India Before Modi

Vinay Sitapati

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787385375
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386334
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Narendra Modi has been a hundred years in the making, and this book provides the backstory. It begins with the creation of Hindu nationalism, moves on to the 1980 formation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and ends with its first national administration, from 1998 to 2004. By revisiting these events, we can trace the Modi government’s current dominance of Indian politics all the way back to its origins.

Vinay Sitapati follows this journey through the entangled lives of the party’s founding fathers: Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. Over their six-decade-long relationship, Vajpayee and Advani worked as a team, despite differences in personality and beliefs. Bound together by RSS discipline and shared ambition–for a Hinduised Indian polity– their partnership explains the nature of the BJP before Modi, and why it won power.

In supporting roles are a colourful cast of characters, from the warden’s wife who made room for Vajpayee in her family to the billionaire grandson of Pakistan’s founder, who happened to be a major early BJP benefactor. Based on private papers, party documents, newspapers and over 200 interviews, this is a must-read for all those interested in the Hindu nationalist ideology that now rules India.

PART I

THE PAST (1924–80)

1

HINDU FEVICOL (1924–45)

Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born in Gwalior to Krishna Devi and Krishna Bihari on 25 December 1924, the noon of British rule over the subcontinent. Atal’s grandfather had migrated from Bateshwar in Uttar Pradesh to Gwalior, one of the 500-plus princely states that covered a third of colonial India.¹ This relocation, coupled with Gwalior’s uncertain identity—Marathi or Hindi—meant that Vajpayee was never rooted to one place; he would contest elections from Gwalior, Uttar Pradesh, and New Delhi in later years.

At the time of Vajpayee’s birth, Gwalior state covered 65,000 square kilometres and had a population of 3.5 million.² It had been carved out from the debris of the Mughal Empire by the ascendant Marathas in the eighteenth century, who had handed it over to one of their commanders, Ranoji Scindia. With the decline of the Maratha Empire, Scindia’s descendants sided with the British. Though careful to never irk their overlords, their piety made Gwalior a hub for resurgent Hindu identity.³

Vajpayee was born into a poor kanyakubja⁴ Brahmin family of the Gangetic plains. His father and grandfather were schooled in Sanskrit rituals, the women expected to take care of home, and conversations were conducted in Hindi rather than English. A family friend says: ‘From an early age Vajpayee resented English-speaking Indians. But he was also fascinated by them. That’s the story of his life.’

Like many other Brahmins during late colonial rule, the Vajpayees had converted ritual learning into a government job. Krishna Bihari became a teacher, an employee of the Scindias. He even fudged Atal’s birthdate to 1926, in hope that his son would have a few more years if he joined government service.⁵ Krishna Bihari was also a poet, writing in Hindi as well as its dialects. With a shock of grey hair and an eternally black moustache, he exuded bonhomie, an air his son would soon acquire.⁶

Three years after Atal’s birth and 1128 kilometres due west, Lal Krishna Advani was born on 8 November 1927 in Karachi, in the western province of Sindh. Unlike the Gwalior of the 1920s, Karachi was directly ruled by the British. Its location by the Arabian Sea made Karachi, to quote its biographer: ‘… a destination for some of the most dramatic migrations of all.’⁷ It was home to a mélange of Europeans, Hindus, Sindhi Muslims, Shias, Parsis and Pathans. The city of Advani’s birth resembled that other metropolis of the British Empire: Bombay.

L.K. Advani’s family had soaked up this ecumenical culture. They came from the educated Hindu Sindhi clan of ‘Amils’, taken from the Persian word for ‘administrator’. It was a legacy of their selection as revenue collectors by a succession of Muslim kings.⁸ One uncle was a civil servant—the mark of education in colonial India—another was a chemistry professor and yet another a lawyer.⁹ Advani’s own father Kishinchand worked as a trader in a family business with his oldest brother, while his mother Gyani Devi was a homemaker. They lived in an abundant bungalow located in Jamshed Quarters, a Parsi locality,¹⁰ and owned a horse-driven Victoria carriage, an extravagance even in Karachi. A family friend says: ‘Their house had a game room, only for games. I have seen it.’

