The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism

Secular Claims, Communal Realities

Achin Vanaik

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786630728
• eBook ISBN: 9781786630735
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

With the Hindu nationalist BJP now replacing the Congress as the only national political force, the communalization of the Indian polity has qualitatively advanced since the earlier edition of this book in 1997. This edition has been substantially reworked and updated with several new chapters added. Hindutva's rise necessitates a more critical take on mainstream secular claims ironically reinforced by liberal-left sections discovering special virtues in India's 'distinctive' secularism. The careful evaluation of the ongoing debate on 'Indian fascism' has resonances for the broader debate about how best to assess the dangers of the far right's rise in other liberal democracies. A study follows of how Hindutva forces are pursuing their project of establishing a Hindu Rashtra and how to thwart them through a wider transformative struggle targeting capitalism itself.

PART I

1

The Communalization
of the Indian Polity

From Independence to
the 2014 Elections

The spectre of growing communalism haunts India today. In the battle for the soul of Indian nationalism, various positions have been staked out. First, there are those who insist that Indian nationalism must rest on cultural and psychological foundations of an impeccably Hindu provenance. Second, there are those who insist that Indian nationalism must derive from secular principles. Notwithstanding the problems of precise definition, the term ‘secular’ does possess an agreed meaning: state neutrality with regard to religion. In multi-religious India, this can mean either a fundamental separation of the state from religious activity and affiliation, or impartial state involvement on issues relating to the religious interests of different communities. In practice, ‘Indian secularism’ has been a mixture of the two. For this writer, the result is an unsatisfactory attempt to reconcile essentially incompatible approaches. A third position holds that, because secularism is in origin a profoundly Western, or at least un-Indian concept, it is at odds with the reality of non-Western, non-Christian existence in general, and with the Indian genius in particular. What is needed is not secularism, nor Hindu nationalism, but an anti-secularism that opposes factitious attempts at separating religion from politics and the state, and instead encourages the use of the ‘authentic’ resources of faith to sustain a sociopolitical culture with a deeper tolerance of diversity and pluralism than ‘Western secularism’ can ever generate.

Religion itself is the key resource in the struggle against communalism. State-centred theories of how to engineer the social good (the modern secular state) are themselves the problem – the stimulus behind communalism. To these must be counterposed the resources of a religiously suffused and plural civil society. This Indian anti-secularism is confined mostly to academic rather than activist debate. But this train of thought has proved to be something of a forerunner and stimulant to the growing popularity in intellectual circles of postcolonial theorizing that would now seek to understand the conjoining of religion and Indian modernity in ways that ‘Westernized’ conceptions of secularism are not capable of apprehending. That this mixed character of state secularism, because weighted in favour of impartiality rather than separation, has proved to be a success as well as being a testimony to the distinctiveness of Indian secularism.

These competing claims provide the context for the following reflections on communalism and nationalism. To fight communalism, we must understand what it is and how it grows. To fight it in the name of a secular nationalism requires us to understand nationalism as well, to know what it does and does not share with communalism.

The Pattern of Modern Nationalism

There is a widespread consensus that nationalism is a modern phenomenon attendant upon the emergence of capitalism, though its longevity has undoubtedly surprised those who thought the globalizing tendencies of capitalism would render nationalism increasingly anachronistic. But what is ‘nationalism’, the ‘nation’, ‘nationality’? Up to and including the period of post-1945 decolonization, nation formation and the emergence of nation-states has mostly taken place in four waves.¹ There was first what the late Benedict Anderson called the creole or settler nationalism of the New World, in which language was not the differentia specifica of nationhood and nation-state formation.²

Then came the linguistic-based territorial nationalisms of western and eastern Europe, in which national yearnings were also related to the later dissolution of the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Tsarist multinational empires. In the twentieth century came the tide of anti-colonial nationalisms, whose boundaries of resistance coincided in almost all cases with the seemingly artificial border demarcations of colonial administrative convenience. In these ‘new’ nations, nation-state formation was more clearly connected to the existence of self-conscious national movements intent on expressing a distinct national culture and history that could not always, or even often, be congruent with the spread of some single indigenous language or ethnic group.

More recently, we have seen not only the resurgence of the supposedly resolved ‘older’ nationalisms, but also the emergence of post-colonial nationalisms whose raisons d’être are new and cannot be ascribed to the distorting legacies of colonial rule. Such is particularly the case with South Asia – Bangladesh, the national movements in Pakistan, Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka, and the secessionist struggles in India’s north-east, in Punjab and Kashmir.

There is an important lesson here: there is no single feature or identifiable factor common to all nationalisms, to all nations, to all nation-state formations. Though many cultural characteristics occur in different nationalisms, they never combine in any immutable package of ‘national markers’. Furthermore, no single characteristic is ever indispensable. Nations (and nationalisms) are not intrinsically secular categories. They can rest on exclusivist racial, tribal or religious claims. Indeed, in India religious groups have been among the strongest candidates for nationhood – as testified to by secessionist struggles in Kashmir and Punjab, and in the fact of Partition itself.

The early stirrings of Indian nationalism, whether as political movement, national identity or national ideology, owed much to the ‘Hindu Renaissance’ of the nineteenth century. Hindu nationalism was important in promoting a national identity, though it was not the only factor and was contested by wider-ranging interpretations of Indian culture and history. There is always a cultural struggle involved in the creation of a nation or nationality, which is best understood either as Anderson has defined it – as an imagined political community – or (better still) as Kohn understood it – as a cultural entity, lodged above all in consciousness, striving to become a political fact.³

This cultural struggle is sharper for the ‘new’ nations, where nation formation is more directly tied to a national movement intent on fostering a national identity based on indigenous cultural roots. It is this latter capacity that has given nationalism the edge over socialism, largely explaining why successful socialist revolutions after Russia’s in 1917 took root by way of a merger with nationalism, either anti-colonial or anti-imperialist in thrust (Japanese imperialism in the case of China, French imperialism in the case of Indochina, American imperialism in the case of Cuba).

The purpose of this brief excursus into the nature of the newer nationalisms in general, and into Indian nationalism in particular, is to establish on prima facie grounds the plausibility of the following proposition: the period when an anti-colonial national identity was being forged was also the period when the Indian polity was being communalized, and the Congress-led National Movement cannot escape most of the responsibility for this. This conclusion stands opposed to those currents of Indian historiography that insist on the essentially anti-communal character of the Indian National Movement.

Here Gandhi’s role comes into dispute. How central was his use of religious idiom and his personal ‘saintliness’ in generating a mass following for the Congress? Was his religiosity peripheral or central to the formation of a winning political strategy for independence – a Gramscian ‘war of movement’ hinging on an escalating series of compromises? Was it the source of a mere communal tinge, or does he as the principal leader of the Congress-led National Movement bear a great deal of the responsibility for the tragedy of Partition? On the other hand, did he not speak the ‘language of the masses’ with a force that no one else could approximate?

Gandhi did not so much speak the language of the masses as speak in the language of the Hindu masses. The religious qualifier here is crucial. Gandhi was the one Congress leader to hold out to the very end against Partition, which was subsequently carried out amid a terrible bloodbath. But he cannot be absolved of much of the blame for that tragic denouement. Kathryn Tidrick, in what is the single most powerful exposition on the life and thought of Gandhi, has this to say about the aftermath of Partition:

Gandhi and many others shared the blame for these horrors. Despite his unorthodoxy, despite his friendships and alliances with Muslims, he was a ‘Hindu’ politician, incessantly invoking Rama and publicly embracing the ascetic practices associated with Hindu holiness. The message he wanted India, as a nation, to broadcast to the world was a mixture of Hinduism and Christianity, philosophically alien to Islam. He never disassociated himself sufficiently from the Hindu communalist wing of Congress. He always seemed ready to blame the Muslims for communal disorders … Communal feeling, however high-mindedly invoked, was a tiger he could not ride.⁴

