Saffronising The Mind Of India By Roshni Sengupta

Saffronising The Mind Of India

By Roshni Sengupta

11 March, 2004
countercurrents.org

"Media are the extensions of man"

Marshall McLuhan's polemical words would evoke a sense of irony especially as the Hindutva conglomerate spreads its tentacles deep the impact of which reverberates through the foundations of democracy on which the edifice called India is built. Given the fact that the media stands firm as one of the pillars of democracy the greatest triumph that the RSS-BJP combine affected was the complete take over of the regional media and the partial coup d'etat regarding the national media both print and electronic. The
telecast of Ramayan stands out as a watershed as far as the relationship
between Hindu nationalism and the media is concerned. The blood-splattered
ball begins its agonizing roll from here.

As the political center occupied by the Congress collapsed in a heap, the
far right moved with lightening speed across the board and settled down
perfectly to fill the power vacuum that had been created. The RSS and its
parliamentary mask the BJP went from strength to strength aided greatly by
the breakdown of the Nehruvian consensus and the quintessential loathing
that the middle classes exhibited towards the failure of socialist planning
and development. It is however interesting to note that the social and
electoral success of the Hindutva conglomerate is essentially built on a
monolithic cadre-based organizational platform that inculcates ideological
centers in young students and creates fascist narcissists out of perfectly
normal men and women.

The organizational strength of the Sangh Parivar emerges out of the
educational base that has proliferated and expanded over the years. The
grassroots mobilization once stabilized then goes on to infect the body
politic of the democratic set-up propelled by the hegemonization of the
media. The RSS-BJP combine therefore played its cards right from the start,
created cadre cells in the form of schools, punctuated society with its
recruits and ideologues in vast numbers, slowly but surely built an
impenetrable base and waited for the Congress to commit a mistake. The media gradually became a victim of the Parivar. The vernacular press in Gujarat is just one example of how and to what extent the Hindutva conglomerate has penetrated media in all its avatars.

Leading up from Hindutva's grassroots conspiracy, the mass cadre base that
the Sangh Parivar has successfully manufactured for itself provides the
requisite numbers for the populist, ceremonial and opulent campaigns that
the Parivar undertakes from time to time in order to maintain support both
social and electoral. The most remarkable and beneficial tactic used by the
Hindutva forces has been the use of public rituals like processions and
large-scale aratis. These rituals and processions have increasingly received
considerable media attention especially since large crowds started thronging
the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of Advani impersonating the new-age Ram.
The image of the god-king Ram has undergone a veritable sea change ever
since the Hindutva conglomerate has begun producing new and ingenious images of Ram on the assembly line. From the obedient prince to the armored
warrior, Ram has been transformed into the cultural symbol of the Hindus
completely neglecting the multifarious divisions within the community in
terms of both caste and religiosity. The Hindutva juggernaut has rolled into
the media which has been cleverly and insidiously utilized to project the
various images of Ram in order to colonize the imagination of the Hindu
masses.

The tele-serial Ramayan gave the Hindutva forces a massive impetus, the
aftershocks of which were experienced on 6 December 1992 for the first time
the most recent installment being the post- Godhra carnage in Gujarat. What
stands out as particularly interesting is that Ramanand Sagar's magnum opus
was telecast on the national network even though religious and
community-sensitive programs were debarred from being televised openly on
such a mass scale. The impact that the serial had on the masses was
phenomenal considering the number of times women actually sat to pray in
front of their television sets when the program was on.

Ramayan was successful in accomplishing something more significant that
arousing a sense of devotion and piety in the majority community. The
overwhelming reception given to Advani's rath yatra was largely the impact
of the hold the serial had on the Hindu masses. The epic had created
euphoria unparalleled in history that was carefully used by the Hindutva
forces to unleash their brand of what they very cleverly called Ram-bhakti
mounted on a Toyota rath followed by a massive crowd of Bajrang Dal cadres
impersonating the venerable monkey-god, Hanuman. The people were swept off their feet and why wouldn't they be? After all the Ram plastered across the
rath was a replica of the hero of the mythological Ramayan.

