Long Live Obfuscation! The debate over how best to hide the ideology of BJP

The Daily Times, June 26, 2009

How to hide an ideology

by J Sri Raman


It was a Sunday sermon on Hindutva. Addressing the national executive of the Bharatiya Janata Party, agonising for over five weeks since its election reverses, on June 22, Lal Krishna Advani warned against “any narrow or bigoted anti-Muslim interpretation of Hindutva”.

He was reported as backing this clarification of the party’s “core ideology” with a quote from the former chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the patriarch of the Parivar or the Far Right “family”, on the fraternity of faiths.

The words of Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, the fuehrer or the “Sarsanghchalak” (Chief Director) of the RSS from 1973 to 1994, may have been wonderful, but what of his deeds?

Here are a few indicative facts.

Jamshedpur, the steel city of then Bihar, witnessed horrendous communal riots in 1979, leaving 108 dead. An inquiry report by a Justice Jitendra Narain censured the self-same Deoras personally for the communal propaganda that had caused the riots. The RSS had held a conference there “only four days before the Ram Navami festival [when the riots erupted] and the speech delivered by...Deoras contributed [its] full share in fomenting these communal feelings”.

The anti-Christian riots of 1982, too, happened during the Deoras helmsmanship of the RSS. An inquiry report by a Justice P Venugopal found his organisation fomenting anti-Christian feelings: “It [the RSS] has taken upon itself the task to teach the minority their place and, if they are not willing to learn their place, teach them a lesson. The RSS has given respectability to communalism and communal riots and demoralise [the] administration.”

Deoras had been the general secretary of the RSS from 1965 until he became its supremo. The period witnessed communal riots in Ahmedabad (1969), in Bhiwandi (1970, with a toll of 75 lives), and in Tellicherry (1971). Judicial inquiry commissions found the RSS mainly responsible for the mayhem in all these cases as well. No word of disapproval of his outfit’s outrageous role in any of the instances ever escaped from Deoras.

Yet, he is idolised as an ideologue of moderation. Many observers, even outside the RSS, give him credit for making a departure that was to serve the Parivar and its political front so well. He might have provoked communal carnages, but he refrained from making statements like his predecessor Guru Golwalkar’s denying even “citizens” rights” to “foreign races” who refused to lose “their separate existence [and] to merge in the Hindu race”.

Deoras was a mentor, in this respect, of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpyee, the famous “mask” of the BJP and the Parivar. Vajpayee put the “Hindutva” issues including Ayodhya “on the backburner” in order to placate allies and stay on in power. He served the Parivar ideology all the same by giving nuclear weapons to South Asia and presiding over the Gujarat pogrom.

Neither Deoras nor Vajpyee altered the Far Right ideology; they just feigned to do so. Their plea to the rest of the Parivar was not to give up the ideology but to gift-wrap it. When Advani — the man who could not become a “mask” — calls for an ideological “change”, he means a cosmetic one just as his deceased mentor and surviving party senior did.

It is not an ideological struggle that we have been witnessing in the party through its post-election polemics. It is a heated debate over how best to hide the ideology for the wide sections of voters outside the party’s “core constituency”. The Shadow Prime Minister of the BJP’s poll campaign was not asking for anything more substantial, either.

This is clear from the fact that he was alluding, by all accounts, to Varun Gandhi’s communal venom spewed at videoed party rallies. Neither Advani nor any of his party peers, it must be noted, has denounced Varun directly and explicitly. Their concern has been to suggest that they were objecting to the style, and not the spirit, of his statements.

To some, the BJP may seem to be indulging in exaggerated breast-beating. The Vajpayee years have not gone entirely in vain, after all. Quite a few observers would seem to see the party as not quite fully a part of the Far Right. Well-known social scientist Ashis Nandy seems to give the BJP such a benefit of doubt when he makes a strange suggestion to the party.

Strange because the suggestion is that the party, which has always taunted the Left about its alleged “foreign” inspiration and links, can learn from an American example. Nandy writes: “The Republican Party...also encourages and allies with Christian fundamentalists. They know a small marginal part of the vote comes from there — small, but a crucial vote percentage. So they woo them pre-election. Post election, though, there could be indirect rewards but no official rewards are handed out to them.”

He adds: “The BJP did not understand this art of political management. They did not learn how to treat Hindutva groups as merely a sect within them; they believed their entire existence depended on the ideology.”

Could it be, could it just be, that Nandy does not understand fully the BJP’s and the Indian Far Right’s politics of religious mobilisation, which is also one of region-threatening militarism?

For comic relief, we can turn to another foreign example held out to the Far Right’s political camp. A scribe-turned-party-strategist has asked the BJP to learn from the example of Britain’s Conservative Party, staging a “comeback” under 42-year-old David Cameron. Under the young leader, we are told “the sartorial norms of traditional Conservative dinners were relaxed from black tie to lounge suits. In fact, Cameron often took care to appear at many party functions without a tie.”

Is that a suggestion that attendees at the BJP’s five-star dinners of considerable frequency should take care not to be dhoti-clad all the time? If it is, it sounds inspired less by Deoras than by some party “neta” (leader) of nattier apparel.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint