By Tanika Sarkar
Hinduism was a term that V. D. Savarkar—founder of organised Hindu extremism—had little use for. In his canonical text for the Hindutva movement, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, he explained why it was so. The word was of Western derivation, he said, and it referred to many diversities among Hindus. In any case, their beliefs about divine matters were of little importance for defining Hindus. He carefully separated Hinduism as religion from Hindutva, which he defined as the unique cultural essence of a whole people inhabiting the land of India. Hindus were to be understood territorially and culturally, not in terms of their understanding of the sacred (Savarkar, 1989 [1923]).
We are, then, faced with a peculiar paradox right at the beginning of our understanding of the discursive history of Hindutva. Savarkar must talk about a collectivity that is designated exclusively by its faith: a community of people held together as well as set apart from others under this single sign. Yet, he manages, through several convoluted strategies, to both claim and resist the identity between faith and a community defined by its faith. I argue that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (henceforward RSS)—his devoted and able successors—too, has deftly played around the paradox, if it has not actually resolved it. The RSS began its career as a movement among Hindus, but without any overt religious activities at first. It called itself a cultural not a religious organisation, and it imparted physical combat training and lessons in communal ideology to its adherents. After Independence it founded a political party, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS), which was later transformed into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of the present times (Andersen and Damle, 1987; Basu et al., 1993).
An important break occurred in the 1960s. The RSS began to work with sadhus and sants, Shankaracharyas and monastic orders; the entire panoply of Hindu religious institutions. Their success in this arena became evident when they were able to mobilise thousands of ascetics in street action in Delhi around the anti–cow slaughter agitation. The BJS, in its electoral agenda, promised religious leaders and institutions an exemption from financial auditing. The RSS affiliates and sub-affiliates, however, needed to go further than an occasional connection or promise. They improvised, in the same decade, an entire organisation in order to bring together Hindu sects, monastic orders, temples and ascetics under their umbrella (Basu et al., 1993). The entry into the world of Hindu religion became an established fact and the new turn seemed to mark a puzzling departure from its own earlier traditions as well as from the preferences of their ideological guru. We cannot, therefore, escape from certain questions: how and why, since Savarkar onwards, have Hindu extremists developed this uneasy relationship with matters of faith, partly sliding away from it, yet, quite insistently and with growing intensity, returning to claim its beliefs, rituals, sacred spaces and times whilst retaining traces of the early reserve and distance. The RSS, the apex body commanding the entire organisational complex of BJP–Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), still does not undertake overt religious responsibility in its own name. It needs affiliates and sub-affiliates—the VHP, the Bajrang Dal—to deal with it. This chapter is an exploration of why such a guerrilla tactic was necessary at all, how it has worked and what are its possible implications.
Let me flesh out the paradox with a personal account. I describe an incident that happened in late December 2008. It was a time when several Hindu ascetics, army personnel and an extremist Hindutva organisation called Abhinav Bharat were charged with a bomb attack on a mosque at Malegaon in Maharashtra. The charges were being investigated and reported very seriously: making it a rather critical and difficult moment for Hindutva organisations. At this time, I visited the central VHP temple in Delhi: the Shankatmochan Temple at Ramakrishna Puram, Sector 6, which is also the site of the VHP headquarters in the city. I was directed to it, at various points on the route, by a large number of people as soon as I approached Munirka bazaar: shopkeepers, peddlers, auto drivers, office workers out at lunch break. Clearly, it is a deeply familiar landmark for a very large locality.