Hindutva's Grassroots Conspiracy: Education, History and Culture

Before we go anymore into how the Hindutva conglomerate used the national
media, it is imperative to understand the grassroots mobilizational
conspiracy underway in various states. This exercise cannot be completed
unless one examines the educational structure of the Sangh Parivar.
Teaching, one needs to realize is crucial to the saffron agenda. The first
Sangh school emerged in a significant context of the partition at Gorakhpur
in Uttar Pradesh in 1952. A Shishu Shiksha Prabandh Samiti was set up to
coordinate the primary schools while bal mandirs began to develop for high
school levels. In 1977, Vidya Bharati was institutionalized to coordinate
schools at the all-India level.

By the 1990s, it was running the second largest chain of schools in the
country controlling about 4000 schools, 40 colleges, a total of about 36,000
teachers and ten lakh students. It developed the Halflong Project for the
North East where Christian educational consolidation had blocked their
spread. It also reached out beyond the regular school and college circuit.
There are shishu vatikas for pre-school infants to orient their physical,
mental, social and spiritual qualities in tune with Sangh sanskaras or
dispositions. The other project is that of sanskar kendras in
geographically remote or socially marginalized areas. Once a week lessons
are provided by single teachers to generate training in 'religion,
patriotism and Indian culture.'

Teachers are recruited from RSS families. To domesticate teachers who come
from other backgrounds there are training camps that are organized several
times in the year widening the ideological net considerably. The regular
schools are located in areas that have an RSS center and a VHP-controlled
temple usually attached to the school premises. The school is thus embedded within what Tanika Sarkar calls a tight and comprehensive range of
institutions that would in calibration, coordinate the child's leisure,
education, ideological growth and religious understanding.

Schools are founded in neighborhoods that have a fairly homogenous caste,
class and community profile. The bonds are strengthened by the teachers who make regular home visits and dialogue with parents outside the school
premises. The boundaries between the school and the family, between students and parents are fluid and Sangh teachers carry forward the school pedagogy beyond the school into the familial space. The school thus functions as a pivotal point within a larger envisioned community that aligns neighborhood ties to Sangh influence.

Even though the Sangh schools follow the regular school board curricula and
examination system they have their own distinctive method of disseminating
knowledge. An apparatus of audio-visual and pedagogical operations was
developed to intervene and remake the historical understanding in opposition
to the old secular textbooks. School walls display refigured maps of
undivided India to drive home the point that the Hindus do not consider the
current one to be the true map of India. The attempt is to pin the blame for
the partition on the Muslims so that a justification for contemporary
revenge can be sought.

The walls are festooned with pictures of Hindu heroes like Shivaji and
Maharana Pratap. A continuous narrative of Muslim wrongdoing is immediately and imaginatively disseminated while the idea of resistance is ineffably associated with royal figures rather than with common people. Distinctive notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, enemies and defenders of faith and nation are produced and instantaneously conjoined. In school assemblies, principles address students frequently on themes of Hindu
patriotism. Many of these principles are kar seva veterans and the ultimate
objective is to build an undying thirst for revenge.

The textbooks used by these schools are true to Savarkar's definition:
Hindutva, as a continuous historically stable cultural essence unifies
India. All those who live outside its orbits are non-Indian or enemies. The
geographical features of India are depicted as objects of worship for the
Hindus. Place names are fleshed out by pointing out their contiguity to
Hindu pilgrimages, to sites where Hindu heroes fought against the Muslims.
Modern or medieval cities are identified by their ancient names. All past
achievements are referred back to the ancient pre-Islamic era.

The landscape is bereft of all Muslim or Christian cultural or religious
presence. Nor do they figure as historical actors except as fifth columnists
for foreign powers or as invaders. History is shown to develop around a
single axis, which neatly bifurcates Indian people into true Indians and
aliens, as Hindus and others, as victims and tyrants, as invaders and
vanquished.

The past is not used as an evolving process nor does it have a synchronic
unity or connectivity. Events or figures are pulled out of it at random,
violating historical sequences at will to illustrate the same point across
time and space. This methodological violence is imperative if the present
politics has to convince people that Ram, a Hindu epic hero was humiliated
by Babur, a medieval emperor and that present day Muslims must be killed and humiliated to avenge that past. There is no analysis of caste, poverty,
gender abuses, no mention of what Hindus have done to Hindus. Power seems to generate from Muslims as a homogenous bloc directed at a seamless mass of Hindus. The students therefore are not insulated form violence rather they are fed with a surfeit of violent tales, demanding violent reflexes in response.

