People's Democracy

HATRED of the Muslims, anti-Muslim rhetoric, the myth of the origins of Aryans in India, and Hindus as the only natural citizens of this country, form the core of RSS ideology. Without this central core the Sangh Parivar outfits would be just any other right wing organizations, and the BJP would be just another right-wing party. What distinguishes them is the irrational basis of their argument that religion is the foundation of identity, cultural rootedness or foreignness, as the case may be.

Hinduism is Indian as opposed to Islam and Christianity which are ‘foreign’. Everything else that they do follows from this premise. This premise itself is put forward at the cost of the facts of history and negates the actual historical experience of the Indian people.

Without this central core the RSS and its entire ‘parivar’ would lose their raison d’etre, become bereft of their only strategy for survival and mobilization in favour of a Hindu rashtra. Anti-Muslim hatred and rhetoric, therefore, are woven into their strategy in a way that the latter cannot be separated from their goals and political designs. They know very well that they cannot succeed in creating irreversible fault lines among the people on any other plank, when allegiances and identities are pluralistic owing to the multiple sources of inspiration and experience. The impact of democratic movements and popular struggles, and of western hegemony, which is not as undifferentiated as they would have us believe, leave scope for avenues through which people can escape their designs and even undermine their goals.

The Hindu rashtra cannot come about without undermining the identities of the Hindus themselves, and the tribal, the dalit, and minorities like the Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists must see themselves as soldiers of the projected rashtra, before Hindutva designs can succeed. Women across class and region must identify their sense of worth in cultural terms that resound with pride in homemaking and nurturing.

The hatred of the Muslim is crucial in this scheme. The fashioning of the Muslim as the ‘other’, the enemy, the danger, the threat to the nation, forms the beginning and the end of their catechism. The young child, from almost as soon as he/she can begin to comprehend hatred and love outside the family, is taught that Muslims are to be hated. And it goes on that way day in and day out in the shakhas, in the social spaces created by family gatherings and festivals, through school syllabi in RSS-linked schools, and occasions in the nation’s life which create opportunities for talk and discussion.

Without going into details one can see that hatred of the Muslim forms a core ‘activity’. It occupies enormous, time, energy, and resources, both ideological and material, of the organisation in the forging of a Hindutva identity, and the fashioning of Hindutva politics, and in creating the individual whose very views make him an accomplice and soldier in their enterprise.

That the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy came about as a result of popular resistance and a united front across a broad political spectrum is not lost on them, and therefore one of the main things the Sangh Parivar has been preoccupied with all over the country, and more particularly in Gujarat over the last fifteen years, is to ensure that such unities break at crucial junctures in the face of the communal plank in politics.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that this is all there is to the RSS and its goals. The mobilization of large numbers, to erect a regime with the narrowest social base, is the ultimate aim of all fascist political groups—and this is precisely what the RSS hopes to achieve through its anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat.

The most significant lessons that the RSS-linked organizations draw from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, are not just about mobilizing on a plank of racism, Aryan superiority and extermination of the Jews, but also about undermining the secular-liberal state.

The goals of the RSS, as with Nazi Germany, involve a strategy for utilising the momentum of popular energy and aspirations, through the visibility of presiding over huge mobs, that give the impression of a mass base even as in actuality the regime’s policies represent a very narrow segment of the Indian population. And it has used terror, sectarian hate-filled campaigns, actual killings and subversion of the state’s institutions, to work towards this end. Eventually people themselves are beguiled and provoked into political activity that excludes them from all reckoning, to ensure the rule of the smallest minority consistent with policies of economic liberalization.

People are made to believe they will earn and gain by eliminating a competitor. Houses of Muslims are being burnt even now as they are in relief camps to prevent their going back to their localities. Those few who dared to venture back were, in connivance with the police, cruelly murdered, and Muslim vendors find their places taken over. Schools are carrying out yet another census, this time of Muslim school children in non-Muslim or secular schools to terrorise them and force them out of the secular educational stream.