The role of religion in the Advani family was layered. The grandfather was a scholar of Sanskrit, a religious marker made even more visible by the fact that Hindus made up only 25 per cent of Sindh.¹¹ The young Lal was conscious that the home of the Indus River was not some outpost of Hinduism, but essential to its sacred geography.¹² However, while Vajpayee was born into the orthodox strand of colonial-era Hinduism, Advani was born into its reformist variant. His family read from the Sikh holy book and visited gurudwaras. Advani remembers: ‘… it was also common for Hindus to pay homage at the shrines of Sufi saints and for Muslims to celebrate Hindu festivals.’¹³ Ideas of the Arya Samaj were also popular in Karachi, especially its criticism of caste. Years later, when Advani was a central minister in the Janata government, the politician Charan Singh would admonish him: ‘You are from Sindh, you just cannot understand the caste motivations in this part of the country.’¹⁴

Had they been born at any other time, Vajpayee and Advani may have never met, let alone entered into a six-decade partnership. They had little in common: one poor, the other rich; one orthodox, the other freewheeling; one provincial, the other anglicized; one a Gangetic Brahmin, the other a Karachi Sindhi. But they were born in the decade in which a new political identity was covering these two contrasting characters under one single umbrella. They were born in the decade that birthed Hindu nationalism.

Perhaps the most enduring definition of ‘nationalism’ comes from the scholar Benedict Anderson. For him, nationalism requires a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ or ‘imagined community’, within territorial limits, and operating under a sovereign state.¹⁵ While the first ingredient of Anderson’s definition—‘an imagined community’¹⁶—is well known, as important is his emphasis on a modern state with land boundaries, inside which this community conceives of itself.¹⁷ To ask, therefore, when ‘Hindu nationalism’ was created, is to ask when the conception of a Hindu ‘people’ coincided with an idea of Hindu ‘territory’ and a Hindu ‘state’. Let us look at the origins of these three ingredients, one after another.

The notion of a ‘Hindu’ territory has ancient antecedents. The Vishnu Purana, sacred literature put to writing in the fourth century AD,¹⁸ states: ‘The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bhárata…’ This, the Vishnu Purana goes on to describe, ‘… is the land of works, in consequence of which men go to heaven, or obtain emancipation’.¹⁹ This geographical imagination of a ‘Hindu’ India has since been congealed by pilgrimages to tirthas (or sacred locations) that are found between the oceans and the snowy mountain. The scholar of comparative religion Diana Eck says: ‘For at least 2,000 years, pilgrimage to the tirthas (tirthayatra) has been one of the most widespread of the many streams of practice that have come to be called “Hindu”.’²⁰

While the notion of a religious terrain is age-old, what has been harder to harness has been a notion of a Hindu ‘people’—an imagined religious community that shares ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’. This is because Hinduism as a religion has lacked a canonical book (unlike the Koran) or an authoritative institution (unlike the Vatican).

The lack of a text or organization that has the final word has led to a plethora of cultural practices. India’s 966 million Hindus constitute 80 per cent of the population. But they are distributed into 3000 castes, 25,000 sub-castes,²¹ and more than 19,000 languages and dialects.²²

Hindus are also separated by religious traditions or ‘sects’. The sociologist A.M. Shah explains: ‘When we enter the home of a member of a sect, we usually find in the front room pictures of only one principal deity… For example in the home of a follower of Pushti Marg… we find pictures only of Krishna… Even in the case of Krishna we may find a preference for one of his forms, particularly the child Krishna.’²³ In a non-sectarian house, ‘… we usually find pictures of a variety of deities of the Hindu pantheon hanging or pasted on the walls’.²⁴