The school hymns and mantras invoking a militant and militarized nation
worship are modern ones though composed in Sanskrit and Sanskrit lessons
teach spoken and modernized Sanskrit. There is little actual knowledge of
ancient Indian history or conditions, which are congealed into stylized
icons. Myths, epics and select fragments of historical episodes are joined
together again traversing chronological sequences freely obliterating
generic boundaries. Consequently Babur becomes the enemy of Ram, displacing Ravana and the history of the demolition of the Babri mosque is attached, with illustrations to form a sequel to legends of Rajput and Maratha valor against the Mughals.

Demons and Mughals flow into each other and the Muslim becomes a
free-floating signifier completely detached form concrete historical
context. Patriotism is entirely identifies with hatred and revenge, the
country with threatened borders. The nation figures as death- the courting
of it, the infliction of it.

The disturbing and extremely dangerous fact is that a similarly vitriolic
and unfounded historical perspective is being disseminated through the State
Education Boards in BJP-run states. Apart from being the successful
laboratory of the Hindutva experiment of which the saffron conglomerate is
extremely proud, Gujarat is also one of the first states in which the school
curriculum was changed for the worse. The measures implemented by the state of Gujarat are not restricted merely to the content of the social studies or history textbook. They include measures within the arena of education that
point to distinct attempts to impose a slant and color on educational
institutions, stifle the basic rights of children belonging to the religious
minorities and impose hegemonic cultural pretexts and values.

Before we go into a detailed critique of the contents of the Gujarat
textbooks, it is important to look at some attempts made by the Gujarat
Board to give a distinct sectarian slant to education. On January 9, 2000
the Gujarat state education department sent out a GR directing all schools
to subscribe to the RSS magazine, Sadhana. When principles of institutions
especially minority institutions protested at the outrage, the circular was
withdrawn. Another circular brought out in December 2000 has insisted on
principals of all schools compulsorily sending their teachers to Sanskrit
training camps in preparation for the move to make the subject mandatory
learning and teaching in schools.

In well-known Ahmedabad schools where the students are Muslim and the
teachers Hindu, the management has discovered a unique way of inflicting
hurt on the minority community- they just refuse to teach. Muslim students
in several schools are compelled to give exams on Ramzan Id or Bakr Id. The
question papers for standards V and VI at the Ahmedabad Municipal Council
schools in the year 2000 contained a particularly derogatory reference to
Muslims-"What is the basic difference between miyas and others?" The Social Studies textbooks of the Gujarat State Board are sorry examples of where a narrow and sectarian ideology can take us. In the Standard V textbook Indian culture is outline as Hindu culture.

There is a clear and underlying assumption that the popular faiths and
beliefs of the vast majority of people who lived here before the ancient
period were Hindu as we understand the term today. The conflict or
convulsions between the Dravidian and Aryan cultures and their belief are
not merely glossed over, they are presented as non-inimical to each other in
the desire to substantiate the claim that Hinduism was able to absorb
contradictions and conflicts peacefully. By implication or actual assertions
the textbooks also state that the real conflicts came with the interaction
with other faiths.

The state syllabus detailed in the texts being currently used by the Gujarat
state board outlines clearly for the teacher and student of history that
when the authors of the textbook write about India they use the term for the
modern nation as synonymous with Hindu. The student is instructed that the
idea of studying social studies is to develop a true understanding of
ancient India. The political implications of these assumptions are
significant and dangerous because immediately for the history learner
paradigms have been drawn.

The textbook allegedly aims at understanding the ancient Indian culture in
the proper 'perspective'. This perspective outlines erroneously that the
ancient age begins with the Vedic times. It becomes clear from this
introductory text for the fifth standard child that no perspective of world
ancient civilizations is given through the syllabus, the desire is just to
begin and end with India, but ancient India has been made synonymous with
the Vedic and that values like 'respectable status of women in Indian
culture' are rooted in the characters depicted through stories taken from
the Vedas.

