what it conjectures existed at the site, and draws a temple. This has a power of misleading suggestion. From the same base plan, architects could well reconstruct other architectural forms – such as a mosque.

In figure 23A, which it must be remembered is no more than a hypothetical reconstruction; these scatters of bricks against the south chamber wall have been presented as though they were encased structures. But Plate XXX, an actual photograph, shows this is not true. Stone blocks lie on top of and within scatters of brick-bats. These would not have provided a firm foundation for any load-bearing structure. The roof of the temple could not have been supported by such weak foundations. Indeed, what they claim are rows of pillar bases, could otherwise be interpreted: as simply cavities filled up with brick-bats and debris.

If this were such a sacred place, the birthplace of Ram, then why was there no temple according to the ASI claim, till the Sultanate period, XIIth-XVIth century AD? Why was it a site of continuous human habitation till then? The Archaeological Survey does not address this question.

If indeed, as they say, the mosque stratum is less than 50 cm below the surface, and the “temple”, so-called, immediately underneath, why did they not stop once they had found the “temple”? For that was their brief from the High Court: to determine whether there had been a mosque and a temple. Why did they, first, go more than 2 metres deep in some trenches and, second, take so many months to complete the excavations? Did they think they had not yet found the temple, and were they still desperately looking for it? And, failing to find it, did they thereafter label — what they had originally thought was part of the mosque or some earlier Muslim religious site such as an Idgah — a “temple”?

A twelfth century construction, if it existed on the same site and pre-dated the mosque, could have been either a secular structure or a Muslim religious site which re-used earlier material. The fact that blocks are re-used in the masjid does not mean that the temple was destroyed to build it.
The hypothesis of the temple is tailored to the theory of the Hindutva archaeologists BB Lal and SP Gupta, made in a pamphlet they produced after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, and a website. The pamphlet focuses on so-called “pillar bases” (pp 55-67). Yet there is no evidence to show that this is a temple, or that Vaishnava or Ram worship was conducted here. There is not a single specifically religious artefact. Much is made of a “divine couple”. But there is no indication of divinity – only a fragment of two waists.

Most importantly, if this were such a sacred place, the birthplace of Ram, then why was there no temple according to the ASI claim, till the Sultanate period, XIIth-XVIth century AD? Why was it a site of continuous human habitation till then? The Archaeological Survey does not address this question.

Circular shrine
In Period V, he ASI says it found a round brick shrine with a water channel – a small Shivalinga installation. The circular shrine is dated to the seventh to tenth century AD (p269). The ASI says that the hall of the Sultanate Period of the 12th century – which it would like us to believe was a Hindu temple – was built at a higher level — and following it. Then how can the shrine be presented as evidence of “remains” which indicate “whether there was any temple/structure which was demolished and mosque was constructed on the disputed site”?

Since the shrine was not demolished to build the mosque, surely it is no proof of the existence of a Hindu temple which may or may not have existed before the mosque came up.

“Now viewing in totality and taking into account the archaeological evidence of a massive structure just below the disputed structure and evidence of continuity in structural phases from the tenth century onwards unto the construction of the disputed structure along with (sic) the yield of stone and decorated bricks as well as mutilated sculpture of divine couple and carved architectural members including foliage patterns, amlaka, kapotapali doorjamb with semi-circular pilaster, broken octagonal shaft of black schist pillar, lotus motif, circular shrine, having pranala waterchute in the north, fifty pillar bases in association of the huge structure, are indicative of remains which are distinctive features found associated with the temples of north India.”

Now this foliage and the decorated bricks, could have belonged to either a secular structure; or been material reused in a Muslim religious structure of the 12th century.
And “viewing in totality” means taking the Siva shrine into account. But how does that help? The Siva shrine does not prove existence of a Ram Mandir.

Terracotta
The press has made references to figurines of terracotta being found. These may not be significant as they are not confined to Layer VII. They occur, in fact, even in the mosque levels! The ASI says this is because the peripheries of the mound were dug and the earth brought up to level the ground, and raise it, for the various structural activities. Therefore there is a big mix; and the findings of terracotta cannot date the “temple”.

Animal bones
If what the ASI has chosen to mention is important though misleading, what it has left out is equally significant. The presence of both animal bones and glazed ware at different levels of this site causes awkward problems for the claim of a Ram temple here.

