People's Democracy

TREATING everybody who differs with the Sangh Parivar on any given issue as the ‘Enemy’ is not simply a question of rhetoric and propaganda for the Hindutva-fascist forces. There is an actual battle on at the popular level through which the co-relation of social- political forces is being altered by these forces. This battle assumes forms that are clearly anti-constitutional in substance, and both anti-constitutional and extra-parliamentary in form.

The attack on secular historiography and the communal street propaganda around it, is only one example of this enemy-centred nationalism. Much of what has not received attention in the mainstream press, is far worse, and is pushing lakhs of people to defense of the exercise of their rights of free expression and political participation in the Indian political system.

While it is true that elections have never been fair in the absolute sense, given the instances of booth-capturing, pressures on lower castes to vote in a certain pattern and so on, which have compounded the consequences that derive from non-literacy among a large section of our people, as well as the hegemonic role of the bourgeois media, never before has the electoral system been held to ransom on the scale it is being done today. New equations are being created on the basis of irrational beliefs, hatred and fostering of violence, directly aimed at creating irreversible fault lines in our society along religious and caste divides.

The general practices in earlier years of interfering with voting affected results in particular areas or booths, but on the whole popular will triumphed despite it because of the sporadic nature and multiplicity of actors in such attempts. Also, governments formed in the post-electoral battle have reflected the pattern of voting. This situation has undergone a sea change, not only due to the manner in which the NDA unholy alliance has placed itself in power, and the way in which the NDA partners continue to flout their own electoral manifestoes in order to remain in power, but also, more importantly, through the undermining of democracy by the Sangh Parivar and the BJP-led NDA government through various anti-democratic measures.

Newspaper reports from many districts have brought to light the tampering with electoral rolls in UP at the behest of the Sangh Parivar, in connivance with state officials. Four or five isolated reports on the matter in back page columns of one or other newspaper show that the phenomenon is far more widespread than has been reported. The rhetoric in the tapes on terrorism prepared by the information and broadcasting ministry, repeated ad nauseum on the TV, are designed to create tension and arouse suspicion between communities, and to simulate a demand for war and revenge. Already it is being said that the ‘public’ demands ‘effective’ steps against Pakistan and the supporters of Pakistan in India. These showings effectively shift the content of patriotism and nationalism towards military and authoritarian solutions, promote the ‘either with us or against us’ mood, and create a war atmosphere in preparedness for political and military adventurism.

L K Advani, the home minister, frequently appears on TV in his role as RSS ideologue identifying democracy with war against Pakistan, and madrasas in UP, literally linking both as enemies, and as identical. Musharraf and Pakistan figure more in the current discourse of the Sangh Parivar and the government on nationalism and patriotism, than the Indian people. The media and the Parivar are obsessed with every word uttered by Musharraf to US officials, to his own people, to anybody in the world! His every gesture is studied and commented upon, discussed in TV programmes, and experts are called in to buttress the RSS opinion on the ‘Enemy’ within South Asia, and Bush is invited to solve our problems and to punish Musharraf. It would all seem highly ridiculous, to say the least, were it not also such a dangerous game of building a negative nationalism.

Goa, Rajasthan and Gujarat have seen destruction of places of worship in the last few weeks. In the Indian History and Culture Society (dominated by the RSS) they talk of passing resolutions that Aryans are the original inhabitants of India, as if administrative action is sanction for validating facts of history! An estimated 2.50 lakh Bajrang Dal activists and about 30,000 Durga Vahini members in Gujarat have been asked to keep a watch on the movements of minority communities in the state, and to send regular reports to VHP and Bajrang Dal offices (sic). Among the kinds of information being monitored is arrival of relatives, visits to hospitals, phone calls from public booths, comings and goings on railway stations.

While the levels of rhetoric are understandably on a high in the run-up to assembly elections in UP and Punjab, the goals and consequences of political rhetoric are more long-term. The cooling of the scene will not/does not mean that earlier positions will be automatically restored, or that consciousness prior to that time will reassert itself as of old. In fact, perhaps, such returns to old positions are not even possible. Every experience, particularly ‘extraordinary’ situations, what we call historical junctures, leave an imprint on the collective psyche in ways that cause new ideological shifts and perceptions to get incorporated and accommodated into older ‘wisdom’.

The relentless anti-minority, militaristic and authoritarian basis of the Sangh rhetoric and actions, has shifted the nature of political discourse in the last decade, which has to be accounted for in any campaign by the democratic forces. For example, contestation over nation and nationalism has logically assumed a larger space in secular-democratic discourse than, say, in the decades following independence when appeals to international solidarities were easier to evoke.

