Hindutva

[acharya]

HINDU NATIONALISM AND INDIAN POLITICS [with an introduction by Pratap Bahnu Mehta]. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2004.

THE upsurge of Hindu nationalism has been among the most marked feature of post-Ayodhya Indian politics. The omnibus under review brings together three meticulously researched and authoritative texts written over the last half a decade that taken together provide the reader an opportunity to undertake an academic journey into the ideology, strategy and social and organizational bases of Hindu nationalism in a comparative mode. In the endeavour the reader is ably guided by an incisive introduction by Mehta who situates the three scholarly works in the present context of Hindutva politics.

Significantly, the three books complement each other. While Zavos ably traces the evolution of the idea of Hindutva in the early 20th century period focusing on the different political idioms and organizational strategies it employed, Hansen relates them in the modern context and also reflects on the relationship between Hindu nationalism and other forms of nationalism in contemporary Indian democracy. <b>The edited venture of Hansen and Jafferlot brings together the essays with an empirical focus that analyzes Hindutva politics in terms of the electoral strategies employed by the BJP, the vanguard part of the Hindutva organizations, at both the national and state level.</b>

A dispassionate analysis of the BJP remains indispensable for an understanding of the socio-cultural causes of the growth of Hindu nationalism. <b>Albeit in a subtler form, the BJP led Hindutva forces have been able to impart a definitive rightist slant to Indian politics during their last six years in power. The effort to bring about a cultural transformation of the civil society in a structural sense was evidenced in the attempt at effecting a ban on cow slaughter, reconfiguration of Indian education, anti-conversion legislation, marginalization of Muslim politics – to recall just a few measures</b>. One may also refer to the BJP in its belligerent episodic avatars in our recent history reflective of its core ideology, i.e. its campaign for the sacred sites like the liberation of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi in Ayodhaya or rath yatras/gaurav yatras taken up by Joshi, Advani, Modi and their ilk.

<b>What is Hindu nationalism? It is an ideology that aims at the creation of an awareness among all the people classified as Hindus of their Hindu identity irrespective of their internal social, cultural and regional distinctions.</b> Drawing inference from Savarkar’s vision of India in a civilizational form, the proponents of Hindutva mobilize the people by invoking the commonness of ethnicity, race, religion, territory, history and culture that encompasses all other differences. The search for an integrated Hindu identity, Zavos argues, results in the assertion of cultural and spiritual superiority of Hinduism in ‘a highly politicized context’. Attention is drawn towards its pluralism, compositeness and tolerance. Referring to the colonial context, Hansen suggests that Hindu nationalism, as a powerful idiom was but ‘one of the several contingent outcomes of a protracted struggle over the definition of Indian nationhood.’

<b>Besides the above strategy of benchmarking Indian identity, Hindu nationalism also creates ‘a common narrative of subjugation’ as Mehta puts it. In this narrative, Hindus have for centuries been victim of onslaught from ‘others’ – Muslims and Christians. Hindutva thus represents an effort to come to terms with a history of subjugation, ‘an assertion of the will that will finally put Hindus in charge of their own destiny.’</b> Both Zavos and Hansen suggest that Hindu nationalism is primarily a political creation of agents like RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and like minded organizations. On the basis of their study of the BJP, the political face of Hindu nationalism and its electoral politics, Hansen and Jafferlot make two significant observations. First, that there is no real contradiction between ideological purity and the political pragmatism shown by the BJP in a coalition era as both serve as an instrument of other. Second, in order to broaden its social and spatial base, BJP’s strategy has been to ‘adapt to the characteristics of regional politics and local social equations.’

Ashutosh Kumar



* An omnibus comprising of John Zavos, The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India; Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave; Christophe Jafferlot and Thomas Blom Hansen, eds., The BJP and the Compulsions of Politics in India.