Apart from the stated objective of portraying ancient Indian culture as
synonymous with the Vedas, the textbooks also proceed to depict Indian
culture as inherently superior to any other culture. In a chapter titled
'The Cultural Heritage of Ancient India' the young ninth grade student is
told: "Ancient Indian history covers a period of about four thousand years.
It can be divided into the following periods-
· The Indus Valley Civilization period
· The Vedic period
· The post-Vedic period
· The Epic period
· The Age of Buddha and Mahavira
· The Maurya and post-Gupta period
· The Early Muslim period"
The same text goes on to assert that from the beginning of the Indus valley
period to the end of Hindu supremacy the contributions of the Indian
civilization were unique, implying that thereafter with the Muslim period
the contribution could not be measured in a similar fashion.

Meanwhile, the syllabi followed by the various Vidya Bharatis and Shishu
Mandirs in other parts of the country continue to disseminate knowledge
through the ruthless violation of all historical facts. The introduction of
such texts in the regular school system and the rewriting of history in
BJP-ruled states has massively increased the number of children who are
being made victims of this second rate and poisonous knowledge. The
following examples would further illustrate the argument-

· Our land has always been seen with greedy eyes.this story of invasion and
resistance is our 3000-year long Gaurav Gatha. When this proud tradition
began is difficult to say as no books were written in this period but we
believe that the first man was born on this land (page 8, Gaurav Gatha, for
class IV, Shishu Mandirs)

· To our ancestors those marauders were like mosquitoes and flies that were
crushed (Gaurav Gatha, page 9)

· Lakhs of foreigners came during these thousands of years but they all
suffered humiliating defeats.the Mughals, Pathans and Christians are some of
these people (Itihaas Gaa Raha Hai, Class V, Shishu Mandirs)

· Nutan Gadya Padya Sangrah has articles by Rajju Bhaiya, Tarun Vijay, K.C
Sudarshan and Jalam Singh Ravlot of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Among the
claims made in this book are the 'truth' that the earth is round and
revolves around the sun was given to the world by Indian scientists
thousands of years ago.

Some gems form the Sanskrit Gyan series are particularly engaging:

· Homer adapted Valmiki's Ramayan into an epic called Illiad.

· The cow is the mother of us all, in whose body the Gods are believed to
reside.

· The Egyptian faith was based on Indian tradition according to Plato and
Pythagoras.

The following one takes the cake:

Ram Janmabhoomi is the birthplace of Ram.

The Sanskar Saurabh textbook for class V presents Sati as a Rajput tradition
that we should be proud of (Chapter 28, Sanskar Saurabh, Book 3 for Class
V). Another edition of the same series for class IV reveals that it is
because we are the children of Manu that we are called manushya (Manu aur
Manav, Chapter 3, Sanskar Saurabh, Class IV). A chapter of the same book
goes a step further and exhorts the Hindu students to action by calling the
Muslims as butchers and killers of cows and therefore if the Hindus kill and
butcher the Muslims there is nothing wrong in it (Page 57, Sanskar Saurabh,
Class IV). Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan
and Bangladesh are shown as parts of India and the student is urged to pray
to a picture of this Akhand Bharat and pledge that he will achieve the same
shape for our country (Page 31-32, Sanskar Saurabh, class IV).

A few more examples are illuminating-

· Bharat is the most ancient nation in the world. Our original ancestors
Manu and Shatrughan gave life to the earth. The Indian ocean in referred to
as the Hindu Mahasagar (page 1, Akhil Bharatiya Sanskrtiti- Gyan Pariksha
Pradhnotri, ed. Vidya Bharati, for Class 8)

· The Hindu belief are characterized as Dharma while Sikhism, Christianity
and Islam are described as sects (page 16, ABSGPP)

· Urdu is not an independent language. It is Hindi written in a different
script (page 65, Sadachar ki Batein, class IX)

· Sri Krishna is referred to as s nationalist (Page 65, Dharma Shiksha)

Students are tested on questions such as the following:

· Who got the first temple built on the birthplace of Shri Ram in Ayodhya?

· Why is Babri Masjid not a mosque?

· How many times did foreigners invade the Ramjanmabhoomi? The answer being
seventy-seven times.