The castigating of all oppositional forces as ‘anti national’ by the Sangh Parivar also puts a big spectrum of political opinion on the defensive in their articulation of balanced and democratic views, as the experience of the war against Afghanistan shows. The minorities have not been able to express their opposition to the US war against Afghanistan at all, and most bourgeois parties are afraid of openly and categorically talking of peace with Pakistan and of making peace, co-operation and anti-imperialism in South Asia a basis for people’s advance in our country.

What has to be understood is that this means that the Sangh Parivar does not begin at the beginning with every new campaign after a ‘retreat’, but from a more ‘advanced’ position. In other words, even while it may be in a desperate position in so far as the coming elections are concerned, and its policies may have angered people to a point where votes for them will not come easily, the Parivar does not have to explain its political positions all over again. It does not have to renegotiate its moorings. It does not have to painstakingly work out its ‘arguments’ to establish connection. It has simply to state them, and the new campaign points get reworked and filtered through the ‘common sense’ derived from years of deliberate and assiduous RSS shakha-sponsored propaganda.

It is this connection between its so-called ‘common sense’ and its projection of ‘popular’ history based on a volatile mix of myth and prejudice, irrationalism and violence, which the RSS has been able to foster that places the Sangh Parivar at an advantage today over democratic efforts to painstakingly argue out rational and democratic political perspectives, compounded no doubt by the role of the hegemonic bourgeois media. The secular democratic forces have to work through an interruption that the break up of the Soviet Union, and the ‘failure’ of the Nehruvian paradigm has entailed, where a whole generation has seen the collapse of heroes, and yet another generation has not experienced the freedom and viability of clear, opposed choices.

It is far easier to slide into ‘radical’ positions that reconcile with consumerism and the market logic of competition and survival, than positions that demand solidarity with the victims of the market logic. It is easier to find answers to disenchantment within right wing radicalism than democratic or Left alternatives, which are more concerned with real situations than with the subjective disenchantments that demand easy answers.

Notions of an identified Enemy or enemies work well with the market logic linked to instincts of survival of the best, if not the fittest. In that sense the right wing does not have to argue against the grain. There is no need for painstaking argument that would force one to question the ‘common sense’ and received wisdom, and therefore allows it to claim heritage and tradition far more glibly than those representing democracy. It simply has to transform the Enemy into a tangible next-door neighbour, against whom the logic of ‘he is responsible for my ills’ can operate. It is this identifying of tangible, targeted enemies that helps facilitate the lure of enemy-based nationalisms, and enable one to be both savage and holy at the same time.

In this context an imagined enemy that must be conjured up in ever more grotesque forms, is crucial to Sangh Parivar nationalism and right-wing fascist politics. With each campaign it must be reinvented and demonized in ever more creative forms, familiar and caricatured old versions whilst reiterating to enable instant and repeated connections with current campaigns.

The unholy mix of ‘Marx, Macaulay, Madrasas’ as ‘Enemy’, by the followers of Mill, Manu and Mussolini’, has been hitched on to the bandwagon of the ‘war against terrorism’; Leftist historians are characterized as "intellectual terrorists", worse than those who sought to blow up the Parliament, because they are "poisoning young children’s minds". This is then attached to the familiar refrain of communists as enemies of "our great Hindu tradition", which they "denigrate", and thus "hurt sentiments" that much be avenged.

The familiar "destroyers of our temples" and those who "forced conversions on Hindus" are there via Pakistan and the ISI, and subsequently potentially identified as the Muslim next door on whom the patriotic Hindu must keep an eye, resurrected as the "terrorists". Do not these same historians praise those very breakers of our temples because they want to help the terrorists to break up our country?

This is the cryptic ‘logic’, created through a mix of familiar rhetoric and new elements, with a similar logical sequence. The ‘Marx, Macaulay, Madrasa’ stereotype is a necessary ingredient that spices any campaign—whether it is the temple, Kargil, ISI, war against terrorism, poverty, elections—whatever the Sangh Parivar is currently interested in.

Claims over tradition and as fighters of the enemies of the nation are familiar nationalisms of the post-revolutionary era following the French Revolution in Europe and the post-national liberation phases in the third world. The Sangh Parivar has emergedas the heir to the most reactionary forms of such nationalism, exemplified not only in the historical connections with Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, but also in the ease with which it has adopted the political postures, language, imagery and concerns of US imperialism today. Persecution and annihilation of the Jew in Europe was the mainstay of the Aryan superiority theory and justification for Nazi Germany’s bid to ‘rule the world’. The Sangh Parivar has incorporated this enemy-centred ‘nationalism’ into imperialism’s war against the third world. Its current, as well as long-term pre-occupation, with ‘teaching enemies a lesson’, must be seen in this larger context.