Just to get the
main thesis of this article sorted out: the Hindutva advocated by the BJP
government and its ecosystems is most definitely not
Hinduism. It is a network of cults that may be embarked on a 21st century
attempt to colonise India. Here’s how:
Hindutva is a
set of beliefs and practices that can be traced to illiberal formations like
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its various avatars and offshoots.
These groups
found utterance about a decade after the Indian National Congress launched the
freedom struggle. In awe of the whiteness of India’s British Raj, they chose
obsequious collaboration and stayed away from the nationalist movement.
Always denizens
of dark alleys and troubled waters, RSS supremacists were arrayed against the
Congress because it espoused secular liberal values. They reserved special
venom for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who they saw as an appeaser of Muslims.
In the event,
the nascent government of India banned the organisation after Nathuram Godse, reportedly one of its
members, was arrested, tried and hanged for the murder of Gandhi.
Since then, the
supremacists remained in the shadows, nursing their hate and plotting their
phantasmagoria of a Hindutva “rashtra”. Their biggest leap into public life was
in the revivalist Ram Janmabhoomi campaign against the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
Grandiosely
termed a “movement,” the campaign was more like an expanding wave of communal
violence and found resonance in sections of the urban middle classes in India.
The revivalist
agitation also won support in the immigrant community in the United States.
In the 1980s, a
large number of Indian community organisations were formed around the
construction of temples in various US cities.
These groups
were an entirely new service sector comprising merchants, traders and small
businessmen to supply community needs for Indian foods, clothes, artefacts,
entertainment and various other products and services.
Comprised
largely of Gujarati and North Indian NRIs, from hourly workers to struggling
professionals and crooked businessmen, this segment of the immigrant community
found itself at loggerheads with their interlocutors in America: other lower
middle class immigrant groups and the white working class and also with blacks
because of their overt racism.
Living cheek by
jowl with the prejudice of their neighbours in the urban ghettos and in the
workplace, these groups sought comfort in the supremacist
cults of Hindutva.
As such, these
working-class groups were in the forefront of a clamour for a unitary church, a
single book of worship, a uniform culture and alarmingly, they wanted to
reverse the separation of church and state.
As a normal
Hindu person, never have I heard advocated a view that Hinduism needs to become
semiticised around a single culture, a single language, a single-minded faith
in myth and superstition, in-your-face rituals, a victim mindset. The demand
arose among ghettoised NRI groups in America and spread to opportunistic RSS
supremacists in India.
Over the years,
the saffron dispensation and its NRI fans managed to fudge the difference
between Hinduism and Hindutva. They developed fantastic theories of Aryan
descent and achievements of mythological forebears.
As a journalist
in the US, I have personally heard life insurance salesmen, factory workers,
retail merchants, others openly assert that being of Aryan descent, they were
whiter than the whites, certainly purer because of their diet and their ability
to keep their women and children cloistered from the lascivious attractions and
impure ways of American life.
The claim about
Aryan descent of the Hindutva cults is worth exploring. So I dived into my
library to locate Ainslie T Embree’s Sources of Indian Tradition, a book
that was prescribed reading for my graduate course in Hinduism. An excerpt:
“The Aryans were
a nomadic, pastoral people, and it was probably the search for new grazing
lands for their cattle that led to their migration into India. The cow was
their main source of wealth, and scholars have speculated that this was the
basis of the later emphasis in Hinduism on the sanctity of the cow. As the
Aryan moved into India from the northwest, they fought many battles with the
original inhabitants of land, a dark-skinned people whom they contemptuously
called “dasas,” a word that later came to mean slave.”
Members of the
various Hindutva cults have decried this as a false interpretation of the
origins of Hinduism, insisting that Aryans were native to India and not
invaders from Central Asia.
The subtext is
that they are descendants of the Indo-European (read white) races.
However, no
respectable scholar accepts that thesis. What is abundantly evident from this
conflation of Aryans, white-skinned people and members of the Hindutva cult is
that such theories are racist to the core.
Just consider
the views of Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, chief of the RSS until his death in
1973. He was big on issues of race and national pride. His take on the Third
Reich and Nazism is produced below verbatim:
"To keep up
with the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her
purging the country of the Semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest
has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is
for Races and Cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated
into one united whole, a good lesson for use in Hindusthan to learn and profit
by."
In their racist
claims to be counted as Aryans, champions of Hindutva are actually hoist by
their own petard. Their claim that Aryans are indigenous to the subcontinent
has been widely and thoroughly discredited.
As such, their
insistence on being Aryan leaves them open to the charge that they are a racist
neocolonial force in India.
How else can you
interpret a recent comment by Tarun Vijay, former editor of the RSS publication
Panchajanya?
Vijay said in a
debate on Al Jazeera television: “If we were racist, why would we have
the entire south... Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra... why do we live with
them? We have black people around us.”
(An edited
version of this post will appear in Dailyo.in, April 2017.)
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