The ASI report has had to acknowledge that animal bones were found because of the insistence of observers appointed by the Court that they be recorded. But it refuses to identify them by the stratum they were found, and hence the period (of time) to which they belonged.

“Animal bones have been recovered from various levels of different periods (emphasis added, 270, Summary).” But which levels, which periods?

Under Objectives and Methodology, page 9, the report says: “samples of plaster, floors, bones, charcoal, palaeo-botanical remains were also collected for scientific studies and analysis.” But from which strata? This question is avoided. And what scientific studies and analysis was done on the bones? This is nowhere explained.

Why are such animal bones not identified by stratum? These bones are material evidence; yet they were not photographed, perhaps to minimise their importance.

As a Hindu I am aware that specific vessels of specified materials are used in ritual. Surely if the temple was built in the medieval Sultanate period, and functioned as one for several centuries, we should be able to find in it some distinctive remains of pottery which would be appropriate to a Hindu sacred structure?

The significant question which the ASI report avoids dealing with is: have they appeared at a strata below the mosque, that is, period VII, XIIth to XVIth centuries AD? If so, the temple theory collapses.

At page 10 the report says: “As per the instructions of the High Court in order to maintain transparency all the excavated material including antiquities, objects of interest, glazed pottery and tiles and bones recovered from the trenches were sealed in the presence of advocates, parties and nominees and kept on the same day of their recovery in the strong room provided by the Authorised Person (the commissioner of Faizabad Division) to the excavation team for the specific purpose, which again was locked and sealed every day when it was opened. Thus the time available for their documentation, study, photography, drawing and chemical preservations was limited to just a few hours only and that too not in the case of material recovered from the trench towards closing of the work for the day.”

Is the ASI preparing excuses for the sloppiness of the work done? Where is the stratigraphy, analysis, photography, chemical preservation of the bones found at the site?

Glazed ware
Glazed ware was unknown in India before the coming of Islam. So it would not be found in a pre-Islamic site such as a Ram temple at Ayodhya.

It is significant that any identification of the glazed ware found at the site, by the specific layers in which it has been found, and therefore the period, has been omitted. At page 270, the report says: “In the last phase of the period VII (the medieval-Sultanate period, that of the supposed temple) glazed ware shreds make the appearance… celadon and porcelain.”

At page 73, under “Pottery”, the report says: “Hence the pottery of these periods (Mughal, late and post-Mughal) are not dealt with separately but are recorded along with the pottery of period VII (Medieval-Sultanate).”

And at page 108, it says: “The pottery of medieval Sultanate, Mughal and late and post-Mughal period (period VII to IX) combined together indicates that there is not much difference in pottery wares and shapes and hence they are not segregated, but instead clubbed together. The distinctive pottery of these periods is the glazed ware…”

Glazed ware has not been separated by stratum in the photographs. Even in Plate 77 which shows porcelain ware of a very late, probably British period, no stratum or period is mentioned in the photo-caption.

The ASI would have us believe that stratum VII is a temple, and stratum VIII a mosque. Then why did they club the pottery of these together? They say, the pottery is so similar. Would a temple in use since the 12th century for 400 years, and a mosque in use since the beginning of the Mughal period have similar pottery?

Even in a medieval temple, contemporaneous with Islam in India, glazed ware would not be used. As a Hindu I am aware that specific vessels of specified materials are used in ritual. Surely if the temple was built in the medieval Sultanate period, and functioned as one for several centuries, we should be able to find in it some distinctive remains of pottery which would be appropriate to a Hindu sacred structure?

Instead, the fact that the pottery from even phase VII is glazed and otherwise similar to Mughal pottery indicates that this may well have been a Muslim sacred or secular site.
One reason they may have clubbed the pottery together is that they first thought strata VIII and VII belonged to the same Mughal building, the Babri Masjid. Only later, under pressure, did they decide to interpret phase VII as being a temple.

In sum
To summarize. What are claimed to be the bases of pillars which held up the temple turn out not to be pillar bases at all. The Siva shrine at a lower level adds no strength to the claim of a Ram temple. The terracotta from different levels has been so jumbled up that it can be linked to no particular stratum and period. And the presence of animal bones and glazed ware makes it difficult to claim that a Ram temple existed on this site between the XIIth and XVIth centuries.

Mosque
And, finally, the ASI Report (figure 23 included) accepts the existence of a mosque. Were there a mosque since 1530 AD, where is the sense in prolonging the title suit? Clearly the site belongs to the mosque.

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