Confronting Hindutwa - Thoughts
For The PathlessBy 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