India: Encore Soft Hindutva ?

Encore Soft Hindutva ?

by Subhash Gatade

Dr Surendra Parikh, practising allergist and President of the Federation
of Indian Associations in USA. Does the name sound familiar ? Definitely
not. But all those people who have been closely following Gujarat
genocide and the dubious role played by Narendra Modi and others from
his Parivar know this man for another facet of his persona. He happens
to be associated with the Hindutva brigade there and was the one who
took initiative to organise ‘Gujarat Gaurav Yatra’ on the streets of New
York City in the aftermath of the genocidal killings in the state. It
was a futile attempt to whitewash Mr Narendra Modi as he was facing lot
of flak at national-international level for his ‘successful Gujarat
experiment’.

It is worth noting that a professedly secular dispensation at the centre
selected Dr Parikh to be one of the receipients of the prestigious
Pravasi Bharatiya Samman which was given to him during the three day
meet held at H’bad. It was quite logical that a small group of Indians
residing in the USA who were present during the programme deemed it
necessary to lodge a protest when he was presented an award by the
President of India. This group was part of a larger coalition of secular
organisations and individuals based in north America called ‘Coalition
against Genocide’ which had spearheaded a successful campaign last year
to stop Modi from coming to USA.

But can it be said that it is for the first time that the dispensation
at the centre has been found to be wanting in its actions vis a vis
upholding secular principles ? The meeting of the National Integration
Council, which was held after a gap of 13 years last year inadvertently
underlined the fact, that government has yet to come out of the mindset
of the past NDA government. The agenda papers circulated before this
gathering in a way tried to peddle a convenient lie, which is very dear
to the Sangh establishment. It said that forcible and fraudulent
conversions (to christianity) are the main cause of civil unrest in
tribal and other rural areas. We very well know that within the Hindutva
weltanshauung ‘Conversion’ is a very convinient ploy to put the
religious minorities on hook. Under this pretext Hindutva front
organisations have played havoc with the lives of the tribals and have
been successful in re-converting may such tribals to their ‘original’
religion. As far as facts are concenred it can be said that the unrest
in such backward areas is primarily because of the material- cultural
deprivation felt by the local population vis-à-vis policies of the
establishment.

Leading Christian rights activist and a leader of the All India
Christian Council conveyed his dispproval over the understanding of the
government on this issue. The letter stated that it “[I]s a malicious
myth propagated by obscurantist and fundamentalist – and often violent –
political groups and their frontal organisations of a well known
exclusivist ideology which believed in the thesis of One nation, One
people, One Culture” totally negating the Indian reality of Unity and
Diversity. ( The Milli Gazette, Wednesday 31, August 2005).

The way UPA government went back on its promise on the issue of POTA
repeal with retrospective effect was for everyone to see. When it was
out of power Congress had called the law draconian and had promised that
it would be repealed with retrospective effect. Once in power it
conveniently forgot its promise leading us to a situation where hundreds
of innocents are still languishing in jails without any trial. The
number of arrests made in Gujarat under this law in the aftermath of the
carnage has been repeated ad nauseam. And we very well know that despite
the fact that goons of the Hindutva brigade engaged themselves in a
planned genocide with due connivance of the state machinery all of those
who were apprehended belonged to the religious minorities.

Mukul Dube, a leading writer in an introductory essay to ‘The Parivar
Raj and After’ (Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, Mumbai, August 2005) had rightly
underlined “ Can the Congress not see what POTA has left behind of
itself? …POTA will continue to apply to those who were arrested under
its provisions. People who have suffered on account of a bad law will be
tried under the provisions of that very bad law—although that bad law
has been thrown out precisely because it was a bad law. It is difficult
to conceive of a more putrid example of brahminical double-speak.”.

Lot of eyebrows were raised when one witnessed the way Congress Party,
the leading constituent of the UPA government, went all out to admit in
its ranks rebels of the Shiv Sena, a Fascist formation mainly based in
Maharashtra. One has seen the way its Supremo Bal Thackray openly
praised Hitler, spew venom against the minorities and dalits and was
instrumental in demolition of the historic Babri Mosque. Justice Sri
Krishna Commission, which went enquired into the infamous riots in
Bombay in 1992-1993, had on several accounts held the Shiv Sena itself
responsible for the tragic happenings in the city. Questions naturally
arose in people’s minds that how could these very people who till the
other day were henchmen of the fascist formation and some of whom had
criminal cases slapped against them on such occasions could overnight
metamorphose into beacons of secularism.

Close wathchers of the Congress recall with horror the way it embraced
the path of soft hinduism in the eighties and thus facilitating the rise
of the ‘hard hindutva’ forces. May it be the issue of Meenakshipurm
conversions in the early 80s or the genocide of sikhs in 1984 or the
opening of the gates of Babri Mosque supposedly to ‘free’ Ramlalla one
could see the growing commonalities of views between the ‘secular’
Congress and the Hindutva brigade. The then Primi Minister of India
Rajiv Gandhi started the election campaign for the Parliamentary polls
in 1989 from Ayodhya itself. And in his opening speech he gave a call
for the formation of ‘Ram Rajya’ It was not for nothing that
majoritarian forces of the Hindutva kind gained an upper hand at the
cost of secularism. Looking back the eighties could be said to be the
turning point in the fortunes of the Hindutva brigade, which helped
bring it to the centrestage of Indian polity from its margins.

The dubious role played by the Congress in facilitating the ascendance
of the Hindutva forces may be a thing of the past but it cannot be said
that it cannot repeat its feat if it finds that it would be beneficial
to it in the short term. Professor Aijaj Ahmad rightly says that
Sangh-BJP may be programmatic communalists but as far as Congress is
concerned it is pragmatic communalists.

It should not be surprising that looking at the disarray in the Hindutva
camp and the slackening secular vigil the Congress Party may reinvent
itself in a soft Hindutva garb ? An inkling of this churning within the
Congress can be had from the grassroot level dynamics where at times one
finds local cadres of both the formations speaking same language
vis-à-vis ‘politics of appeasement’.

The ‘soft Hindutva detour’ of the Grand Old Party of Indian democracy is
definitely a wake up call. It remains to be seen how the motley
coalition of individuals, organisations which with their consistent
strivings helped turn the tide against the resurgent communal BJP
reinvigorates itself so that their cause celibre does keeps marching ahead.

South Asia Citizens Web > Communalism Repository