The temple architecture is unusual and interesting. It is surrounded by high walls, fronted with towering gates, topped by a statue of Lord Hanuman, the monkey God and premier devotee and military commander of Ram’s army. Arms and massive tail upraised, he is about to strike out at the unseen enemy with his huge mace. If the first visual image is one of aggressive strength, the general layout of the temple complex suggests a grim starkness. The gates stay closed and are guarded by armed security personnel except when they are flung open to admit the public during morning and evening worship. The sprawling compound contains a large number of hostels and houses of VHP workers, several offices, a large common dining hall. It is more of a bureaucratic space, a hub of Sangh–VHP organisational activity, rather than a public place of worship. There is, as a signature mark of the VHP which pledges itself to cow protection, and as a reminder of the anti–cow slaughter campaign of the RSS, a rather unkempt cowshed or gaushala. Its desultory aspect made me think that even though at this particular point it has no immediate relevance, it is, nonetheless, maintained in case a future need for it arises: in a hypothetical case, for instance, of illicit cow slaughter by Muslims, which will then make a revival of cow protection campaigns strategically necessary for the VHP. A series of steps lead up to the temple which is perched on a steep incline, well above the rest of the neighbourhood, as if to confirm the necessary opposition between the sacred and the mundane, the high and the low. Its presence is hierophanic; it is the bounded source of a sacred force that sacralises, through osmosis, the space around itself; in this case, the enclosed VHP compound.
Though I found the temple doors closed after the morning worship, there was a buzz of activity and animated discussion around a slim, young man with an air of quiet authority. I got to know that he was a high ranking RSS activist, assisting the VHP with its local temple and festival synchronisation programmes. Several VHP men stood conferring respectfully with him and there was a middle-aged marketing executive from the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), a man who is also a trade unionist in the trade union front of the RSS: the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) (Jaffrelot, 2005; Saxena, 2005).
I introduced myself, said I was interested in Delhi temples and asked about the holy images in this one: their sacred significance, the logic behind the layout of the temple space, and so on. The RSS man was embarrassed. He kept saying that he was from the Sangh, he was not really concerned with such things; I should ask the priest about this. The priest proved to be an elusive figure. He was unavailable after worship hours and at the time of worship, he was preoccupied with his ceremonial functions. If he was strangely uninformed about the very temple where he stood, the RSS activist was, nonetheless, very precise about the number of temples in the locality. His relationship with the place of worship is important. Matters of faith are relatively minor concerns, whereas the holy site lends itself to mobilisation of a community of religious combatants whose worship would also encompass practicalities of political organisation.
The entire R. K. Puram area of Delhi has 56 temples, he said, and all of them are affiliated to the VHP. As an RSS activist, his task is to make sure that they follow an identical ritual calendar as well as a shared ritual schedule for their festivals—that priests behave in largely similar ways and get their training from the VHP. I had noticed a Radhasoami Satsang building close by as well as an Arya Samaj Mandir and several other temples from different denominations. He affirmed that all of them were working with the Sanatan Dharm temple network, the largest single temple network in North India, which is affiliated to the VHP. Several Sikh gurdwaras were also a part of the collective. The definition of the Hindu is not, therefore, a literal one. In this case, it had come to include sects which had historically defected from Hindu religious traditions and had been emphatically opposed to temples and idol worship. Again, doctrinal differences are resolved in favour of a political compulsion which the RSS embodies.
While he was entirely clear and precise about the organisational activities of temples, festivals and rituals, the RSS activist could not recall with any certainty which other deities were worshipped within the VHP temple and how they were arranged inside in relation to one another. I raised doctrinal and mythological questions about the belief structure that the temple upheld. I met with the same uncertainty. The disinterest in doctrinal and specifically religious matters proved to be pervasive. In my visits to the RSS and VHP bookshops in Delhi around the same time, I had noticed that there were practically no Sanskrit sacred texts on sale. In fact, during the days of the National Democratic Alliance governance, dominated by the BJP (1998–2004), the VHP–RSS had asked for the promotion of spoken or modern Sanskrit in schools, but not for classical Sanskrit literature in which Hindu sacred texts are written. Textbooks in RSS-run schools and states contain modern religious verses in Sanskrit and Hindi, but very rarely do they include even fragments from classical sources. The disjunct between Sangh religiosity and Hindu religious doctrine seemed striking.
