The BJP's triumphalism is misplaced, but the struggle to mount a powerful ideological challenge to Hindutva has become more uphill for Centre-Left forces.
NOTHING since Lal Krishna Advani's rath yatra of 1990 has boosted the hubris and the gross arrogance of the Sangh Parivar as strongly as the Gujarat Assembly results. The Bharatiya Janata Party now triumphantly says that the "roadmap for the future is clear": it is poised to wrest back each State held by its opponents and also emerge victorious in the next Lok Sabha elections.
The BJP National Executive meeting on December 23-24 declared the Gujarat election verdict "a mandate" for and an endorsement of its core "ideological positions" and expressed confidence that it "will prove to be a turning point in India's history" and that "cultural nationalism... will find wide scale (sic) acceptability all over the country". This followed the crowning of Narendra Modi not just as Chief Minister of Gujarat in a spectacular ceremony in an Ahmedabad stadium but as the mascot of a new, virulent Hindutva. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) expectedly exults over the Gujarat results. Its most rabid elements like Praveen Togadia stridently declare that India will become a Hindu rashtra in two years' time.
Even Atal Behari Vajpayee has joined the chorus. He told Dainik Bhaskar that the Gujarat elections "will help the nation understand secularism in the proper perspective"; Gujarat has released "new energies", which must be skilfully used to "help us preserve the values of our [presumably Hindu] life". The scales should now fall off many Vajpayee-supporters' eyes.
The BJP has cited all sorts of reasons for its victory, including "good governance", and the popularity of "cultural nationalism" and its "commitment to eliminate terrorism". It portrays the results as a punishment to secularists for their "Hindu bashing". In reality, the BJP's victory is not as pervasive and comprehensive as it seems.
A look at the detailed election results shows that the party won just under 50 per cent of the vote (to be precise, 49.79 per cent). Given the 62 per cent poll turnout, this means 31 per cent of the population supported it, giving it a total of 10.13 million votes. However, the votes of the secular parties (the Congress(I), the Nationalist Congress Party, the Samajwadi Party, the Janata Dal(U), the CPI(M) and CPI) together add up to 8.62 million. In addition, "Independents" won 1.17 million votes. It is estimated that perhaps 70 per cent of these were bagged by rebel Congress candidates. If these votes are added, the total secular vote goes up to 9.44 million, only marginally (7 per cent) lower than the BJP's.
The BJP thus gained considerably from Opposition disunity. In addition to the 53 seats bagged by the Congress(I) and Jatanta DalU), the secular parties lost by narrow margins in as many as 40 constituencies, where the combined vote of the Number 2 and 3 candidates exceeds the BJP's. Absent vote division, the BJP would have lost all 40.
What is special about Gujarat is not a Hindutva wave so much as the BJP's ability to raise its vote-share by six percentage points, despite having organised India's worst pogrom of a minority in 55 years. The success is all the more telling, given its appalling record of governance, which saw index after social index plummet, and growth slow down from 10 per cent-plus in the mid- and late- 1990s to only 1 per cent now, leaving a wasteland of closed factories. Disgracefully, the BJP's vote was especially high precisely in the two regions northern and central Gujarat where the post-Godhra violence was most acute.
One of the main reasons for this dark victory is the electorate's polarisation along religious lines which the BJP effected. However, it would be wrong to attribute its success to polarisation alone. Also significant was the Congress(I)'s "soft Hindutva" line and failure to confront the BJP on communalism and nationalism. The Congress(I) concentrated exclusively on "development". More generally, two sets of factors seem to have been at work. The first is in many ways Gujarat-specific, and the second more generic, present in many other States.
The first set of factors has to do with some conservative right-wing peculiarities of Gujarati society, politics and culture. Gujarat has seen not a loosening of hierarchies, but a hardening of caste divisions over two centuries amidst a general absence of social reform just when some other parts of India were being reshaped by reform movements. Perhaps no other State matches Gujarat in throwing up a substantial class of proprietary farmers (the patidar Patels) which so dominates its economic, social and religious life. The Patels' ascendancy coincided with the rise of conservative cults such as the Swaminarayan sect, in contrast to the cultural "renaissance" and modernisation processes that were gathering momentum in some other regions in the 19th century.
The Patels, the Banias and the Brahmins of Gujarat retain a tight hold over state power, the economy and social institutions. They have steadfastly refused to share power with other groups. Indeed, they have beaten down challenges from below with violent street-level agitations for instance the anti-Dalit, anti-Muslim mobilisation in 1980-82, and the campaign against OBC reservations in 1985-86.
Gujarat is thus an oddity or paradox: one of India's most urbanised and industrialised States, but socially, one of the most conservative and backward. Gujarat has a Muslim minority that is culturally highly integrated and assimilated its 130 Muslim communities speak no other language than Gujarati but is reviled and ghettoised. Gujarat is, relatively, highly prosperous, but it has among India's lowest wage levels, and highest rates of exploitation. Surat's diamond industry and Alang's shipbreaking yard are revolting instances of this.
Nowhere else has economic neoliberalism been as deeply and widely implemented as in Gujarat. And nowhere else has the same kind of rapid deindustrialisation occurred, wiping out the country's second largest textile-mill economy in the 1980s, and more recently, a range of modern industries, especially chemicals. These processes, along with the advanced commercialisation of all social relations, have produced enormous stresses and dislocations for instance, growing destitution among now-unemployed mill workers, crime, intensification of caste prejudices, and new rivalries between Dalits and Muslims in collapsing city centres.
