Confronting Hindutwa
- Thoughts
For The Pathless
By Pratap Bhanu Mehta
Any candid appraisal of the
prospects of politically combating Hindutva should, even at the risk
of appearing graceless, acknowledge the uphill task ahead. Hindutva
has become larger than the BJP and it will be a mistake to suppose that
its fate is simply bound to short-term electoral fortunes of the BJP.
Parties as diverse as the AIADMK and Congress have taken up Hindutva
causes; and most political parties that have not yet, have no compelling
political reason to resist it.
For the first time sinceIndependence,
the marginalisation of Muslims in the electoral process is so complete
that almost no political party seriously tries to attract their votes.
Even if the
BJP loses the next election as a result of political complexities, long-run
momentum is on its side. It has the character of a genuine social movement:
a thicket of organisations that will not disappear, an ideology whose
ability to tap our buried resentments, complexes and fears is undeniable
and a leadership that is full of initiative and elan. The Congress lacks
all these attributes. Even if it wins on an anti-incumbency sentiment,
it is doubtful that in its present state it has any capacity for ideological
self-renewal, any ability to regenerate a moribund organisation and
any leadership capable of
the slightest initiative. No political movement has the prospects of
any success if its ideological slogan is a pure negative. "Anti-Hindutva"
is not a viable political slogan. People are energised by and vote for
a positive agenda, not simply against something. You can't combat Hindutva
with nothing, and nothing is what most political parties offer.
The principal requirements
for combating Hindutva-a vast and energetic organisation, an appealing
alternative ideological formation that carries any degree of conviction
and a leadership that inspires confidence-are difficult to conjure up
in the short run. Hindu identity has also increasingly come to be constituted
by a sense of injury, by a sense that they are a people who have relentlessly
been at the receiving end of history. This has increasingly become the
common sense of Hindu identity, independently of party affiliations,
and is the deep source that sustains Hindutva and makes its aggressive
politics of self-esteem so potent. The more Hindutva is attacked, the
more succour it draws from this sense of injury and this is why direct
ideological assaults on Hindutva are proving so curiously self-defeating.
How does one proceed? One
option is for all politics and public discourse to be more single-minded
about issues like governance, in the hope that we can, for the time
being simply change the topic. This is certainly a minimum start. The
only difficulty is that all parties are so implicated in misgovernance
that the consequences of this strategy are uncertain. Whether we agree
or disagree, the BJP has, at least, shown initiative in more areas,
from the foreign policy to the economy, than anyone remembers the Congress
doing. It has claimed liberalisation as its own, run an economy with
low inflation, is poised to claim that it facilitated the retrieval
of Kashmir and certainly got India more attention around the world.
What will you combat this with? Charges of corruption? Or reminding
people of the violence in Gujarat, which most think was an understandable
reaction to Godhra anyway?
It is a truism that politics
is driven by distributional coalitions. In the present climate all distributive
paradigms have exhausted themselves.The "Mandal" paradigm
can be accommodated within the Hindutva framework and in an era where
most wealth is generated outside the state, it has obvious limitations.
All political parties are groping for the next distributional coalition
in an era of liberalisation. There are some limited but potent possibilities.One
would be for some party to boldly link the gains of privatisation to
the welfare of the lower castes. For instance, draw up a new social
compact that the thirty thousand or so crores that privatisation will
generate will be effectively earmarked for deprived classes and ensuring
Dalit access to the gains of the market economy. Combine them with some
modest land reform, as Digvijay Singh tried, and you might craft an
alternative distributional coalition that can redefine politics away
from both Mandal and Mandir. Creating an alternative distributional
coalition is laborious work but politics only advances by crafting new
social coalitions.
Finally, the most indelicate
question of all. What would it take to address the widely shared Hindu
sense of self-injury that feeds the politics of revenge that Hindutva
thrives on? How does one address it so that it at least does not take
on a virulent anti-Muslim edge? No matter how exaggerated this sense
might be, dismissing it is simply politically self-defeating. What sustains
this sense of injury? Terrorism has clearly reinforced a sense of being
under geo-political siege and unless the political compulsions of regimes
in our region transform dramatically, there will be enough incidents
to give Hindutva comfort. India also suffers from a profound crisis
of self-esteem about its place in the world that makes it particularly
vulnerable to nationalist politics. Again, with the possibility of winning
the world cup remote, it is not clear how this anxiety can be addressed
in the short run.
Would a settlement that allowed
a temple to be constructed at Ayodhya give Hindutva a short-term political
victory but in the long run take away the potent issue that has reinforced
the most vicious edges of Hindutva politics? Would it be enough to wean
away Hindus from an apocalyptic politics of self-esteem? Will it open
up the space to distance Hindutva from Hinduism?
I am not sure anyone knows the answer to this question. But one thing
is certain: the endless procrastination of courts, the unmeaning negotiations
of largely unrepresentative religious bodies will probably continue
to work in favour of Hindutva and we have to think past them. Our tragedy
is that we can endure neither our present condition nor the means to
overcome it.
(The author is professor
of philosophy and of law and governance at JNU, New Delhi.)
14/2/03