When I asked the group at the temple about why this should be so, they retorted after some thought: why should books be so important? It is the heart that is the seat of devotion. The centrality of the human soul as the real temple, as the true abode of God, is fairly well known to certain strands in the bhakti devotional tradition, especially among adherents of nirguna bhakti or worship of a divinity without any personal attributes. However, in that lineage, it has been often allied to an eschewal of temples rather than of texts. In the Hindutva case, in contrast, the written sacred word has been banished but the temple stands forth as the heart of religion, rather than the quietist worship that the bhakti denoted. Finally, it was the BMS unionist who managed to improvise some answers to my queries. The Gita, he said, is the key text that the VHP worships and all Hindu houses must possess it. Indeed, the Achara Samhita, the VHP’s code of religious conduct, specifies that every Hindu household must possess and worship a copy of the Gita. It does not stipulate, however, that it must be read, understood, its key passages recited or memorised. It is, literally, a sacred object, not a text. It seems that the close, personal interaction between the sacred text and the devotee that cheap print culture and individual possession of holy books had enabled has come to an end (Lutgendorf, 1994). Perhaps, the audiovisual electronic media—especially the year-long television serialisation of the Ramayana in 1987–88 that preceded and also accompanied the VHP build-up for the Ram Janambhoomi agitations—has replaced the book based dissemination of religious knowledge and devotional understanding. Substitution of reading by audiovisual media would be convenient for Hindutva. On the one hand, visual images are fleeting, transient, yet indelible in their instant, powerful impact. Their message sinks in immediately, before any questions or rethinking can begin. Books, on the other hand, allow for leisured and more thoughtful reading, opening up a space for a gradual interlocution of the words. They are dubious resources when the organisation is selling a seemingly religious message that does not actually reflect the lessons of the sacred texts. During the Ram Janambhoomi movement, a variety of audiovisual products were manufactured by the RSS combine that skilfully deployed songs, speeches and visual images to create a virtual reality about history and mythology, bypassing older meanings (Basu et al., 1993).
Once I had raised the question of sacred texts, the men did not want to evacuate the ground completely. Thinking quickly on his feet, the VHP activist noted that recently they have added Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas to the sacred corpus. The word recently struck me, but there was no further explanation of this. Obviously it referred to the televised Ramayana serial and also to the Ram Janambhoomi movement, both of which used motifs from Tulsidas’ text. The sacred canon is, therefore, an open one but only the Hindutva authorities are allowed to pour in their additions or modifications. When I asked why they did not regard the original Valmiki’s Ramayana as especially holy, he said because it is inferior to the Tulsi version: Valmiki wrote under a tree with his eyes open and Tulsi ji wrote with his eyes closed. He could, therefore, experience God inside himself. I asked them, rather insistently, about how they read and interpreted various myths that they consider important. After some evasions, the trade unionist began a novel linguistic dance which I have earlier found RSS people to be quite adept at. He said that we worship Ram who represents aram or rest or peace; we say a Ram, which means come peace. Krishna is Nanda who is actually anand or joy, so we say A Nanda or come joy. These divine figures stand for the eternal human quest for peace and joy. I asked him why Krishna should be called Nanda because Nanda was actually his father. He swept on grandly, without answering my query.
He seemed to be on firm ground when he approached a modern sacred text, the hymn Bande Mataram, which the 19th century Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay had composed in a communal-patriotic vein. He said that the most sacred words for Hindus were Bande Mataram, as they are dedicated to a sacred being—the Motherland—who contains within herself both Krishna and Ram, the holiest of Hindu Gods. Together, the duo merges to create the body of the sacred land of Bharat who is absolutely central to the faith of contemporary Hindus (Sarkar, 2009). Interestingly, he assumed Krishna and Ram to be two different divinities, not as two incarnations of Vishnu, which they actually are. Even more interestingly, he added a gloss of his own to the modern hymn as the author of the hymn nowhere says that the song is dedicated to Ram or to Krishna. I recited some of the verses from the hymn to their great delight. They seemed familiar with them, even with the Bengali passages, but they could not elaborate their meaning. We find, once again, that a thinness and insubstantiality of textual-mythological concerns is conjoined to an urgent imperative to engage with sacred spaces and events to claim and recreate the sacred order. Sacred words and images are invoked, but as ritual chant or as holy objects. They are reference points for something else; they are signifiers, not a full sign in themselves. They are not even symbols to make meanings with; they are frozen icons, closed in upon themselves. Just as they made the historical facts about the Mughal period elastic and flexible in order to shape them around their own political message, so they played around with mythological and doctrinal discourses. The actual content was neither known nor was given any importance. It provided merely a shaky but visible foundation for their mobilisation of militant Hinduism.