· What was the number of the struggle for the liberation of Ram Janmabhoomi,
which was launched on 30 December 1990? Answer: 78th struggle

· The students are also asked to mention the names of the young boys who
laid down their lives while unfurling the saffron flag at the birthplace of
Lord Ram.

Historian Irfan Habib is of the opinion that since Hindu- Muslim antagonism
has provided that main ground on which the RSS has flourished since its
birth in 1925, it is not surprising that it has devoted much attention to
projecting a view of medieval India that should justify its founder
Hedgewar's description of the Muslims as "hissing Yavana snakes". It is
professedly because of the primary place it accorded to the Muslim threat
that it remained out of the freedom struggle. It had indeed from the
beginning its own version of the two nation theory. Medieval history
therefore had to be so shaped as to present two nations always at war, one
brutally assaulting, and the other nobly defending.

Pre-eminent in its discourse is the image of the Muslim as destructive
barbarians, foreigners and immoral degenerates. K. S Lal, the favorite
historian of the RSS began his career as a RSS spokesperson with his book
Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (published 1973). Here he gave
a picture of the continuous decline of the total Indian population from 190
to 120 million between AD 1200 and AD 1500, through large-scale massacres of Hindus perpetrated by the Muslims. With these unsubstantiated figures he has become an authority on history for the RSS.

The purpose of this explication was to outline and define the fundamental
attempts being made many of them successful at creating a whole class of
young men and women who are fed on blatant historical lies and distorted
strains of thought so that when required this youth can make the numbers at
Dharm Sansads, rallies, processions and participate in blood-curdling
genocides. Having implemented the agenda at the grassroots level and while
this large group of fanatics are being nurtured, the RSS went ahead and
started making inroads into the media, both print and electronic. Let us
first look at the print media.

Saffronizing Newsprint: The Assault on the Print Media

Two questions are extremely important in this regard: Is it possible that
the mass media can be implicated in the manifest saffronization of society
and politics? And What role does the media play in the orchestration of
violence and pogroms? Any analysis of the media's role in communal politics
in riot situations must differentiate between two distinct but mutually
dependent phenomena.

First, the act of incitement of violence and the rationalization of the same
after the event and second, the act of disarming the reader or viewer by
conflating religion and nation, constantly lowering the level of political
discussion, inundating readers and viewers with diversionary or trivial
issues and by the very forms and techniques of news dissemination.

Walter Benjamin in the 1930s described the modern newspaper as a theatre of literary confusion. The current situation in India vindicates the stand
taken by Habermas that political discourse in the public sphere dominated by
the mass media is driven by corporatism, advertising and most importantly
the state.

The RSS has made use of every cunning vein its body to manipulate and set
the agenda in terms of what the people should know and internalize. The
agenda more often than not is diversionary and the media has gone along as
an accomplice both willingly or out of ignorance and lack of
professionalism. The rise of the BJP in the 1980s led to the most dramatic
shifts in media coverage. A section of the press especially the language
press has systematically communalized itself, while openly communal notions have found favor and gained respectability to an extent in the secular
English language press as well. The Shah Bano case was converted by the BJP and a broad section of the print media into a symbol of the supposed
Otherness, separatism and backwardness of the Muslims.

Media analysts opine that the BJP's forte is the creation and management of
the pseudo-event. A pseudo-event is the product of the complex interplay of
various factors including the emergence of journalists as publicists of
partisan causes and the presence of an issue, however remote that can be
exploited to put the party into the headlines. For instance the BJP
attempted to create a pseudo-event by claiming that hundreds of Hindu
temples had been destroyed in Kashmir after the demolition of the Babri
Masjid. Unfortunately for them the journalists decided to verify the BJP
claim and found it to be a total fabrication.

The pseudo-event par excellence of the BJP however was the fictitious
martyrology it generated following the aborted assault on the Babri Masjid
in October 1990. So biased was the media coverage that the Press Council had to censure four Hindi newspapers- Aaj, Dainik Jagran, Swatantra Chetna and Swatantra Bharat. The Pioneer in the same month front-paged a report which claimed that the Muslim driver of Advani's chariot was encouraging Muslims at several places to offer kar seva in Ayodhya.

