Peter Ronald deSouza: The Intrinsic Limits of Hindutva as an Ideology of the Indian State
NB: This is an instructive article: members of the establishment who retain the slightest capacity to think rationally beyond their career interests, should read it carefully. I have argued elsewhere that ideologies have an inbuilt tendency toward implosion: the process whereby prevailing doctrines of political hegemony fail to maintain the minimal coherence required for self-perpetuation, and need to be replaced by outright lies, deceit, domination and terror. Dreams of empire end up as nightmares; primarily because of 'a deficit of thought', as Professor deSouza has argued with great insight. Hindutva is a project to invent and impose a civil religion in India. The concept of Hindutva is similar to the Japanese civil faith known as State Shinto – and represents the imperial dream of the RSS toward unrestrained dictatorship over the entire terrain of what once was the British Empire in India.
The issue in South Asia is not the separation of religion from politics, but from nationalism. Communal ideologies ground the concept of the nation on the presumption of an endangered community. This is a politics of a permanent emergency. The spokesmen of communal nationalism are not interested in the truth of religion, but its use – and they use it for political mobilisation. Nation-worship is a manifestation of right-wing atheism, an identitarian numbers-game, wherein all truth is reduced to a philosophy of number. I have written more about nation-worship as the new atheism here. DS
The Intrinsic Limits of Hindutva as an Ideology of the Indian State
The BJP has built an electoral juggernaut but the mishandling of the pandemic has shown that Hindutva as an ideology is a handicap in the running of a modern state. The challenge to the BJP will come at the state-level & will be rooted in a cultural pushback.
Beyond the pictures of funeral pyres in abandoned quarries, beyond the wails of women beseeching hospital officials to admit their relatives gasping for oxygen, and beyond the scenes of despair and tragedy lies a brutal truth. Hindutva cannot run a modern state. This is not hyperbole for such incapacity cannot be explained by the standard analysis of bureaucratic bottlenecks, decision delays, administrative failure, official apathy, leadership narcissism, political cynicism or even just bad luck.
What we are seeing (but do not see) is something more
fundamental at work. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has infused into the
state structure an administrative culture that threatens the logic of a modern
state. This needs to be named. The state that is emerging, or has emerged,
depending on how one sees the news, leads to one conclusion alone. The BJP’s
governance philosophy makes it unsuited to deal with the demands of a modern
state. To see it, therefore, as just another player in the game of competitive politics
in India is a fundamental error….
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/intrinsic-limits-hindutva-ideology-indian-state
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