I attended the evening worship at the VHP temple, which was conventional and not elaborate, grand or overcrowded. In sharp contrast stood the local Sanatan Dharm temple nearby, as well as the one near my home at Greater Kailash, Part 2. In the evenings these temples overflow with men, women and children of all descriptions, the lanes around them are choked with cars and motor cycles, the air rings with chants blared out by several loudspeakers and the huge buildings are bright with dazzling lights of every colour. Worship there is a daily public festival. The VHP temple, then, exists more as a signpost to proclaim an entitlement to its coordinating role among temples rather than a public place of worship. The RSS and VHP organisers are the key figures, not the priest. It is a site where the Sangh combine’s organisational efforts are planned. Worship is a necessary but auxiliary activity.
By underlining this contrast between regular temples and the VHP temple, I do not at all intend to refurbish that tired and conventional dichotomy—the innocence and joyousness of genuine Hindu faith versus the grim discipline of RSS organisations. The RSS violence can also be performed as a joyous ritual, a point to which I shall return later. I want to state here that it is the RSS–VHP connection that gives a purpose and a vision to the Sanatan Dharm network of temples. It does not stand outside or opposed to it. In 1991, during the Ram Janambhoomi movement, some of us had interviewed a Sanatan Dharm temple priest at Nizamuddin East in Delhi. We asked him to identify the most sacred day on their calendar. To our surprise, he mentioned an exact historical date rather than a conventionally sacred event—Vijaya Dashami Day, 1925. That was the day when the RSS was founded, he said, the most important day for all Hindus in India. We were told that all the major conventions of ascetics or sadhu sammelans in the country were a part of the VHP’s Dharm Sansad, then fully engaged with the Ram Janambhoomi movement. Obviously, they endorsed and facilitated the attendant pogroms and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The role of ascetics was prominent and striking in the violent campaigns. Saddhvi Rithambhara’s audio cassetted speech, which commanded violence, was often broadcast from temple loudspeakers in many small towns in North India and several of them did unleash major pogroms (Sarkar, 2001). It was not a transient connection; in early 2003, shortly after the Gujarat carnage, Praveen Togadia of the VHP ran weekly classes on ‘self defence techniques’ within the temple premises of the Greater Kailash Sanatan Dharm temple.1
A very large array of sects and orders, too, have come under the umbrella of the Sanatan Dharm network which synchronises its religious discourses and organisational meetings under VHP auspices. Whenever the need arises, as it did during the general elections in the 1990s, it takes a collective pledge to promote the BJP cause. Let us recall the Trishul diksha or initiation into the sacred Trident ritual for VHP–Bajrang Dal activists that took place on a large scale shortly before the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. Designed as a religious ritual, it would only have been performed within the sacred space of temples. Certainly, an enormous growth in the construction of temples and of monumental statues of Hanuman has coincided in the capital city with the growth of the Ram Janambhoomi movement. The Sanatan Dharm movement—its network of temples, priests, ascetics sects and monastic orders, its organisation of festivals and pilgrimage journeys, its public religious discourses and musical congregations—is deeply and openly implicated in and subordinated to the RSS–VHP agenda. We were told in 1991 that the Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the VHP, holds its weekly training and meeting at its Hanuman temples (Basu et al., 1993: Chapter 2). Since the Dal has proudly claimed the responsibility for violence against Christians in Orissa and Karnataka, and against Muslims in Gujarat and various parts of North India, it is curious that temples should be its venue.