Newspapers in India tend to follow a rather quaint practice of selectively
providing news in riot situations. Reports are particularly insidious
whenever the victim of an outrage is a Hindu and the perpetrator a Muslim.
However, when the victim is a Muslim more often than not the news reports
will be terse and lacking in nomenclature or other clues. Even though 90 per
cent of victims in a riot are Muslim the fact that their names are not
reported when the names of a few Hindu victims are can create a false and
dangerous impression of Muslim aggressiveness. Likewise the majority of
those indulging in looting and arson may be Hindus but the naming of one
Muslim can contribute to the fiction of Hindu victimhood in a communally
vitiated atmosphere.

The Gujarati press is particularly guilty of acts of omission as well as
clear attempts at incitement during communal riots. That most newspapers in
Gujarat are owned by hardcore RSS members is another issue altogether.
Stories about the dishonoring and molestation of our women is a recurring
theme in communal media coverage. The legacy of the 1969 pogrom was carried forward to the carnage in 2002 where leading newspapers reported the rape and murder of Hindu women in lurid detail. The Editor's Guild of India Fact Finding Mission has directly indicted the vernacular newspapers in Gujarat particularly Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh for abettment and incitement to anti-Muslim violence.

Sandesh crossed all limits of responsible journalism and was at its
inflammatory best. The major characteristic of the newspaper had been to
feed on prevalent anti-Muslim prejudices of its Hindu readership and provoke
it further by sensationalizing, twisting, mangling and distorting news or
what passes for it. On 28 February 2002 the main headline says: 70 Hindus
burnt alive in Godhra. Another report on the front page called to the Hindus
to avenge blood by blood.

The 1 March edition of the same newspaper claimed that Ahmedabad had been handed over to the army when the worst killings in the city happened on that very day. Another report claimed that the whole Sabarmati Express would have been torched had it not been delayed as a mob of Muslim fanatics was waiting at Signal Falia with petrol bombs.

Sandesh on March 2, 2002 featured a ghastly picture of charred and mutilated
bodies claiming that they belonged to the Godhra train victims without
establishing the facts. The pictures were so gruesome that they actually
fanned the flames of violence in localities that had hitherto remained
peaceful. The following morning the front page of the newspaper contained
the photograph of slaughtered women, allegedly Hindus but no details were
given.

The newspaper continued its biased and one-sided coverage further into March as the 6 March 2002 headlines screamed: Hindus beware-Haj pilgrims return with a deadly conspiracy. The denunciatory adjectives used liberally to
describe the Godhra incident is strikingly absent in reporting the
subsequent genocide. The most horrific acts of violence were repeatedly
sensationalized with the use of a few devices like bold letters and large
pictures of mangled dead bodies. When reporting the death count, red stars
were used for crude emphasis.

Sandesh also effectively circumvented the code of conduct that disallows
naming of communities involved in the violent conflagrations. Areas in the
state or the city with large Muslim populations are referred to as
'mini-Pakistan'. Scattered across the paper were numerous reports of
'religious fanatics' abducting tribal women and thus facing the wrath of the
Hindus. Selective usage of words and phrases serves to identify and further
communalise the minds of the people. More significantly and often with
tragic consequences, it also serves to denounce all Muslims as religious
fanatics and all Hindus as devotees.

Often the news items did not seem to have much concern about the veracity of facts presented. There is no attempt to qualify statements or to name
sources of information. On 7th March a report claims to have discovered
Godhra's 'Karachi connection', the connection being that an entire area in
Karachi is named Godhra. There was no attempt to authenticate the
information.

The role of pamphlets and handbills is also extremely essential to note.
Computer generated or more crudely and clandestinely printed pamphlets and
handbills, without any imprint line were brought out and widely circulated.
The dissemination of such material was reported in the press though the
Gujarati press did not give it much importance as it went against their
pro-RSS bias. Their authenticity was difficult to establish but their
diabolical intent was unmistakable.

One pernicious piece of hate propaganda calls for the economic boycott of
the Muslims. Another four-page pamphlet calls for funds for the security of
the Hindus as their life is in danger. The most damaging of these is an
alleged secret RSS circular listing ways of killing or debilitating the
minorities. A booklet called the riot manual was in circulation Ahemedabad
containing a list of -do-it-yourself brutalities.

