The rise of the Hindu Right

Siddhartha Deb’s Twilight Prisoners outlines the contribution of the liberal elite to the emergence of the Narendra Modi regime.

Survivors of the 1984 gas disaster burning an effigy of Union Carbide outside the company’s abandoned factory premises in Bhopal on December 3, 2018.   | Photo Credit: FARUQUI A.M.

There has been plenty of commentary on the evolution of Hindu nationalism in India over the past decade. Many of these works—with honourable exceptions, of course—tend to frame this story in a linear trajectory, the main themes of which are centred around the origin of the RSS, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and Babri Masjid demolition, the Gujarat riots and Narendra Modi.

Amid these academic writings that have flooded the intellectual space in India, Siddhartha Deb’s Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of The Hindu Right And The Decline of India stands out.

Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India

By Siddhartha Deb 

Context 

Pages: ‎232

Price: Rs.599

The book draws on a series of essays the author wrote over the past decade that allows readers to immerse themselves in the hydra-headed world of Hindutva and its multidimensional matrix in which Hindu nationalism took decades to gestate and make itself manifest in the most sinister of ways.

The highlight of the book is clearly its evocative writing through which Deb sketches out the gradient layers in which India’s political, social, and cultural realities fan out and turn into an intersectional point for the many dynamics that enable Hindutva to find expression.

Book cover of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Decline of India by Siddhartha Deb  | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

The “loud expert voices” that paved Modi’s way to power

As Deb demonstrates, the rise of Hindutva could not have been possible without tacit acceptance from the country’s aspirational demographic group that envisioned India as a rising power. The imbrications between modern narratives about India, with all their secular pretensions, and the Hindu nationalism that the country’s electorate eventually delivered are hard to miss. As Deb writes, in the run-up to the 2014 parliamentary election, it was the “loud expert voices” from a seemingly well-heeled section of the liberal diaspora that “bolstered the triumphal narrative” around Modi’s “economic miracle”.

Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University, for example, would deny that malnutrition (which Gujarat reels under as badly as the rest of the country) was responsible for stunted growth among millions of Indian children. Instead, genetic limitation was to be blamed.

This kind of myth-making that backed Modi led citizens to ignore some of the glaring inconsistencies of his economic model. For instance, while the media trumpeted Modi’s decision to offer the Tatas space to set up a car-manufacturing unit for their flagship project Nano in 2008 in Gujarat, how the low-cost vehicles were later found to be vulnerable to fire hazards was overlooked.

The hype about “Islamic terrorism”

The centrist discourse originating from sections of India’s liberal elite also fed into the hype about “Islamic terrorism”, cementing India’s transformation into a security state that grew suspicious of its Muslim citizens. This narrative struck deeply with Indians, migrating as they were to the West in the early 2000s, propelled by the IT boom. Indians could conveniently shut their eyes to the bloodletting taking place in Gujarat and, instead, seize on the West’s troubles with the Muslim world to give expression to their own deep-seated bigotries.

A list of familiar tropes spun in the media would soon become part of received wisdom: “India was an ally in the marketplace and in the war against Islamism, and it was a contrast to both the overly religious, anti-Western militancy that would consume Pakistan and the godless manipulation of market capitalism in China,” Deb writes.

From this new culture, built around the shibboleths of materialism, a kind of “white man’s Indian” was finessed into shape, exemplified in the narratives of Western intellectuals like Thomas Friedman, whose book The World Is Flat Indians grew increasingly enamoured of. There is an uncanny overlap between the reworking of the discursive space within India and the arrival of Modi.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the nation on Independence Day in 2014. | Photo Credit: SAURABH DAS/AP

Although the rise of the Hindu Right in India was not an overnight process, it was already presaged by the major premonitory trends unfolding in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The lethal gas leak in Bhopal in 1984 that killed more than 20,000 people over the course of several years was, for all intents and purposes, connected to the country’s Green Revolution, which had precipitated a voracious appetite for pesticides, especially those backed by Western science, the wisdom behind which the Indian government would have hardly doubted. The Union Carbide factory that manufactured these toxicants in Bhopal was already beset by concerns over safety issues. The company itself had horrendous origins, linked as it was to the legacy of gas chambers in Europe.

Emerging out of this rank nexus between capitalism and nation-building was the enthronement of the security doctrine as the cornerstone of India’s state policy. The brilliantly written chapter about the crackdown on Burmese dissidents sheltering in Manipur, who had launched an uprising against the military junta in Myanmar, hammers home this point very well.

The author has welded the essays in the book into a consistent narrative, with the chapters linked dialogically to each other. Deb’s account of the Hindu Right’s obsession with Vedic “technology” apparently found in ancient Hindu scriptures; the assassination of dissenters critical of Hindutva; and the weaponisation of law enforcement agencies, along with the use of military-grade spyware to frame social activists on trumped-up charges— all add to the coherence of his storytelling.

The book concludes with the author’s rendezvous with Arundhati Roy, one of India’s leading public intellectuals. The conversations are sharp and immersive, offering a vital window into Roy’s world, tracing her journey from being a student of architecture, to getting crowned as the country’s foremost critic. Perhaps, the author wishes to remind us that the acclaim Roy has attracted is symbolic of the broader resentment over the kind of degeneration that India has experienced, and that such a resentment is a natural corollary to the path that Hindutva is traversing. 

Shakir Mir is a freelance journalist and book critic based in Srinagar.