Oxford University's Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme comments on Venkat Dhulipala

By Dilip - Wednesday, September 12, 2018

I will open this comment with an anecdote. Some months ago, whilst exercising in the gym I visit, the senior trainer was talking politics with someone. He is a friendly individual and I normally do not converse whilst exercising. He happens to be an admirer of Narendra Modi. On this occasion, Modi was in election mode and the communal signalling quite blatant. I felt compelled to interject and say that it was unacceptable for the PM to spread hatred amongst Indians. He paused a bit and then (with a hint of shame) said, “Yeh toh politics hee hai sir.’ (‘But this is only politics, sir’).

Oxford University's Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme (CSASP) has circulated a comment on Venkat Dhulipala's attendance at a seminar in Chicago organised by the World Hindu Congress; which to the best of my knowledge is an RSS front [Here is a link to the talk in Chicago by Venkat Dhulipala]. The comment has been endorsed by others; and seeks to re-circulate Faisal Devji's review of Dhulipala's book Creating a New Medina (2014). The innuendo is that Dhulipala's attendance at the seminar proves his sympathy with Hindutva ideology; and underlines the correctness of Devji's criticism in that review.

In 2014, I spoke at a seminar on fascism organised by the Jamaat-i-Islami Hind at their campus in Abul Fazal Enclave in Delhi. In my view, the Jamaat represents an important strand in Islamo-fascist ideology. In March 2013 it joined mass demonstrations in Kolkata in support of the Bangladeshi war crimes accused, who were members of its Bangladeshi counterpart. Vicious statements were made against Sheikh Hasina. It has organised hateful demonstrations against Taslima Nasrin , curtailed her right to speak at public events; and hosted homophobic seminars. To my mind, its ideals and activities are as reprehensible as those of the RSS. Nonetheless, if the Jamaat invites me to speak my views, I will do so. In 1988 the ABVP (another RSS front) invited me to speak on the Tamas serial. I asked them to invite my friend Purushottam Agrawal instead, which they did - here's a report on the repercussions of that seminar.

My attendance at meetings organised by the Jamaat or the RSS - or various left-wing bodies, for that matter - does not make me an ideologue or sympathiser of either. It is the content of the ideas expressed by me in writing or verbally, that should be the criterion of judgement. Dhulipala's scholarship has been praised and endorsed by intellectuals such as Sumit Sarkar and Ashis Nandy; not to mention several other scholars - do they too, in the view of the CSASP, qualify as apologists for the RSS world view?

Devji's review of Dhulipala's book made several inaccurate allegations. It also included ad hominem comments (the very title of the review is offensive) and made the allegation that his book was an apology for the politics of the Congress (not the Mahasabha). It also made the following points:

'his focus on old-time religion also means that Dhulipala sees Muslim divines as its only representatives. At no point does he consider the fact that so many of the Muslim League’s leaders and propagandists were products of a reformed or modernist Islam, like that retailed by the Aligarh Movement, and that it was this version of the religion that defined the party’s Islamic vocabulary – to the degree of subordinating clerics and Sufis to it.' He goes on: 'Dhulipala is happy to compare the League’s ideology with Nazism but instead of taking its ideas seriously, he insists on giving them a purely religious weight – and so effectively depoliticises the Pakistan movement...'

Incidentally, B. R. Ambedkar also compared the League’s demands to Hitlers (significantly using stereo-typical phrases): 'The Muslims are now speaking the language of Hitler and claiming a place in the sun as Hitler has been doing for Germany. For their demand for 50 per cent is nothing but a counterpart of the German claims for Deutschland Uber Alles and Lebensraum for themselves,

irrespective of what happens to other minorities.' (Thoughts on Pakistan, Bombay 1941; Chapter 11; p 261-62). And the Mahasabha also took within its ambit both reformist Arya Samaji’s and anti-modern revivalists.

The merging of conservatism and modernism in self-strengthening movements is an important strand in histories of nationalism, not to mention in Indian communalism of various hues. The tendency has been characterised as 'reactionary modernism' by some scholars. Nothing in Dhulipala's book indicates that he is unaware of this; or that he gives the Leagues ideas a 'purely religious weight'; or that his focus is solely on 'Muslim divines', quite the contrary.

