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NEWS & LETTERS, OCTOBER 2003Lead Article The struggle for India’s futureby Maya Jhansi The Aug. 25 bomb blasts in Mumbai (Bombay) that killed over 50 people were the latest in a series of low-scale attacks that have terrorized India in the last year. Two women, allegedly part of a group seeking revenge for the massacre of 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat by a Hindu mob last year, were arrested, but it is not clear whether they were involved in the six other bombings in Mumbai since December. This group is suspected to have ties with radical Islamist groups in Kashmir and possibly with Al Qaeda. Whatever the case may be, we can be sure that the current coalition government headed by the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will make full use of them to further its own reactionary agenda, including nuclear politics. We can take some heart in the fact that Mumbai did not erupt in riots following the bombing. The city kept peace, with students and others even coming together to raise their voices against terrorism and communalism. However, the Shiv Sena, another Hindu nationalist group in Maharashtra, and the BJP are using the bombing to kick off their campaign for upcoming state and national assembly elections. Particularly disturbing is the success the Hindu Right has had in dehumanizing Muslims and other minorities to the point that outlandish lies and propaganda, for example about Muslim fertility rates, have entered mainstream discourse. In Pune, a city known as a center of education because of its many colleges and universities, I saw dozens of copies of Hitler's MEIN KAMPF being sold by pirated book vendors. I asked several of the book vendors about it, and they told me that they sold two to ten copies of MEIN KAMPF a day. A professor at Pune's well-known Fergusson College told me of a student who named it as his favorite book in a college interview. Although no definite conclusions can be drawn from these observations, they are, at the very least, alarming. As hard as the Right is trying to win the minds and hearts of India, however, much of the lived everyday reality of Indians escapes the narrow logic of their ideology. Everything from popular culture to ongoing struggles and organizing by the deepest and lowest sectors of Indian society show that, while the Right has made important inroads, they have not yet captured the imagination of India. In the planned industrial city of Faridabad on the outskirts of Delhi, workers and activists from the FARIDABAD MAZDOOR SAMACHAR (FARIDABAD WORKERS' NEWS) talked about their everyday struggles at the factories and against the local and state governments. The government has attempted to demolish the shantytowns, some of them over 40 years old, where workers from companies like Goodyear, Escorts and Whirlpool live. Although Faridabad is a planned city, with housing for supervisors, managers and officials, there is no space allotted for workers' living quarters. Thousands of women, children and men, joined by residents from neighboring shantytowns, have come together to protect their homes by blocking demolition machinery and blocking roads and railroads. Several shantytowns have been demolished, but several have been saved by the spontaneous efforts of the residents. This is the kind of struggle that is ongoing but doesn't make the papers--and is not controlled by any party. Such struggles show that, though the Left in India has sunk into lower abysses of insignificance, there is both everyday resistance and a search for alternatives to existing society. DANGER OF RIGHT-WING POPULISM It seems, however, that it is the Right more than the Left that is trying to speak to the strivings of people for a better life. The sectors that once formed the base of the Left parties--workers, peasants, adivasis (so-called tribal peoples), Dalits and women--are being actively wooed by the Right in an ingenious and nefarious strategy of fascist populism. Indeed, most alarming is that today the largest labor union in India is the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), organized by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the leading organization of the Hindu Right. With a staggering membership of 7.6 million, the BMS has surpassed not only the Communist Party-controlled Center of Trade Unions but also the Congress Party-controlled Indian National Trade Union Congress. The BMS statement of principles declares their "conviction that [the] class concept is a myth." Claiming to balance the pulls of capitalism and socialism, the BMS argues that "maximum production is the national duty of labour." It tries to soften this obviously corporatist and authoritarian goal with a call for restricted consumption and fair distribution. In addition to the BMS, there is the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, which has large numbers of farmers, peasants and agricultural laborers. This is an organization that has consistently opposed the struggles of the Save the Narmada River Valley Movement. The largest organization working with the adivasis, the poorest and most marginalized sector in India, is the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, run by the RSS. There is also a Hindu nationalist women's group, Stri Shakti. The Hindu Right has also pulled many Dalits into their fold. Several have written about the mobilization of Dalits in the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena has succeeded in recruiting, among others, the once-radical Namdeo Dhasal, co-founder of the Dalit Panthers and one of the greatest modern Marathi poets to come out of the Dalit literary renaissance of the 1970s. It was not for nothing that Hitler felt compelled to call his party national-socialist. Likewise, though the Hindu Right clearly represents the high castes and classes, it has made a mammoth effort to draw the masses into its fold and has co-opted and twisted the language of the Left to do so. UNDERSTANDING THE HINDU RIGHT The Hindutva movement cannot properly be called a religious fundamentalist movement. Fundamentalism revolves around the attempt to politically and socially realize and enforce one particular interpretation of a sacred text as the only valid one. This kind of fundamentalism would likely not go over well in a civilization as diverse as that found on the Indian subcontinent. The "fact" that India is 85% Hindu ignores that within that 85% lies not only caste, gender, regional, linguistic and class differentiation, but a whole spectrum of competing religious traditions (some part of emancipatory movements) that do not see themselves as one. The