India: Hindutva’s Head Of State: Under Modi’s many hats is one basic ideology (Hartosh Singh Bal)

(The Caravan - 1 October 2014)

During his election campaign and as prime minister, Narendra Modi has demonstrated a willingness to reach out to communities considered, even marginally, to be “Hindu” in the RSS’s ideological scheme. Muslims and christians do not come under this umbrella.

LAST MONTH, in his first interview as prime minister, Narendra Modi told the CNN news show host Fareed Zakaria the blandest of truths: “Indian Muslims will live for India, they will die for India—they will not want anything bad for India.” Predictably, expectations from Modi on this score are so low that this made headlines. The pre-recorded interview left out an obvious follow-up question (somehow Modi’s interviewers always skip the obvious follow-ups): Your public life has largely been spent in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to which you continue to owe allegiance—how do you respond to Muslims who are understandably alarmed by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s recent claim that India is a Hindu nation?

On 17 August, Bhagwat, speaking in Mumbai, stated, “Hindustan is a Hindu nation. Hindutva is the identity of our nation. There are different communities in it. And such is its strength that it can incorporate these other communities in itself.” Commentators hoping this would prompt a rap on the knuckles from the prime minister expressed consternation. “Bhagwat statements last thing needed just after Modi’s pleasantly inclusive I-Day speech,” the editor Shekhar Gupta tweeted, “Anushasan needed.”

Perhaps Gupta had forgotten that the Sangh is the dispenser of anushasan—discipline—and not Modi. After all, Bhagwat, in Mumbai for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s golden jubilee, was echoing an idea that has long reverberated through the rhetoric of the Hindu right. The problem is not that Bhagwat and Modi do not agree, but that they do. For the first time in independent India we have a government that believes exactly what its backers in the Sangh believe: that a set of citizens has the right to lay down terms of national identity that privilege them over others.

Veer Savarkar, a self-professed atheist and revolutionary, first coined the term “Hindutva” in 1923. Perhaps his clearest articulation of the concept was in a speech he gave as the founding president of the Hindu Mahasabha, where he boiled down what it meant to be Hindu to two essential factors: “Everyone who regards and claims this bharatbhoomi from the Indus to the seas as his fatherland and holy land is a Hindu.” This position was inherently exclusionary, as Savarkar made clear: “Just as by the first constituent of Hindutva, the possession of a common holy land, the Indian Mohammedans, Jews, Christians, Parsis, etc. are excluded from claiming themselves as Hindus, which in reality also they do not … so also on the other hand the second constituent of the definition, that of possessing a common fatherland, excludes the Japanese, the Chinese and others from the Hindu fold… ”

The leaders of the Sangh have always stood by this definition of belonging, highlighting certain parts of it according to their convenience. For example, it is difficult to understand how Indian-origin citizens of other countries, large numbers of whom support the RSS, qualify as “Hindus” when they can no longer list Hindustan as their “fatherland.” But then, while the definition of Hindutva was always a matter of selectivity, people of Hindu origin in other lands were not the targets of exclusion—some select inhabitants of India were.

This was made explicit by MS Golwalkar, the second chief of the RSS, who is perhaps the most important figure in the history of Hindutva and a man Narendra Modi publicly acknowledges as his idol. “Bharatiya” would not suffice as a term for Hindus, Golwalkar argued in his 1966 Bunch of Thoughts, because “there is a misconception regarding that word. It is commonly used as a translation of the word ‘India’ which includes all the various communities like the Muslim, Christian etc., residing in this land. So, the word ‘Bharatiya’ is likely to mislead us when we want to denote our particular society. The word ‘Hindu’ alone connotes correctly and completely the meaning that we want to convey.” Why was it necessary for the RSS leadership to convey any particular meaning of “our particular society”? The answer is implicit: to keep Muslims and Christians out of it.

Hindutva is often perceived as pitching the ideologues of the Hindu right against secularists. But to frame the debate in this manner is to ignore the larger fact that the RSS is essentially arguing against the very core of the Indian Constitution. The Constitution’s enshrining of individual rights extends well beyond the word “secular,” which was inserted into the preamble as late as 1976 through the controversial 42nd Amendment championed by Indira Gandhi.

The Constitution begins by stating that India—that is, Bharat—shall be a Union of States. There is no recourse to history in drawing the boundaries of the republic. The document’s clear definition of citizenship is in stark contrast to the abstractions of Savarkar’s “Hindutva”: “At the commencement of the Constitution every person who has his dominion in the territory of India and—a) who was born in the territory of India; or b) either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or c) who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years immediately preceding such commencement—shall be a citizen of India.’’

The Constitution resolutely avoids giving any importance to history, mythology or ethnicity. It defines a geography shared by people who have adopted a set of values enshrined within its pages. Being Hindu has no special significance in this republic.

For the RSS this is anathema. Golwalkar provided a good example of how the concept of the “Hindu Rashtra” derives legitimacy by overtly distancing itself from religion while implicitly drawing from a particular set of beliefs and practices. “The word Hindu is not merely ‘religious,’” he said in an interview.