This cacophony of beliefs, organizations, texts and gods has led Marxist and postmodern scholars to argue that there was no such thing as a ‘Hindu’ consciousness before the nineteenth century. It was the modern, colonial state that created Hindu and Muslim identities. This claim, that Hinduism is a colonial invention, is disputed by other scholars who retrace a Hindu ‘group’ consciousness to the advent of Muslim rule from the eleventh century AD onwards.²⁵ Others go even further into the past, divining a recognizably ‘Hindu’ shape in the Puranas in the fourth century AD, which ‘greatly expanded [the] mythology of the gods Vishnu, Siva and Devi’.²⁶

Whatever be the source of a Hindu ‘consciousness’—whether the fourth, tenth, or nineteenth century—there is scholarly consensus that by the late nineteenth century,²⁷ an imagined Hindu community was very much in evidence. Vivekananda, Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, Bankim Chandra and the Arya Samaj²⁸—all aimed to establish a shared Hindu identity. What was lacking, however, was the third ingredient of Hindu nationalism—a conception of a Hindu ‘state’.

Those looking for a model of a theocratic state in Islam, Christianity, or Judaism can find it. The Koran provides for the rule by a ‘Caliph’ according to the precepts of Islam.²⁹ The Hebrew Bible lays down the basis of a political structure,³⁰ as does the New Testament.³¹

Hinduism, in contrast, does not provide for a definitive model of a theocracy. As the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: ‘… politics, even when dependent upon religion for earthly legitimisation, has never in Hindu thought taken on messianic or apocalyptic significance.’³² Even the concept of ‘Ramarajya’, as detailed by Valmiki in his Ramayana, conceives of a kingdom where, ‘Every creature was full of joy and happiness. Everyone was engaged in the pursuit of dharmic actions or virtue.’³³ This is hardly a religious vision, let alone a theocratic one.

Perhaps the closest to a ‘Hindu state’ prior to the twentieth century was the king Shivaji and the Maratha Empire he founded. Shivaji was born in the seventeenth century near Pune in central India. His father was an estate holder for the Bijapur sultanate. Chafing at the domination of the Mughals in the north and the Bijapur and Golkonda sultanates in the south, Shivaji rebelled, formed an army by uniting various Marathi-speaking castes, kept three Muslim rulers at bay, and in 1674 crowned himself a sovereign king. His descendants (and their Peshwa advisors) widened this Maratha Empire, which at its high point in the eighteenth century controlled 25,00,000 square kilometres of territory.³⁴ It stretched from the Arabian Sea on the west to the Indian Ocean on the east, from Goa in the south to Delhi in the north. The Marathas, not the Mughals, were the paramount power when the British came to India.

This Maratha Empire Shivaji founded could have one day become a model for a Hindu state. Yet, and perhaps tellingly, the many ‘Hindu’ narratives of Shivaji stress his ability to unify Hindus, rather than run a government according to religion. The historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar even has an explanation for Shivaji’s lack of vision for a state: ‘For one thing, he never had peace to work out...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• India Before Modi Photos
• Prologue: Prime Minister Advani (1995)
• Part I: The Past (1924–80)
• 1. Hindu Fevicol (1924–45)
• 2. Ghosts of Partition (1945–50)
• 3. In Nehru’s Shadow (1951–67)
• 4. Partnership Forged by Fire (1968–73)
• 5. Perks of Prison (1974–77)
• 6. Prudent in Power (1977–80)
• Part II: The Party (1980–98)
• 7. Radical Hindus, Moderate Vajpayee (1980–84)
• 8. Advani’s BJP (1985–89)
• 9. Mandal, Mandir, Market (1990–91)
• 10. Too Many Generals (1992)
• 11. Untouchables (1993–98)
• Part III: Power (1998–2004)
• 12. Experiment in Governance (1998–99)
• 13. Coalition Dharma (1999–2004)
• 14. Oh, Pakistan (1999–2004)
• 15. Making India Great Again (1999–2004)
• 16. The Spectre of Narendra Modi (1999–2004)
• Postscript: 2004 and After
• Scholarly Contribution
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Back Cover