While we discuss the stranglehold of the saffron brigade on the print media
particularly in the states, it is imperative to ask a very fundamental
question: What role did the national television network play in cementing a
concrete base from where the Advanis and Joshis could launch their
offensive? As has been mentioned before, the telecast of Ramayan created a
ready flow of devotional support to the Ram Temple campaign. The RSS-BJP
combine made a clever choice of time to whip up mass hysteria and Ramanand Sagar's televised epic served them well.

Televised Hindutva: Ramayan and the Saffron Onslaught

Although not many analysts are prepared to make the link between the serial
and the feverish propaganda campaign for the Ram Temple in Ayodhya,
subsequent events do suggest a strong link. For Tapan Basu and others, 'the
serialized Ramayan reduced Hinduism to its mythology which was then
presented as the essence of nationhood.it provided to the new aggressive
middle class spawned in the 80s a packaged, collective self -image which
with the mobilizing by Hindutva became the motivating force for changing by
force and violence the image of the country itself.' Elsewhere Appadurai and
Breckenridge have argued that even though the televised epic was not openly
incendiary with regard to religious sentiments there can be no question that
the electronic rediscovery of the Hindu epics gave tremendous leverage to
Hindu religious nationalists as they escalated the communal stakes in places
like Ayodhya.

Television gave the epic a potency it never had before and the state knew
this. Peter van der Veer states that Faizabad High Court's decision to open
the padlocks and the joyous televised coverage of this act of 'Liberation'
were attempts by the ruling Congress to manipulate the politics of Rama
devotion in its favor. This is where the Congress went wrong and the BJP
showed that it could play the game better. The benefits were more iconic
than ideological. Rather than Ram espousing Hindutva, the RSS-BJP gang fully exploited the popularity of the televised epic, even going so far as to
strike godly poses for propaganda photographs and using Sagaresque décor for their raths and stages at political rallies.

An early and perceptive critic of the serial was Romila Thapar who linked
the televised epic to the Indian state's desire to iron out socio-culturlal
diversities and fabricate a homogenized culture that would be easier to
control. Speaking at a gathering of the Virat Hindu Sammelan, Ramanand Sagar justified his work by comparing the serial to the rediscovery of a forgotten presence.

The serial's broadcast however violated a Nehruvian taboo of the secular and
non-partisan status of government institutions, in this case Doordarshan.
The government's avoidance of religious imagery had aimed to secure a modern democracy that ruled irrespective of caste or creed. The weekly telecast of Ramayan inaugurated a new era not only in television but in politics as well, with the popularity of these serials allowing the ambivalent status of religion to be exploited and to sanction Hindu nationalist initiatives in
the name of the people.

The decision to telacast Ramayan represented an important departure from
previous practices in three respects. At a fixed time every week, there
would be a program marked by the symbols of a particular community. The
broadcast was to a nationwide audience, not to a local or regional one. And
by rendering it in a format meant for the general audience, Hindu
programming was now being offered not as part of some quota system but
identified with culture in general, not limited to particular festival days,
stations or communities.

It was the show that definitively established the Delhi-centered, Hindi
language medium across the country's diverse population: a serialized
version of one of the world's oldest epics featuring prominent gods and
goddesses of the Hindu pantheon. In a 1988 op-ed. piece, S. S. Gill, who had
recently retired as Secretary to the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, explained his reasons for commissioning of the tele-epic. He
identified the Ramayan with the national-popular.

"Ramayan is basically a secular epic," he wrote,"which portrays a
bewildering range of human relationships and socio-political situations.In
his search for an expressive metaphor to symbolize a welfare state of his
dreams, Gandhiji could do no better that think of Ram Raj. You take away
Ramayan from the consciousness of the Hindus and you leave them socially and morally maimed.The fact of the matter is that the Hindus constitute 83
percent of the country's population and the large Indian ethos is
predominantly Hindu and the Ramayan is its center-piece."

Beginning with the argument that the Ramayan is universalist and humanist,
Gill proceeded to describe it as essentially Hindu, and then to say that
India itself is essentially Hindu. He attributed the Ramayan's powers
successively to its plot and characters, its values and its omnipresence.
Disagreement could only spring from liberal guilt or form the minorities who
were in any case outnumbered, he asserted.