Unfortunately (and this is our fault and choice) many people including academicians, have become habituated to the assumption that a criticism of Muslim communalism makes you a Hindu communalist and vice-versa. Let me put it simply: I do not need to be an apologist of the one in order to criticise the other. This kind of Pavlovian partisanship has vitiated the atmosphere for decades and is stupid as well as a waste of time. Communalism can never be understood if we insist on viewing it through a communal lens - as an arithmetically differentiated phenomenon; rather we need to see it as one political tendency with several manifestations.

A common complaint against Dhulipala is that he presents Muslim politics as a congenitally communal and separatist monolith. (The people who say this are clearly allergic to any critical assessment of Muslim communalism, besides being unable to read what they refute prior to refuting it). In fact he has done precisely the opposite. Today, few Indian historians comment about Maulanas Syed Mohd Sajjad; Tufail Ahmad Manglori, or Hifzur Rahman Seoharvi - intellectuals who resolutely opposed the two nation theory. Dhulipala has presented their arguments in detail and shown that far from Pakistan being a dark continent it was debated in detail in meetings, newspapers and pamphlets. He has done us a service by bringing these debates to light; and his critics would do well to read them.

Devji, on the other hand, is inclined toward casting communalists in positive light. He credits the Mahasabha's stance thus: 'Hindu nationalism to its credit always recognised the Muslim League as its political enemy. (We shall soon see why it is 'creditable' to naturalise enmity). Actually it entered into political alliances with the League, while at the same time ideologically framing Muslims as a monolith. It demonised not the League so much as an entire community - a practice favoured by all brands of communalists.

As an object of analysis, Indian communalism is linked to civil religion theory: the debate about the political instrumentalisation of religion. As such, paradigms of civil religion are mixtures of traditional beliefs, modernist yearnings and dreams of glory. Communal ideals of the nation are attempts to enforce a civil religion. This has led to a legitimation crisis of colossal proportions, because it is not possible to establish a stable polity in South Asia based on a ‘national’ religion. The issue is not the separation of religion from politics in general, but from the very idea of the nation. Communal ideologies tend to define it in terms of a permanently endangered community. Hindutva (which is comparable to Japan’s State Shinto), is a project seeking to impose a civil religion upon India. Pakistan’s experiment with civil religion was a massive and continuing failure. And so is the attempt to enforce a civil religion in Bangladesh.

Devji's arguments are based on Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's concept of the political. The latter refers to a zone wherein the focus is on sovereignty; the sovereign being defined as ‘the one who decides the exception.’ It is a dream of a permanent emergency. For Schmitt, what is most characteristically human is the friend/enemy distinction, as opposed to universal humanitarian categories. This aspect of political life is an existential reality, an absolutisation of enmity, which places it beyond ethical judgement.

Schmitt was a philosopher of absolutism. His virulent anti-semitism; and efforts to disguise his past; are a matter of record. His ‘decisionism’ smuggled the notion of the miraculous into legitimation theory. He was contemptuous of liberal democracy, claiming in 1923 that acclamation was superior to voting, and that Italian fascism and Soviet Bolshevism ‘were certainly anti-liberal but not necessarily anti-democratic.' (Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; 2000, p 16. I have argued elsewhere that Lenin was the twentieth century's first successful Schmittian political leader). Thus, Schmitt's concept of the political raises the communal endeavour to a sanitised plane. Many critics of liberal democracy, including conservatives and Leninists, are attracted to his version of raison d’etat; perhaps for the reason that it absolves one from making any ethical judgement whatsoever. The political ends up as a zone beyond good and evil.

To this way of thinking, even an empirical study of political thought and action becomes dangerous if it prompts reflection upon the moral or amoral choices of the historical actors. They wish to avoid such reflection and remain on the perch of assumed scientific detachment that Schmitt provided the critics of liberalism - both on the Right as well as the Left. Perhaps that is why many people are so irritated at Dhulipala's research; and rush to denounce it (and him personally) without reading it. This is not scholarship, but ideological propaganda. The person or persons managing the CSASP Twitter account should follow Devji's own injunction to take ideas seriously. They should read and assess Dhulipala's arguments carefully, instead of indulging in mindless jeering. DS

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