In this situation, Hindutva functions as a cohering force and a source of ideological legitimisation for the rule of the globalising neo-liberal upper-caste elite. It is buttressed on the ground by new evangelical Hindu movements which proselytise among the tribals and play upon the "Sanskritisation" aspirations of other plebeian layers.
Gujarat is unique for the sheer spread and power of the VHP, with branches in 55 per cent of the 18,000 villages. Along with religious cults and gurus, the VHP has drummed up an aggressive form of Hindu identity assertion. Its penetration of schools and textbooks is extensive. Given the weakness of Gujarat's Left and of its liberal intelligentsia infinitesimal in relation to commercial entrepreneurs there has been little resistance to the Sangh Parivar's growth. A decade of BJP rule has consolidated Hindutva's hold. No other State matches Gujarat in its ideological stranglehold over civil society and state institutions, including the police.
THE generic factors in the Gujarat verdict are extremely important too. They will come into play immediately in Himachal Pradesh and the other States going to the polls soon. Broadly, they include the BJP's appeal to bellicose nationalism; second, its claim that it is uniquely committed to defending "national security" against "terrorism", on which the secular parties are "compromised"; and, third, its xenophobic portrayal of Islam and Muslims as "outsiders", with "extra-territorial" loyalties, who cannot be trusted at this "critical juncture" when India's security is gravely threatened, like the United States', by jehadi terrorism.
It should be clear that even in the short run, no sustained ideological-political challenge can be mobilised against the Sangh Parivar unless these claims are exposed as misleading, exaggerated, or downright hollow. Yet, it is undeniable that they appeal to many people, especially urban, upper-caste, high-income strata. Just as bellicose nationalism has struck root over the past two decades, elite opinion in India has shifted rightwards under the impact of neo-liberal economics, Social-Darwinism, imitation of role-models of "success" and "competition" defined in misanthropic terms, and increasing fascination with force as the main means of resolving differences and disputes.
These ideas, like Mera-Bharat-Mahan nationalism, have gone largely unchallenged by the Centre-Left at the level of social discourse. At the level of parliamentary or strategic debate, there is often a competition among centrist parties to appear more loyal than the king. Thus, certain groups that criticised the government's handling of the Kargil crisis (for instance, intelligence failure) ended up railing at it for not taking the war to its logical culmination!
Since September 11, terrorism strictly of the non-state, and preferably Islamic, variety has become a powerful shibboleth which it is not easy (or popular) to attack. Given today's Islamophobic climate, particularly in the United States, many Indians who would have preferred to be fence-sitters on the issue of religion and politics, now sympathise with the view that there is an "organic" link between Islam and terrorism, and that Indian Muslims are partial to jehad.
All these propositions are utterly, completely misconceived. The Sangh Parivar's claim to nationalism finds no validation in the freedom movement's history. It did not participate in it. Sections of it collaborated with the colonial state, preferring to regard Muslims as the greater evil. Parivar nationalism is hate-filled and negative. It severs the nation from the people.
The BJP must be roundly condemned for saying, in reply to the VHP's Hindu rashtra demand, that India has been a "Hindu Nation" for thousands of years and will never become a "theocratic state". This "theocracy" business is a red herring. The core of communalism is not about the rule of priesthood, but about the primacy of one group by virtue of religion. This primacy has no place in democracy especially in a richly plural, composite culture such as India's.
India was never a "Hindu Nation" in any real sense. For about 2,000 years, non-Hindus have been integral to what is called India Buddhists, animists, Jains, atheists, Christians, agnostics, Muslims, ancestor- or nature-worshippers. It makes no historical or sociological-political sense to term ancient or medieval India a "nation". This is a quintessentially modern phenomenon. Nor will it do to talk about one continuous Indian "civilisation". Civilisations arise, grow, decline and die.
For a thousand years or more, Muslims have been inseparable from India's material life: languages, arts, crafts, economic practices, literatures, music, administrative systems, forms of social intercourse, and politics, as we have known all these. Muslims' integration in Independent India and their commitment to it is one of the greatest stories of cultural-political assimilation anywhere. This has withstood the worst stresses produced by the rise of "identity politics" over the past two decades, in particular both political Islam and political Hinduism.
It is truly remarkable that not a single Indian Muslim has recently joined a violent Islamic movement anywhere in the world: whether in Afghanistan, Kashmir, North Africa or Pakistan. To underrate this community's prodigious restraint and good sense is to indulge in communal stereotyping.
The BJP must be thoroughly contested on the issue of terrorism too. Its leadership has no comprehension of terrorism not just its origins, but of how to fight it. Legislating draconian laws, setting up special "fast-track" courts, and staging fake "encounters" do not solve the problem of terrorism. That is amply demonstrated by the discontent and suffering in Kashmir, the sorry experience with TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act), and the latest verdict in the first trial under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act).
If the BJP is to be electorally defeated, it must be challenged at the ideological level. But that is not enough. It has to be pursued into civil society and into the institutions it has infiltrated: tribal villages, primary schools, Dalit settlements, cultural organisations, youth groups, professional associations. This cannot be done by parties which are mere election machines.
There has to be a movement, through society and in politics, based on cooperation between progressive parties, civil society organisations and the intelligentsia. This will be a long haul. Communalism is a historic menace. It seeks to destroy the legacy of the Enlightenment and of modernity itself. It can only be fought comprehensively, without short-cuts.
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