Reports of police killing in a particular incident show that of the 40 odd shot dead by the police, all were Muslims and shot in the chest or the head. The number of people in relief camps is increasing as people escape the terror of mobs in cities and villages of Gujarat. An entire community has seen its livelihood and economy smashed and is in virtual despair, as the BJP government in Gujarat and at the center ensures that the VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders of mobs remain in control and go about their murderous spree with absolute freedom, and citizens who do otherwise are punished.

Lumpen proletariat among the Dalits and OBCs have been mobilised and armed to carry out the pogroms and terrorise citizens. There was a large presence of dalits in the pogroms, largely migrant labour who ruthlessly attacked their co workers in the infamous Naroda-Patia killings. In Sabarkantha and Panchmahal regions it was the local adivasi community that was mobilised and misled into being the prime attacker. Elsewhere in cities affluent middle class men and women came in cars to join in the looting.

There has been a shocking collapse of social linkages and institutional structures that uphold civil society and the constitution, and communalism has become inseparably linked with criminality. Muscle power, looting and destruction of businesses and sources of livelihood, on an unprecedented scale, are threatening to alter the correlation of social and political forces in the entire country.

There is a message being sent to all bureaucrats and policemen all over the country in what is happening in Gujarat. Policemen who ensured that killings do not take place in their area have been transferred. Scores of mediapersons have been severely beaten up and injured in full public gaze. The policeman who saved Medha Patkar has been suspended, while those who beat up the journalists and connived with the disruption of the peace meeting are free. Peace meetings and marches by Gandhians, students, NGOs and social activists in support of communal harmony are being disrupted by these stormtroopers with the connivance of the Gujerat state machinery. On March 19 hoardings put up by the Citizen’s Council appealing for peace, were pulled down, blackened and burnt. Medha Patkar, Swami Agnivesh, 80-plus Gandhian Nirmala Deshpande, students and teachers of the Indian Institute of Management, Mallika Sarabhai - for the BJP government none of them are acceptable if they call for peace. Peace has become a dirty word, while killings of Muslims has been given the status of a patriotic duty. Citizens’ initiatives for peace and relief are being ‘punished’ as ‘conspiracy’ to defame the government. This is what the Gujarat experiment aims at achieving.

Every newspaper in Hindi and Gujarati has refused a paid advertisement by secular-minded NRI intellectuals calling for peace and punishment of the guilty. The IAS association which wanted to discuss the role of the bureaucracy in such crises and introspect on its failure in the context of Gujarat, has had to call off its meeting. All these happenings have made newspaper headlines in one major national daily or the other and yet they get away with it.

Citizens who seek to help the minorities or attempt to stop them, are being systematically targeted and branded as enemies. The chief minister proudly displays posters of the VHP and Swadeshi Jagran Manch in his office. As Rajdeep Sardesai (NDTV), noted, the message is being sent that the BJP government is a Sangh government, and that this identity, and extra constitutional loyalties, will henceforth decide the course of things. One may add not only in Gujarat but all over the country so far as the BJP government is concerned.

We have reports in the press that the gruesome happenings in Gujarat have not disturbed the equations between the elite sections, particularly those involved in industry, trade and commerce, and the ruling regime. There is considerable financial support behind this flexing of muscles. It is being also reported that the number of shakhas and attendance in shakhas has gone up considerably in Ahmedabad and all over the state. It is being told that joining them is a better deal than opposing them.

On a different plane, we have already heard the World Bank give the certificate that investments in India remain unaffected by the happenings in Gujarat. Mr. Vajpayee has followed suit in characterizing Gujarat as an aberration that need not bother the foreign investors as the government is in control.

It is true this government is in control. But it is a government that has abandoned its citizens and is out to destroy the secular democratic state. In that sense its control implies increased and further loss of control of the nation’s destiny by public bodies and people’s organizations. It alters the equations of power and social intervention. It threatens the rights and ways of life we have all become used to. In that sense Gujarat is not an issue of one state, of something that is happening out there to others. It is an issue of urgent concern for us wherever we are. Like Palestine, it is a test of our position on democracy and human solidarity.