Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice

Business Standard, November 23, 2018

Modi and the cultural reframing of India
Aakar Patel


Regardless of whether we become a Hindu "Rashtra" by law or not, we are already becoming a Hindu "Rashtra" in practice


About 15 years or so ago, it became clear to me and many other observers that the chief minister of Gujarat was bringing something new and fresh to Indian politics. What he was communicating to his audience and how he was connecting was a departure from the past. What I mean is this: At the national level, India’s leaders had played down majoritarianism even when they indulged in it. The Congress said it adhered to or pretended to adhere to a Nehruvian secularism which saw India in civilisational terms but not necessarily through the prism of a particular faith. For the first few decades after 1947, this kept capped the sentiment against minorities that was rampant in the rest of newly independent South Asia.

The Bharatiya Janata Party abused religion more openly but professed horror and shock when confronted with the result of their mischief. Having led the mob to Ayodhya, L K Advani was surprised that it pulled down that mosque he campaigned against, and announced it was the “saddest day of my life” (2,000 Indians died in the violence that ensued). Mr Advani’s partner Atal Bihari Vajpayee also spoke in reasonable and measured tones while building a party and political movement on the corpses of his fellow citizens.

Narendra Modi was different. He was not defensive about his posture and there was no quarter offered, even as lip service, to minorities. He put forward his contempt and lack of sympathy without ambiguity in the face of the greatest horrors visited on his fellow Gujaratis on his watch. This is the material he was communicating. What was new also was how he was doing it.

He recognised and appreciated the fact that Indians like charisma in their leaders and we like heroism and bombast. What would frighten the voter in another part of the world as something too authoritarian, extreme and nationalistic would be quite appealing in our parts. What the few would see as comical exaggeration and reduction, the many would find attractive.


All of this interested me a great deal. I began to focus much of my column writing on him, also translating his poetry and his essays and biographies. However, I thought, and I have also written this somewhere, that he was a man before his time.

My logic was as follows: In the United States, it is the blue collar or working class that is the base of Donald Trump and his reductionist nationalism. In India it is actually the thinking middle class that is given to rabidity more than the poor or the working class.

The tolerance of the average Indian, who was forced in everyday life to engage with a Muslim, and who was not affected by a debate on 9/11 and global jihad and such things, was not reflected in the middle class. It was the middle class that would gravitate towards Mr Modi’s siren call but they were insufficient in number at that point (that is, 15 years ago) in our economic history and therefore unlikely to make a difference. And so while he was unique and significant, he had perhaps come a few decades early because the ground wasn’t ready.

Of course, I had made some mistakes in my assessment. For one, I ignored his other qualities and his attractiveness outside of his majoritarian appeal. The bombast and the heroism would indeed find takers. And second, that a plurality would do the job and a majority wasn’t really needed. The third thing that I hadn’t foreseen was how quickly he would yank the polity from the clutches of namby-pamby secularism and take it towards what is called the “right” (but is actually just simple majoritarianism), producing a constant emphasis on identity and a targeting of minorities.

A decade ago it would not have been particularly easy for the side defending “Brahminical patriarchy”, a term of everyday use in academia and caste debates, to win, as it so comprehensively has done now. And it owes everything to Mr Modi and the success of his cultural reframing of India as it sees itself.

I have had the unfortunate experience of engaging with a lot of mid-level officers of various enforcement agencies in the last few weeks. I am a pessimist by nature but even I have been taken aback by how crude their representations are and how lacking in any nuance their arguments in favour of nationalism and majoritarianism are.

All around us, we are seeing the signs of this awakening produced by a new confidence — the result of the Modi era. Business Standard reported this month that corporates were giving their mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility allocations to gaushalas. This is illustrative and, once again, is not something one would have encountered just a decade ago without some resistance from media and civil society. But today, it is normal and we are going to have to live with this sort of a thing for a long time now.

It is difficult for India to replicate exactly what Pakistan did to its minorities because Islam is more regulated and easier to reduce to a set of precepts than Hinduism. Doctrinal Islam also has less that is in conflict with modern principles of equality and rights than doctrinal (Sanatan) Hinduism. The danger is not that we will become a Hindu Rashtra by law, but that we are becoming, if we have not already become, a Hindu Rashtra in practice.