Myths and Dreams:
Hindutva Nationalism
and the Indian Diaspora
By Angana Chatterji
26 March, 2003
The mobilisation of Hindutva
across the United States has damaging effects on the business community,
academy, and society at large. It impacts how culture is shaped and
community built in diaspora. It affects how decisions connected to India
are made, collapsing Indian issues into Hindu issues. It influences
how funding is allocated at universities, curriculum developed, temple
organisation undertaken, development aid disbursed, and hate campaigns
mounted against minority and progressive groups.
In the United States, funding
for Hindu extremism is lavish and contentious. Amidst the recent exposure
of the India Development and Relief Funds collection of hate money
for harmful development in India, the Indian community is divided on
the issue of supporting development through Hindutva affiliated organisations.
Development is increasingly a vehicle through which the conscription
for Hindu rightwing extremism takes place. The actions of Ekal Vidyalaya,
Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad, Vivekananda Kendra, Sewa Bharati and other
groups offer incriminating evidence of this. As Hindu nationalism infects
the grassroots across India, Indians in the United States are questioning
the consequences of financing Hindutva.
As we watch, L. K. Advani,
Praveen Togadia and Narendra Modi continue their outrageous crusade,
building support for an authoritarian Hindu nationalist movement. Intent
on demonstrating the incompatibility of according minorities equal citizenship
in India, the Sangh Parivar is popularising the contemptible idea of
India as a Hindu nation that tolerates minorities even better
than democratically challenged Pakistan or Bangladesh. In the nightmare
of Indias present, secularism is fast becoming a commitment that
the nation is willing to betray. It is prevalent to claim India as a
Hindu nation, at least a nation of soft Hindutva. Hindutva,
soft Hindutva, moderate Hindutva ideologies soft on genocide.
India is a secular republic, inclusive of diverse faith and non-faith
groups. How can an India no longer committed to secularism remain committed
to democracy?
The acceptability of a Hindu
nation is predicated on the infidelity of non-Hindus, and assumptions
of Muslim and Christian betrayal are imperative to legitimating Hindutva.
The Sangh is assembling the political, social and economic conditions
in which to be non-Hindu in India is no longer tenable, offering genocide
as a rational response to the untruth of betrayal. What
does loyalty look like when you are disempowered, afraid, discriminated
against? Have we asked ourselves that as a nation?
Diaspora Indians must acknowledge
the ascent of authoritarianism and tyranny in India and stop Sangh apologists
in the United States from justifying hatred in the name of cultural
nationalism. Organisations in the United States supporting Indias
development must recognise the necessity of secularising development,
and be vigilantly critical of development administered by sectarian
organisations. Development implemented by institutions affiliated with
the Sangh Parivar only lays the groundwork for hate and civil polarisation.
It fundamentally violates the terms on which disenfranchised communities
wish to determine their right to life and livelihood. Dalits, adivasis,
Christians, Hindus and Muslims across India speak of how their villages
and watersheds intertwine, how crops are dependent on the run-off water
from each others lands, and how they cannot afford to hate each
other. In the guise of implementing development, Hindutva promotes malignant
fictions that Christian missionary activity is placing Hinduism at risk,
that Muslims are reproducing at a rate that threatens the Hindu majority
of India.
Among adivasi communities,
such development inflicts their forcible incorporation into
Hinduism. This is unacceptable even if adivasis materially benefit from
development because it facilitates cultural genocide. Adivasi self-determination
movements have been struggling to rewrite the history of assimilation
to which they have been subjected. The interpretation that they are
an underclass of Hindus, who, with necessary evolution,
may return to the fold is blatant ethnocentrism. Hinduisation is a ruinous
process of colonisation. Such practice is unethical regardless of who
undertakes it and how much economic development results.
Indians in America working
for Indias development must prioritise the self-determination
of local communities, and struggle against the institutionalised inequities
of caste, religion, tribe, class and gender. They cannot base their
aspirations for Indias future on the absurdly unsustainable development
modelled by the United States or support the frameworks of cultural
annihilation through which development is imagined and modernisation
attempted by the Sangh. It is not a matter of building wells or developing
roads, it is also a matter of deciding how needs and priorities are
determined, access and decision making is enabled, how cultural difference
is affirmed and identity politics supported. Development is the construction
of political will toward rethinking inequitable relations of power.
It is a mechanism expected to produce equity and ensure the human rights
of the poor. This is possible only if we work with local movements to
develop secular frameworks for change.
Those affiliated with Hindutva
in the United States must be contested as they fashion an India of their
imagination. The intensity and power of becoming in this new world,
amidst vast differences, racism, assimilation, forces of homogenisation,
is compounded by a hollow disconnection from what is most meaningful
-- culture, home, identity, history. The greater the alienation, the
greater the desire to grasp at fiction. In this abyss of diaspora, myths
originate of an India that never was or should be. These myths nurture
dreams where the Hindu prabashi (ex-patriot) can return to purge the
motherland from impurities, to cleanse what is polluted, to restore
honour and claim victory.
In the United States, the
fervour of long distance Hindutva nationalism is intense. Dangerous
stories circulate. Muslims are polygamous terrorists whose deliberate
identification and massacre in Gujarat is justifiable, even necessary.
The campaign for trifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir is logical. Ayodhya
is a defensible expression of cultural pride. In this unreflective chasm
of proxy nationalism, a substantial community is supportive of Hindutva
or unconcerned with its wretchedness. Others misrepresent that support
for a Hindu India is not support for Hindutva, only pride in the glory
of Indias past, so from it one might craft Indias future.
To rail, as so many do, against the persistence of structural inequities,
of the horrors of history, of the politics of caste and cows in the
present, is only to bear incriminating evidence of ones own bastardisation,
loss of purity, lack of faith and pride in Indianness. What
is this Indianness? Indic culture, chaste, beautiful, Hindu, despoiled
by conquest and colonisation. How is it manifest, fortified? A return
to its origins, a proclamation of its sanctity. What is left out? The
reality of India.
Angana Chatterji is a professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology
at the California Institute of Integral Studies.