The Right's wrongs

A work that brings home to the reader that while democracy in India flourishes, it is also held in siege by the Sangh Parivar.

PUBLISHED on May 15 this year, this book makes a timely appearance. Although meant primarily for the American reader, it has a message for Indian readers also. If the American focus is on militancy in West Asia to the complete neglect of the growth of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh's (RSS) militancy and clout, many an Indian imagines that the RSS is a disciplined volunteer organisation dedicated to public service and its political front is a "decently" right-wing party led by men of character with an acceptably soft communal bias.

On June 6, 2007, at Nagpur, retired Air Chief Marshal A.Y. Tipnis said "the RSS can render great service by standing up as a bulwark against forces of fundamentalism, communalism and religious prejudice and intolerance" - all virtues for which the RSS has won deserved acclaim (Indian Express; June 7, 2007). It did not dawn on him, while condemning the Staines murders, that the assailants were Bajrang Dal men and that the RSS has never condemned them.

RSS supremo K.S. Sudarshan was present at the function. He attacked the electoral system and "the Western model of economy" and preferred "the Hindu model", that is, the caste system, which he publicly defended on July 10, 2006. Organiser, the Parivar's organ, ridiculed, on January 8, 2006, "pundits prescribing the BJP to become a right-wing tool for power, discarding all ideological baggage".

No one who followed the birth of the Jan Sangh in 1951 and its rebirth in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could have had any illusion on this score. However, illusions were not only entertained but also fondly nursed.

The Jan Sangh faction broke from the Janata party on its leaders' membership of the RSS. Yet, M.C. Chagla and N.A. Palkhiwala went to the inaugural session of the BJP in Mumbai in 1980. The BJP leaders' professions of public morality were fully exposed in the six years of their power at the Centre. Uma Bharati, a former BJP Minister at the Centre and Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, exposed the whole lot of them in an article entitled sarcastically "The party with a difference" (Hindustan Times, December 30, 2005). She wrote: "Corruption charges were levelled against Ministers. Questions marks were raised [sic.] on the impartiality of the PMO [Prime Minister's Office] and the cleanliness of the Home Minister's Office."

Particularly damning was her reminder of the BJP's grab for power at the Centre in 1996 when it knew it lacked majority. The government lasted a mere 11 days, during which A.B. Vajpayee tried to get the Atomic Energy Commission to hold nuclear tests to buttress his power. The officials, creditably, refused.

Uma Bharati's reminder is particularly wounding: "The only achievement of this short tenure was the signing of the counter guarantee agreement for Enron a few hours before the fall of the first BJP government" (emphasis added throughout). The identity of the Minister who inspired that sordid action, her former bete noire, is not a secret. The prime responsibility must fall on the Prime Minister. Vajpayee's endorsement and his motives were even more sordid. The Minister would not have dared to advise the course unless he thought that Barkis was willing. So, apparently, was the whole lot of seniors.

Americans, understandably, are no better informed. But there arose a school led by Robert Blackwill, then U.S. Ambassador to India, who sought consciously, calculatedly to whitewash the RSS and the BJP's record.

Martha C. Nussbaum is a distinguished scholar with special expertise in culturally related political issues. She is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and author of Frontiers of Justice. She brings home to the reader effectively that while democracy in India flourishes, it is also held in siege by the Sangh Parivar, which poses a threat to its survival.

"This is a book about India for an American and European audience. One of its central purposes is to bring to the attention of Americans and Europeans a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world. Its second and larger aim is to use this case to study the phenomenon of religious violence and, more specifically, to challenge the popular `clash of civilisations' thesis, notably articulated by Samuel P. Huntington, according to which the world is currently polarised between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America. India, the third largest Muslim nation in the world (after Indonesia and Pakistan), is far from fitting this pattern. Instead, in the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, we find the use of European fascist ideologies by Hindu extremists to justify the murder of innocent Muslim citizens. Through a study of this case, its historical background, and the ideological debates surrounding it, I argue that the real clash is not a civilisational one between `Islam' and `the West', but instead a clash within virtually all modern nations - between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity, achieved through the domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition."

