Mukul Kesavan - Hindus and others: The republic's common sense
The historical significance of Narendra Modi's Hindu
nationalist regime will be measured not by its economic record but its success
(or failure) in changing the political common sense of the republic. Modi is a Hindu strongman committed to remaking India in his
own image. He inherited a country where political virtue had been synonymous
with pluralism. This pluralism consisted of celebrating India's religious
diversity, invoking a tranquil pre-colonial past, blaming communal conflict on
colonial wickedness, supporting affirmative action for depressed castes and
insisting that India, despite its huge Hindu majority, was not a Hindu nation
but a pluralist, non-denominational State.
Narendra Modi's core supporters elected him to confront
these pieties. Modi's party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, sees pluralism as the
effete legacy of its ideological other, the Indian National Congress, the
anti-colonial party that ousted the British raj. Having reduced the
Congress to a dynastic rump, Modi's goal in office is to free India of this
straitjacket of political correctness that stifles its Hindu majority and
panders to religious minorities.
The alternative understanding of the republic that the BJP
sponsors is explicitly majoritarian: it swears by an ethnic nationalism that
would remake India into a Hindurashtra, or nation. The party has been in
power before but Modi's success in leading it to an absolute majority and the
reputation he acquired as Gujarat's chief minister, as a man who takes no
prisoners, has created both expectation and foreboding.
Indians know that conceptions of political correctness can
change. Fifty years ago to bring up caste in political argument or government
policy in India was to demean the discourse; caste was real but residual. Like
widow-burning or untouchability, it was a bad smell from the past that needed
to be purged from modern India, not formally acknowledged or taken account of.
Even the affirmative action quotas for Dalits, the most exploited and
segregated of India's plebeian castes, were meant to be temporary. By the end of the 20th century, though, caste had become
respectable not just as a sociological category, but as the natural unit of
political mobilization and as an authentically Indian measure of deprivation or
privilege.
In the 2014 parliamentary elections, the BJP led by Modi
seemed to overturn the electoral relevance of caste by routing entrenched caste
coalitions in the two largest north Indian states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. If
this first step in the consolidation of India's Hindus into a political bloc
undivided by caste identity can be followed up by the creation of a governing
culture where India's 'Hindu-ness' becomes a normal and matter-of-fact part of
public life, the reorientation of the republic might become a reality.
To this end, the BJP wants Muslims and Christians to
acknowledge that Hinduism isn't just the largest faith in India, it is also a
cultural inheritance that defines the nation state and all its citizens.
Central to the BJP's understanding of Indian history is the notion that Hindus
are India's aboriginal community. Indian Muslims and Christians are, therefore,
originally Hindu, branches of a parent trunk. Their religious beliefs are
foreign grafts on fundamentally Hindu bodies. When Modi's minister for culture
speaks of Abdul Kalam being a patriot "despite" being a Muslim, he
isn't being snide, he's being honest. He genuinely believes that being Muslim
(or Christian) gets in the way of being Indian.
The model minority citizen for the BJP would be someone like
Francis D'Souza, deputy chief minister in the BJP's state government in Goa,
who announced in July last year that "[a]ll Indians in Hindustan are
Hindus, including (me). I am a Christian Hindu, I am Hindustani. So you don't
have to make it a Hindu nation; it is a Hindu nation".
In the winter following the 2014 election, ideological
affiliates of the BJP, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad organized 'homecomings' where hundreds of Muslims and Christians
were publicly converted to Hinduism except that the word 'conversion' was never
used because Muslims and Christians were primordial Hindus merely returning to
the fold. The chief of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, described Christians and Muslims
as ' apna maal' ('our material'), a crudely colloquial way of
asserting the Hindu ownership of Christian and Muslim bodies.
The most radical attempt by Modi's government to reset the
dial of political correctness was its bid to steal Christmas. In its first year
in office, the new government decided to rebrand Christmas. December 25 was
renamed Good Governance Day and dedicated to the memory of two Hindu
nationalist leaders. Civil servants and public school children were required to
attend schools and offices to worship at the altar of good governance. This
dilution of Christmas as a public holiday had a simple goal: the symbolic
appropriation of a day sacred to Christians.
In the same month, a minister in the Union government,
Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, made a speech dividing Indians into Ramzaadon (Ram's
children, or Hindus) and har*****don (b*****ds, the rest). She was mildly
reproached for profanity but not at all for the bigotry of her speech.
Similarly, last October when there were minor riots between Muslims and Hindus
in Trilokpuri, a poor, densely populated neighbourhood in East Delhi, two BJP
legislators from the area took partisan, pro-Hindu positions without being
reprimanded by Modi or the party leadership.
If the summary treatment of minorities is one aspect of the
BJP's campaign to reform republican common sense, another is the party's
deference to 'Hindu' sensibilities. A few months into his prime ministership,
Modi encouraged a gathering of Indian doctors to imitate the extraordinary
achievements of ancient Indian surgery, which, according to him, had
successfully attached an elephant's head to a human body. He was referring to
Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. It is unlikely that Modi believed that Ganesh
was the product of plastic surgery; he said what he did because he, like his
party, believes that a glorious Hindu present is best built on a storied Hindu
past. The same logic animates Modi's elevation of the Gita, a sacred Hindu
scripture, into India's national text, and his enthusiasm for leading vast
public sessions of yoga.
This willingness to pander to a 'Hindu' culture leads to
perverse policy. The BJP chief minister of the central Indian state of Madhya
Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, refused to let eggs be served in the state's
mid-day meal programme. Over half the children in Madhya Pradesh under the age
of six are underweight and a majority of Indians are not vegetarian, so
Chouhan's fiat amounted to imposing the dietary preferences of upper-caste
Hindus on a malnourished public. Modi's BJP is indifferent to the human cost of
its no-egg policy. Vegetarianism is intrinsic to Hinduism; it follows that it
ought to be promoted as a national virtue.
Has Hindu patriotism begun to displace a benign pluralism as
the republic's cardinal virtue? It's too early to say but this much is clear:
Modi's regime has made majoritarian ideas respectable by owning them and taking
them seriously.
The State in India subsidizes, directly or indirectly, every
academic and intellectual institution of any standing. Its patronage matters. A
small but growing cadre of
Hindutva fellow travellers who might once
have been discreet about their prejudices, now fight their corners in
television studios, university departments, quasi non-governmental bodies like
the Indian Council of Historical Research and newspaper columns. Twitter and
Facebook resonate with the enthusiasm and passion of Modi's champions. Whether
this passion will survive the next electoral cycle or the entropy that is the
fate of every Indian government is unclear, but it is a fact that the Muslim's
fabled propensity to breed and the Christian missionary's sinister designs on
needy Hindus are a part of the public conversation in a way that they weren't
before.
The anti-colonial movement that brought the republic into
being was singular in its refusal to define the nation in terms of the standard
European templates of language and faith. Its fetishistic celebration of
India's diversity was based on the belief that Mother India was too large to be
stuffed into petticoats designed for smaller European women.
India is surrounded by south Asian states that chose to
define themselves in terms of their dominant faiths. Pakistan is an Islamic
republic, Nepal used to be a Hindu kingdom and Sri Lanka flirted with the idea
of becoming a Sinhala-Buddhist nation state. Nations owned by their religious
majorities make their minorities second-class citizens, a fail-safe
prescription for hectoring violence and alienation. If Modi succeeds in
displacing Gandhi's idea of India with Hedgewar's Hindu rashtra,
India will become just another South Asian chauvinism: Khaleda Zia's Bangladesh
or Mahinda Rajapaksa's Sri Lanka, this time on a subcontinental scale.
