Back to the roots

The phased parliamentary polling enables party strategists and think-tankers to take intermittent stock of the way the popular mood swings, by occasional sample surveys of “the horse’s mouth”, the electorate itself, in scattered regional segments. Elections over the last decade — as the Congress weakened and withered over the whole country — have increasingly focused on “Presidential” characteristics, within a herrenvolk of leaders, among whom people are expected to choose for five years of stability. Exit polls help parties to readjust their tactics of the short term.

An example of this is the sudden increase of interest in India’s Muslims, many of whom have yet to vote. The media have awakened to the plight of what it calls “the Muslim community”. The term is redolent of the era of communalism from 1905 to 1950, when the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha staked claims for their own religions to get either political autonomy or majoritarian dominance. In the second half of the 20th century, the connotation of religious-group solidarity was obscured. They were to be understood not as abstract wholes, but disparate by sectarian distinctions (Sunni, Shia, Lingayat or Satnami); by locality and federated territory (Pathan, Baluch, Northeast Indian tribal, or say, Keralan or Karnataki); or by class (elite Muslim, plebian Hindu, rich tribal landlord or poor artisan).

The community of faith is not an undifferentiated unit. It includes people who have very separate values, linguistic ethnicity or class interests. The term community acquired an abstract social character — of cooperation, principled by endogenous creativity within relevant groups based on internal heritage and traditions. In global political theory, community is autonomous and separate from political vote blocs. It is not to be manipulated by favours at election time or by riots organized to threaten particular localities and classes when elections do not immediately loom ahead. Yet this is how the party that has suddenly adopted — since its somewhat unexpected victories in heartland assembly elections early this year — the parliament electoral strategy of good governance and principled stability, is behaving.

Before the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the all-India level, as recently as 1998, it was mainly known for advocacy of explicitly Hindu causes. In historical explanation and celebration, the names of assorted Hindu emperors, chieftains and religious reformers were expected to get priority over Muslims who were castigated as minority conquerors from foreign mountains and deserts. In foreign relations, Pakistan and Bangladesh were abused as haunts of missile-makers, fanatical Muslim terrorists and indigent migrants flooding what should remain a Hindu-dominated economy. In social life, Indian Islam was treated as a foreign ideology, whose practices were in some way exogenous to the sense of national community. Hindu communalism had these characteristics throughout the 20th century. After its decisive show of strength in flouting a weak Congress regime and destroying a Muslim historical monument in 1992, it came to be known outside India as Hindu nationalism, a chauvinistic alternative to the Indian National Congress. This religious chauvinism did not perceptibly change in the five years that its spin-doctors now claim have outdone 50 years of work for national progress by the Congress.

The IIM fee controversy has been cleverly used to shove Murli Manohar Joshi’s disastrous historiographical agenda under the carpet during the elections. Yet, the worthless National Council for Educational Research and Training textbooks have not been junked. There has been no respite from anti-academic Hindu historical biases. In foreign relations, there has been no change in Pervez Musharraf’s position rejecting even the line of control as a possible basis for peace in Kashmir. Cricket rivalry tokenism has just been touted as an example of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s sage success in tranquilizing Pakistani sports onlookers. Beyond shades — and poor ones at that — of Leni Riefenstahl’s depiction of Nazi power at Nuremberg as well as fascist management of the Berlin Olympics, sports management has not significantly contributed to the prospects of south Asian peace, in the way that even ping-pong diplomacy did to Sino-American relations in the Kissinger era. In social relations, the tendency remains to treat all Muslims as one community, a sort of subordinate sub-nationality in the Indian Union. It is being reciprocated by less enlightened political fanatics among segments of Indian Muslims themselves.

Reports of appeasement of “the” Muslims by mobilizing forces within them to drum up a last-minute rift among voters who have always seen V.D. Savarkar, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Nathuram Godse and M.S. Golwalkar and their successors as potentially violent anti-Muslims, should be analyzed in terms of political continuity in change. The continuities have an antithetical dialectic. All that Gujarat meant last year was to show the mailed fist not just to Godhra carnage (shockingly used by even Vajpayee to justify a statewide pogrom) but to Muslim masses as a whole, not only in Gujarat. The BJP has extended its opening of public revenues from the middle classes and farmers, now (in the wake of the recent exit polls) to students of madrasahs. Such centres of Islamic theology, no doubt, will be selected by the BJP-backed National Council for the Promotion of the Urdu Language for specific reliability to the party’s interests in the same way as an ex-foreign secretary has accused a member of the finance minister’s dynasty in Barmer of discriminating among followers for grant of visas to Pakistan.

The velvet glove for Muslims was always thin. In the Eighties and Nineties, Congress politicians sought to expand the bases of Muslim education through lavishly funded bodies like the Maulana Azad Foundation and promotion of the Urdu language as a link language for India and also as a growing Indian regional language. The mailed fist within the glove, that is, the Gujarat line, is the element of change. The BJP came to power by accusing the Congress of Muslim appeasement. Yet it now begins to follow what it then used to call pseudo-secularism. Savarkar, after whom L.K. Advani has now named Port Blair Airport to the exclusion of far more courageous revolutionaries who languished in the Cellular Jail after he had been released from double life imprisonment by furnishing a bond to British imperialism, used to justify the murder of British officers by his devotees on the ground that the means justify the end.

Perhaps he used this logic in his discussions with the people who assassinated Gandhi. His ideals have been well analyzed in a recent Bengali book, Beer Savarkar, by Ranjan Gupta. Savarkar’s admirers in their bid to retain power over India’s Central government are using such expedient logic.

Dark days lie ahead for the principled governance of India. The present regime’s pre-modernist attack on historical reasoning has contributed to shortening, and in some cases erasing, public memories of its own roots in religious xenophobia. All the more reason why the electorate that will exercise its voting rights next month should recall that the incumbents today in Central administration have not given up the intellectual legacy of Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar. Each of their intellectual guides wanted India’s Muslims to be subordinated. Vajpayee and Advani can hardly renounce that tradition.