In doing so, she holds up the mirror to Americans also. "It is crucial to ask whether there are internal complexities, tensions, and oppositions in America that resemble those that we can more easily see in India (given that it is always easier to see problems elsewhere than to become aware of them in oneself). India's democracy has remained healthy largely because it has so far managed to surmount the tendency to see its own nation in a simple Manichean way (good nonviolent Hindus against bad violent Muslims) and instead to accept both the more complicated reality of multiple tensions and the possibility of a shared political life among people who are different."

The Gujarat pogrom in March 2002 revealed both the strength and the weakness of Indian democracy. The national media, print and electronic, did the country proud. The press in Gujarat disgraced itself. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), within and outside the State, valiantly rose to the occasion.

The author points out that "during the ascendancy of the Hindu right, when intelligent diplomatic pressure could have achieved change, United States foreign policy was largely indifferent to internal tensions in India, focussing only on the threat of nuclear conflict with Pakistan. American ignorance of India's history and current situation was largely to blame for such omissions. Today US policymakers continue to focus on nuclear deal-making, ignoring the nation's internal dynamics."

Blackwill was largely responsible for misleading the US administration. "Most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter, and that if there is religious tension in a nation, Muslims are the ones to blame. These simplistic assumptions are inapplicable to India, but they are exactly what leading members of the Hindu Right want Americans and other Westerners to think. To the extent that they succeed in projecting a scare-image of Muslims, they deflect attention from their own crimes."

The government of Finland did make a highly vocal protest at the time and was denounced by the Vajpayee government for foreign interference. The US State Department included an accurate summary of the events in its 2002 International Religious Freedom Report, "but the administration did not make these events salient in its foreign policy; I cannot locate any major statement by a member of the present administration between 2002 and 2004 condemning the attacks. The Democrats were also silent - with the exception of former President Clinton, who in March 2003 issued a long statement for a conference sponsored by the journal India Today, in which he condemned the atrocities, saying that the events in Gujarat were among the saddest events since he left office. Clinton criticised the national government for its failure to stand against the politics of hate."

In May 2004 the US Commission on International Religious Freedom found Chief Minister Narendra Modi to have been complicit in the Gujarat violence. In September 2004 the State Department's International Religious Freedom Report returned to the question of Gujarat, giving a detailed account of the derailment of the rule of law and tracing the violence to the ideology of Hindutva espoused by the BJP.

Nussbaum's book is a fascinating and instructive work with flashes of insights one would expect of a scholar of her distinction. She is more than willing to recognise qualities in those she censures. The chapter on the human face of the Hindu Right is based on sympathetic reports of her interviews with the Parivar's ideologues.

Indian readers will be familiar with her accounts of the assault on history and M.M. Joshi's war on textbooks. They would, however, do well to read carefully the chapter on the Parivar's "diaspora community" in the US and the clout it has come to wield there.

Perhaps the most riveting chapter is the one that analyses the place of women in the RSS-BJP's credo and its notions of sexuality and male dominance. However, her attempts repeatedly to draw a parallel with the US South is laboured and wholly unconvincing. The party floated by India's Klu Klux Klan was at the driving centre of power for six long years.

Hindutva is a fight against history. It seeks to avenge imagined wrongs in the past. Not one historian of note accepts its thesis. "What is wrong with the Hindutva view of history is that, at many points at least, it neglects or distorts the evidence. We need not take up the cudgels for an old-fashioned positivism about history in order to insist on the virtues that Thapar rightly emphasizes; inclusiveness, methodological consistency, marshalling of evidence, analytical precision. We need not deny that the choice of how to construct a narrative out of the data always reflects some conception of what is worth talking about, and that such conceptions are often influenced by one's culture and politics. Still, the narrative must square itself with the data - textual, documentary, archaeological - and if there are parts that won't square, one must be truthful about them. If the data include (as Thapar's data do) textual sources, the historian must investigate those sources in their historical context, seeing how they might themselves have fallen short of these key historical virtues. These standards are the key to any adequate account of why some histories of India are valuable and others mere hackwork. A history that meets them will never be the final word, because the past is too many-sided and too elusive for any account to be final. But it will be respectable."