A confusion of genres highlighted the mysticism of the serial. Commentators
described it variously as a mythological soap opera and an epic soap opera.
In the Hindi press, the Ramayan was described as a dharmic serial. Many
viewers actually felt that God was giving them a darshan every Sunday
morning. In this sense, the serial was able to create a collectively
observed weekly ritual, one that was extraordinary to witness. It offered
narratives of the ethical life and its trials, tribulations and rewards,
told in alternatively melodramatic and devotional modes.

When Ramanand Sagar depicted ancient Hindu society as politically and
socially equal to the challenge of modernity, indeed to have anticipated and
surpassed it, he drew on an Orientalist-inspired current of thought that had
achieved considerable circulation by the nineteenth century. His ability to
stage it on national television with the approval of government censors as
well as enormous audiences, indexed its continuing political potency.

Most of the other signs of ancient science are pronouncedly military in
character. The Maarich-Subahu incident, in episode four, is the first
disclosure of the largely 'defence' oriented understanding Sagar offers of
ancient Indian learning. The incident also provides the first encounter in
the story with the 'Other', namely the rakshasas (demons). The notion of
righteous destruction as a fit means to deal with "sin, injustice and
oppression" is categorically affirmed in the serial. There is the suggestion
of the necessity of the national, racial defence. The repeated
sanctification of weaponry is noteworthy.

Sagar also interpolates themes that seem directly inspired by the then
nascent Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. There is deep discussion of ram's
conversation with his birthplace, which more or less corresponds with the
imagery projected by the Hindutva ideologues. Audiences could read the
serial as offering a benign tale of as bygone age but one with an urgent
message for the present. Viewers could understand the Ramayan as offering a way of talking not just about faith or the epic past but about what kind of
leadership a society required.

In the VHP's iconography, Rama is a heavily armed warrior. The devotional
movement towards femininity in the worship of Ram was jolted towards
militancy as a result of the more martial portrayal of Ram and his actions
in the Ramayan. Moreover through the power of television Ayodhya and Ram's
life in and return to that city are brought very close to the viewer. There
can be little doubt that Ayodhya as a real historical place in Uttar Pradesh
has been effectively connected by the RSS and the VHP to the campaign at
Ayodhya through television.

In contrast with the old iconography, which provoked reverence and
contemplation, the VHP representation is propagandistic and seeks to steer
and direct thoughts and action. Thus there is careful selection and
rearrangement of elements from the available repertoire according to the
kind of behavior sought to be provoked. The point is not of course to
stimulate Hindu consciousness as such-least of all in the vaunted plurality
and inclusiveness of that term, but to attach the appellation 'Hindu' to the
desired aggression.

The Rama story was presented as belonging to the public domain. After the
screening of the epic consecutively many Hindu myths and rituals began to be
declared as legitimately belonging to the public sphere inviting the
participation of one and all in their commemoration and re-enactment. The
images of saffron-clad sadhus, ancient science working wonders, women
suffering benign oppression and the idea of a proto- modern state seemed to
be resembling the VHP-RSS propaganda to such an extent that it is impossible to tell one from the other.

The rhetoric of Ram Janmabhoomi, to its ineffable advantage centered on the
violence of loss, on the pain and humiliation of an enforced deprivation,
all encapsulated in the demonized figure of the Muslim 'other'. The Hindu
imagery in market circulation, in the Ramayan videos, calendar art or
advertising redefined popular symbols and proffered an invigorated sense of
identity by inserting these symbols into a narrative of improvement.

The attempt at creating a hegemonic cultural space where all other
influences are carefully ignored and removed from public memory succeeded
with Ramayan. The Congress government in granting permission for the
telecast neglected the power of the televised media. The support to the
Ramjanmabhoomi campaign began its ascendant rise from here. The Sangh
Parivar soon captured the imagination of the swooning Hindu masses and the
rest they say is history.

Hindu nationalism's flirtation with the media today has turned into an open
relationship with more and more regional newspapers donning the saffron
garb. The hegemonizing process begins with the shakha schools and spreads outwards into the public domain through the print media. The creation of a dominant Hindu public sphere can be traced back to the decision to broadcast a mythological on state television for the first time. Therefore the saffron offensive comes at you from all sides, a sort of a three-pronged attack.