claim that India is 85% Hindu is an oversimplification that the Hindu Right is at pains to make a reality. Contemporary HINDUTVA, though it mobilizes religion in the service of politics, is much more interested in establishing Hindu unity through a nationalism of the "blood and soil," than through the imposition of a particular religious sectarianism. This can be seen most especially in the resurrection by the Right of the Hindu nationalist V.D. Savarkar, the author of the 1923 work Hindutva. The BJP opened the year 2003 by unveiling a portrait of Savarkar in the Parliament building, next to the portrait Mohandas K. Gandhi. This caused a huge stir in parliament, in part because Savarkar had been arrested, though never convicted, for masterminding Gandhi's murder. Savarkar started out his career as a militant freedom-fighter, but then increasingly became involved in the Hindu nationalist cause. In HINDUTVA, Savarkar wrote, "Some of us are monists, some pantheists; some theists and some atheists. But monotheists or athiests--we are all Hindu and own a common blood" (56). Savarkar called for an end to caste hierarchy, religious ritual and superstition. He wanted to throw out Brahmin orthodoxy. To him, Hindutva was defined, not by religious practice, but by a feeling of solidarity generated by hatred for the Other, specifically the Muslim. The heir apparent to Savarkar's philosophy is none other than Atal Bihari Vajapayee, the Prime Minister of India, who had, in the 1970s, famously challenged the Brahmin orthodox RSS to open its doors to the lower castes. The Hindu Right is no Taliban. They cater to multinationals, pander to the U.S., and promote science and technology. The focus on Hindutva as a form of religious fundamentalism to which secularism is counterposed has detracted attention from its nefarious populism. The gap between the rhetoric and the reality of the BJP is easy to point out, but what party does not have this gap? Indeed, this is the crux of the matter. The successes of the BJP and the Hindu Right have been made possible by a politics of cynicism that has imprisoned the political life of the country, at least since the State of Emergency called by Indira Gandhi in 1975. WHERE IS THE LEFT? The Emergency was unleashed in order to help the Congress Party stay in power, but the real object was to crack down on the vibrant radical movements that erupted in the early 1970s: the Naxalite (Maoist) insurgencies, the women's movement, workers' and peasant organizing and various regional movements for separate statehood. Indira Gandhi's goons rounded up, imprisoned and tortured thousands of socialists, Communists, Naxalites and other oppositional forces (though it should be remembered that the Communist Party of India supported the Emergency). Included among the opposition forces was the RSS, also banned by Indira Gandhi at this time. She could have done them no bigger favor. They came out of the Emergency with a whole new public face and a clearly worked-out strategy. After the Emergency, alliances with the Jan Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, by the socialists and Communists gave the Hindu Right a national presence they never previously had. Great socialist leaders, like Jayaprakash Narayan and Lohia, justified this power brokering as necessary for the defeat of the Congress. Forgotten were the many movements at the ground level. Several of these movements protested against this politics of expediency. For example, the Shetkari Sanghatna (a farmers and peasants rights group) in Maharasthtra resisted the pressure to compromise with the Hindu Right, and instead led campaigns to expose their hypocrisy. The Emergency ended any claim of the Congress Party to be the heir of India's struggle for freedom from the British, but it also ended almost every other party's claims to the same. The idea of principled politics was gone. In the 1980s and 1990s, the downward spiral of the Congress could be seen in their plunge into communal politics, particularly the vicious pogroms against Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In the 1980s, it was the Congress that laid the groundwork for the destruction of the mosque by the BJP in Ayodhya in 1992. CHALLENGES FROM BELOW The other side of the 1990s was the unprecedented participation of the lower castes, including Dalits, in the political process. The collapse of the Congress meant the growth of regional and caste-based parties, which many have seen as a harbinger of true democracy. But this politicization is very quickly being swallowed up by the cynical politics of opportunism, self-interest and corruption. The hope for genuine democracy in India does not reside in Delhi but in the movements that have consciously rejected electoral power politics and have raised the most profound questions about India's future. The Emergency did not succeed in crushing the new movements that had arisen in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, India continued to witness the growth of the women's movement, and farmer and peasant organizations, as well as environmental struggles that have attracted the attention of the world. India's various environmental movements, from Chipko to today's struggle to save the Narmada Valley from the ravages of a proposed big dam, have posed some of the most important philosophic questions of our generation: Is capitalist industrialization the only way to meet our needs? What is our relationship to the earth? To each other? Though the Narmada movement suffered a serious setback two years ago, when the supreme court lifted the six-year stay on the building of the dam, the struggle there and in many other places in India is far from over. One convoluted idea floating around the government is the plan to link together all the rivers of India. It is precisely this hubris that the environmental movement challenges us to reject. Many feminists and activists are engaging in a self-critique of their assumptions, particularly their acceptance of the idea that industrial development and scientific knowledge would eradicate the problems of poverty, illiteracy and hunger, and set the stage for the development of socialism. In the collapse of these Nehruvian ideals of modernization through rapid capitalist industrialization and centralized state control, new openings for a genuine Indian socialism have emerged. The new movements have raised new questions that deserve serious thinking and rethinking, not platitudes and slogans. Addressing these new challenges from below is probably the best--maybe the only--way to ensure that Hindutva is not the future of India. |
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