It is a pity that a scholar who writes such a work should lapse into factual errors that would be unforgivable even in a tabloid journalist; they are egregious and many. She is the only one to talk of the "essential features" of the Constitution and does so repeatedly. The precise and accepted expression is the unamendable "basic structure" of the Constitution, which she mentions rarely. Indira Gandhi "purged the Supreme Court to remove her opponents [sic.] there". She did nothing of the sort. The hated 42nd Amendment "abolished judicial review"; wide off the mark, again. We are told: "In the 1960s a new political party, the Jana Sangh (or People's family), came to be closely identified with the RSS... The RSS understood its role as that of an ongoing source of energy behind these political developments."

The Jan Sangh was an RSS creature. It was set up in 1951 by a deal between the RSS boss M.S. Golwalkar and the former Hindu Mahasabha leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. The RSS provided the muscle, the cadre, and the ideology with which Mookerjee agreed anyway. It controlled the Jan Sangh as it does the BJP. The Jan Sangh was not an autonomous new growth that "came to be closely identified with the RSS". It was the RSS' baby.

She writes: "In 1980, the BJP, Bharatiya Janata Party (National People's Party) the longtime political affiliate of the RSS and VHP [Vishwa Hindu Parishad], was founded as a successor to the Janata Party" - a "long time" affiliate being "founded" in 1980 is a preposterous description of the Jan Sangh leaving the Janata Party in 1980 to revive itself under a new and false garb of the BJP. No scholar should write such a slipshod summary.

To use Macaulay's famous phrase, every schoolboy knows that idols were surreptitiously planted in the Babri Masjid on the night of December 22-23, 1949, and remained there until the mosque's demolition on December 6,1992. They were reinstalled on the site, where they remain to this day.

Martha Nussbaum turns the truth on its head: "The issue was dormant for many years. Then in 1949 some Hindus broke into the mosque and placed idols of baby Ram there - an action that Hindus regarded as a miracle and Muslims as a desecration. There were indications [sic.] that the Hindu Mahasabha was involved in the event. Nehru asked for a return to the status quo ante, and the Governor of Uttar Pradesh ordered the district magistrate to remove the idols. He refused and was removed from his post. Nehru remained firm, however, and even arrested several leading members of the Hindu right in the region. Eventually the idols were removed and the whole situation calmed down."

This betrays an appalling and inexcusable ignorance of an historical fact of fundamental importance which no account, secular or the Parivar's, contests - the idols were simply not "removed".

At another place, writing in detail of the demolition, she shows ignorance not only of the Central Bureau of Investigations' (CBI) charge-sheet of October 5, 1993, the Magistrate's committal order, a judicial pronouncement on August 27, 1994, the Sessions Judge's order framing the charges on September 9, 1997, but also of the many confessions, all of which establish prior planning to the hilt. Her doubts reflect sheer ignorance.

On the Mumbai blasts of 1993, Nussbaum writes: "Many hundreds of people, predominantly Muslim, have been arrested and remain in detention today, but no convictions have resulted and only minor offences have been charged. To make things more confusing, one of the most prominently implicated suspects is Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt, of mixed Hindu and Muslim parentage (his mother was the famous actress Nargis, who later became a member of Parliament; his father, Sunil Dutt, a movie star who became a leading politician in the Congress Party). Dutt has been charged with some lesser weapons offences and is free on bail, but he has never been tried, or charged for the major offences in which he has repeatedly been implicated. The whole incident remains ill understood" - by Nussbaum, certainly. Why write on matters that you have not cared to study?

Especially when you can write so profound a truth: "What subverts democracy, and what preserves it? In any democracy, the moral imagination is always in peril. Necessary and delicate, it can so easily be hijacked by fear, shame, and outraged masculinity. The real `clash of civilisations' is not `out there', between admirable Westerners and Muslim zealots. It is here, within each person, as we oscillate uneasily between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others."