It denotes a “people” and their highest values of life. We, therefore, in our concept of nation, emphasize a few basic things: unqualified devotion to the motherland and our cultural ideals, pride in our history which is very ancient, respect for our great forefathers, and lastly, a determination in every one of us to build up a common life of prosperity and security. All this comes under the one caption: “Hindu Rashtra.” We are not concerned with an individual’s mode of worship.

Here geography has been granted a sacredness, and mythology that poses as history made a determiner. The “variety of sects and sub-sects like Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, Vaidik, Bouddha, Jain, Sikh, Lingayat, Aryasamaj, etc” within this “Hindu” identity, Golwalkar claimed, only hide a deeper unity as “indivisible organs of one common dharma.”

But not all these “sects” are willing to accept this classification within the “Hindu” fold. Groups such as the Dalits and tribals may fall within the theoretical embrace of the “Hindu Rashtra,” but find themselves excluded in practice. The battle over nomenclature in the Sangh’s decades-long efforts to co-opt tribals in parts of central India is revelatory. The Sangh prefers the term vanvasi, or “forest dweller,” over adivasi, or “original inhabitant,” even when most tribals today are not forest dwellers, because to accept the latter term would mean acknowledging that other groups could have an older claim to this land. (Organisations such as the Gondwana Gantantara Party, which espouses a Gond identity outside the Hindu fold, define themselves as adivasis precisely to bolster a sense of ownership.)

Dalits have never seriously claimed an identity outside the Hindu fold, but have largely stayed away from association with the Sangh. The recent Uttar Pradesh by-elections, which were preceded by the Sangh’s attempts (still ongoing) to polarise Dalits and Muslims, may signal a new strategy for fostering an aggressive “Hindu” identity among “lower-caste” voters. But battles over loudspeakers at temples—one pretext for the polarisation—cannot obscure the fact that for most Dalits even access to temples remains a problem.

While Dalits and tribals represent Hindutva’s largest set of dissenters, in theoretical terms the greatest challenge to the ideology is the Sikh assertion of a separate identity, which undermines the very construct of a “Hindu rashtra” from within. With both their fatherland and holy land firmly within the country’s geographical boundaries, the Sikhs of India satisfy Hindutva’s twin criteria for being “Hindus,” but they refuse to accept this nomenclature. On the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak in 1986, in the midst of the violence in Punjab, the RSS made a bid to woo the community by floating a new outfit called the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat. Perhaps aware of the potential for controversy, this organisation’s aims continue to be shrouded in the same ambiguity that marks most of the Sangh’s efforts at garnering support from more marginalised “Hindu” communities.

The website of the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat lists ten “resolutions,” some of which are uncharacteristic as Sikh demands. One states that “in Pakistan, the Hindu shrines should be handed over to the Hindu community and it should be managed only by them. It should be opened for the Hindu devotees of India for Darshans.” Another articulates an RSS position that has few takers in the Sikh community: that “a magnificent temple of Shri Ram should be made.”

Such attempts have attracted considerable resistance, providing fodder for only the most radical voices within the Sikh community. In a 2009 case that was underreported in the national media, the head of the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, Rulda Singh, was shot in Patiala and died of his injuries two weeks later. Two suspects, allegedly members of the militant group Babbar Khalsa International, were arrested and put on trial. Such violence does not have sanction from much of the Sikh community, but the idea of a separate non-Hindu identity does. At the height of the so-called Modi wave, during the Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party was still unable to get its candidate, Arun Jaitley, elected from the Sikh-dominated constituency of Amritsar.

However, setting aside this aberration, which in numerical terms counts for little, the RSS does draw great satisfaction from Modi’s electoral victory, tending to see it as an affirmation of the logic that drives their view of India. The BJP has failed to garner support from Christians and Muslims, but it has effectively consolidated a “Hindu” vote cutting across caste. It is in this context that Modi’s rhetoric, which has been so endlessly and so pointlessly analysed, must be understood.

Hindutva allows Modi to speak of inclusiveness without spelling out that Muslims and Christians are less than equal by definition. Exclusion is built into the term, and his record in Gujarat bears this out, as do his party’s first few months in power in Delhi. Only those commentators who have tried to project their own longings for an Indian inclusivity onto him have missed noting this consistency.

Modi has spoken often about working within the Constitution—but as the prime minister he cannot do otherwise. While he may draw his legitimacy from constitutional values, he draws his core political support from the idea of Hindutva. These are not compatible ideas. Modi may talk of Indian Muslims dying for the country; he could never claim that they would die for Hindutva.

Thus far, Modi has reconciled the two by outsourcing the Hindutva agenda to cohorts such as Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath. At some point he is likely to be forced to choose between the Constitution’s guarantees of equality and Hindutva’s implicit exclusivity. While Modi does not have, and is unlikely to get, the parliamentary numbers to fundamentally tamper with the Constitution, we can guess what his instinctive choice would be. We only have to remember that moment in Gujarat when the man who gamely sports headgear from any “Hindu” sect baulked when offered a skullcap.

Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan, and is the author of Waters Close Over Us: A Journey Along the Narmada.