Even among the non-Muslim masses, the distinction between speaking ‘for’ and ‘in’ is fundamental. Gandhi helped to create an important ‘Congress link’ between local-level grievances (and leaders) and the pan-Indian struggle against a centralized colonial state. But it was a link over which he did not exercise much control. Historians of the subaltern have pointed out the frequent discrepancies between what Gandhi espoused and the way his exhortations or directives were interpreted to fit popular perceptions of the meaning of their struggles.⁵ Since the socially oppressed of India are no more naturally prone to permanent non-violence towards, and class conciliationism with, their social oppressors than the socially oppressed elsewhere, Gandhian principles of ahimsa (non-violence) and ‘trusteeship’ (class paternalism) were in part forged precisely to serve as control mechanisms.

The link also provided for a two-way interpenetration of identities. Most historical work has stressed the seeping downwards of a ‘national identity’, so that obscure villages and unknown villagers could come to identify themselves with the National Movement as Indians as well as retaining their more spatially restricted identities. Sandra Freitag is one of the few who have emphasized the opposite process: how local-level identities generalized and spread upwards to influence even the character of the National Movement.⁶

In the north, unlike in the west and south (where linguistic and anti-Brahmin caste identities were rather more important), the dominant community identity was often religious in character. Here the development and expansion of a common religious identity was not the passive product of colonial machinations, but was meshed into local cultural and political practices, themselves undergoing change in a dynamic socioeconomic and political context. Even before Gandhi, Congress efforts to widen its local support base meant building on existing cultural cleavages and perceptions consolidating religious identities. That the Congress-led National Movement did have an important secular dimension tied to aspirations of some of its key leaders is not in dispute. But the growing weight of historical evidence would strongly suggest that any easy separation between nationalism and communalism during the colonial period is frankly untenable.⁷

Communalism

While the characterization of nationalism as a modern phenomenon is widely accepted, even if the ethnies on which certain ethnic nationalisms are based have a much longer history, the same cannot be said of communalism. Nevertheless, it is best understood in this way, and thus as qualitatively different from the politico-religious tensions and conflicts of pre-modern, pre-capitalist, pre-colonial times. The idea that the separation of the political from the religious is a viable proposition had to await the emergence of generalized market relations (generalized commodity production), which enabled a decisive separation between the political and economic spheres of existence, and thus an emerging civil society.

That political life and whole areas of social existence should become relatively autonomous from each other marks a decisive transition, providing the foundation for the relative decline and compartmentalization of metaphysical and religious thought. The private world of ‘meaning’ and the public arena of ‘legitimacy’ were substantially separated. Secularism is itself a modern ideology promoting the notion that the separation of the political from the religious is a positive ideal.

It is because of this pre-established point of reference – the secular ideal – that communalism has a distinctly negative connotation, itself testifying to its more modern character. Communalism may not be straightforwardly counterposed to nationalism, but it is more easily contrasted with secularism. There is another, more important reason for emphasizing the modernity of communalism. In the era of modern mass politics, religious politics has a strength that is qualitatively greater and more dangerous than its equivalent in the pre-modern era. The distinguishing characteristic of modern politics is the decisive significance of mass mobilization, mass appeal and popular legitimization of elite rule.

This is not something found only in the democracies. It is crucial for authoritarian and quasi-democratic regimes as well. Here the capacities for mass mobilization are weaker, and the relationship between popular sanction and elite governance less direct. But even dictatorships must pay attention as never before to moulding and influencing popular perceptions. Centralized control over key networks of communication is the sine qua non of political monolithism. Ruling classes, whether by coercion or persuasion, or both, justify their dominance in the name of maintaining or extending the ‘national popular interest’. This stands in contrast to the legitimations sought by the absolutisms and monarchisms of the past. The politics of communal appeal today are in an altogether different register from the politics of religious appeal in the past.

Having affirmed communalism’s modernity, what then of its meaning? The term ‘communal’ was first used by British colonialists simply to describe ‘communities of interest’, including religious groups. It is in the context of the 1906–09 debates around constitutional reform in India and the issue of separate electorates for Muslims that the term ‘communal’ was given a negative connotation of bigotry, divisiveness and parochialism, because such separate representation was deemed anti-national and anti-modern.⁸ Communalism in a religiously plural society is a highly complex phenomenon which it is risky to try to confine within a single definition. But it is among other things a process involving competitive de-secularization (a competitive striving to extend the reach and power of religions), which – along with non-religious factors – helps to harden divisions and create or increase tensions between different religious communities. Here greater importance granted to religious forces, religious identity, religious competition and religious ideologies, as well as to religious imbrication in popular, folk and elite cultures. The development of a strong collective religious identity among Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians is a necessary but insufficient condition for the growth of communalism. Non-religious factors are not excluded as important causal factors, but are often misperceived in religious terms. If we are to comprehend communalism properly, we must undertake a comprehensive examination of both the religious and secular in Indian society.

Communal Politics

Focusing on the specific problem of communal politics, we are immediately confronted with two broad questions. First, what lies behind the appeal of communalism? Though the identity crisis of an urban middle class undergoing modernization and partial Westernization has made it receptive to such appeals, their origin has usually been elitist, and disseminated for achieving and promoting secular purposes and goals. There is considerable authority in the instrumentalist argument that religion, whether in the form of faith or ideology, has little to do with the formation of such an appeal – beyond the obvious point that some of its symbols, myths and devotional themes are selectively misappropriated.

Here a ‘materialist’ analysis of the sources of communalism would reveal the role of the colonial state in deliberately exacerbating the communal divide. Competition for jobs created tensions between the Hindu and Muslim urban middle classes and elites. In post-independence India, attention would no doubt be focused on the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in many Indian towns possessing a sizeable Muslim population, as a result of Gulf remittances, the growing export demand for handicrafts and artisanal products, and other expressions of uneven development that have clearly disturbed traditional patterns of dependence between Hindu traders and Muslim artisans. Similarly, the effects of the Green Revolution in Punjab are not without communal resonance for the Sikh kulak and Hindu trader. Then again, there is also the upward economic and political mobility of the agrarian bourgeoisie, of these mostly upper echelons of the intermediate castes having their social and emotional reflection in a greater striving towards association with a broader Hindu identity. While such explanations are important, they are only part of the story.

There is also a second question: What accounts for the success of the communal appeal? Here it becomes impossible to maintain any artificial separation between ‘true’ or ‘folk’ religion, on the one hand, and communalism on the other. For what unites ‘folk’ and ‘elite’ religion, its ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ forms, is something intrinsic to the nature of all of the main world religions – Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. We are here on the socio-psychological terrain of identity, of the relationship (never static) between religious belief and the socio-psychic need to anchor one’s sense of self, or more correctly one’s senses of selves.

Among the many functions of religion and religious belief, this is now arguably the crucial one, and is common to all believers from whatever social strata. While the claims of a religious philosophy or ethics can be universal, this function of identity fixation, or affirmation, must always be particularist. A believer is Hindu or sub-Hindu, Christian or sub-Christian, Islamic or sub-Islamic, and so on, even if this particularist identity can itself be an expansive one. The communal appeal thus derives much of its formidable character not just from the resources of power accumulated by the one making the appeal, but also from the importance of religious identity in the psychic health of the receiver. But this is not to invest it with incontestable powers.

The importance of religious identity is historically and socially variable. Where substantial secularization of state and civil society has taken place, religious identity in social – and psychic – life is less important, and the communal appeal correspondingly less attractive. Since the formation and expansion of religious identity ‘from below’ takes place largely in civil society, secular emphasis concerning state and civil society needs to be inverted.

Outside of the advanced West, in much of West, South and Southea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• Index