In 1990, there was a minor clash over a boundary dispute between an old Muslim graveyard and a new and expansive Arya Samaj cremation site on Lodi Road in Delhi. While investigating this riot, we were told quite frankly, by both RSS and Arya Samaj, of VHP–RSS–Arya Samaj links that had existed long before this particular episode, both in the locality and beyond. This is not to suggest in the least that all traditional religious spaces have been annexed to Hindutva purposes. After all, Ayodhya, so recently the heart of the VHP enterprise, soon shook itself free from any noticeable entanglements with the BJP. At the same time, I do want to suggest, quite strongly, that any binary opposition between normal everyday religious activity and the RSS political agenda is naïve. It is, after all, the supreme purpose of the Sangh to saturate and suffuse precisely the every day of Hindus with its own meanings and signs, to seep slowly but steadily into the institutions of leisure, politics, cultural and charity work, education, media and religion, into the small veins and capillaries of the social body and to expand in a molecular manner. We take its purpose to be primarily electoral at our own peril. To focus entirely on the parliamentary and electoral activities of the BJP is to misrecognise the purpose of the combine as a whole in exactly the way the Sangh desires us to do. Electoral success is an important facilitator; it is not the ultimate aim of the Sangh parivar.
Let me close this personal encounter with a brief episode. The RSS activist was reticent about religious details but he spoke eloquently about the great religious learning of Saddhvi Pragya Thakur, the woman ascetic deeply implicated in the Hindu bomb factory activities that had been exposed by the Maharashtra Police Force and media investigations at this time (Hindu, 20 November 2010).2 This reminded me about a similar reputation that Uma Bharati used to enjoy when she was within the Sangh parivar. He also spoke reverently about Thakur’s inspirational oratory which is strongly reminiscent of Saddhvi Rithambhara’s contribution to violence in the last decade. Sacred knowledge and rousing violent words, then, are particularly relegated to female ascetics again and again. In the same breath, he spoke about the patriotism of army officers, some of whom were then suspected of links with the bomb factory. I asked him if his RSS has a special cell to work within the army. He evaded the question, but without an explicit denial. He said that since army officers are mostly Hindus, there is no particular need to indoctrinate them. They are Hindus, they feel the right way, he said: ‘I myself have scores of relatives in the Army, I know how they feel.’ Significantly, it was he who raised the very delicate issue of the involvement of army officers in Hindutva plots, I had not mentioned it. He prefaced and concluded his words with a perfunctory gesture at caution: ‘Of course, I am not saying that they were actually making bombs …’ The candour, even with a complete stranger, indicates a conviction that anyone with a Hindu name would approve of Hindu communal plots, even in state institutions.
He said that the RSS had recently commemorated the anniversary of the cow protection agitation in Delhi. In that agitation, 400 sadhus had been murdered by the Delhi Police. This was an absurd claim and there is a reason for such wild exaggerations. There is a great need for the combine as a whole to invent and to recklessly inflate a body of martyrs, as the movement, despite its record of violence, has suffered from embarrassingly few actual casualties or from state repression. The confidence with which he gave me the invented figure—as there had not been a single martyr in that agitation—shows that figures, when precisely mentioned, are capable of arousing belief without verification. Numbers carry the aura of magic. The anniversary is annually commemorated at Jantar Mantar and this time it was apparently attended by a Deoband Imam, a ‘rashtravadi’ or nationalist Muslim who is opposed to ‘Islamic terror’. Though a Muslim, he is also a patriot who, apparently, denounces the activities of Mushirul Hasan, then Vice Chancellor of the University of Jamia Millia Islamia. The Muslim ‘patriot’ had proved his patriotic credentials by alleging that Hasan protects terrorists. Mushirul Hasan has been very active in secular campaigns against the Sangh combine. The story thus combined rumours against a political enemy deftly with proclamations of RSS’ tolerance for ‘good’ Muslims.
If even Islam throws up an occasional figure acceptable to the Sangh, Christians do not possess anyone at all whom the Sangh would endorse. The vicious anger against the community is stimulated by an imperative of social competition. Christian organisations have long been active in the tribal belts, offering a variety of educational, medical and charitable resources. The VHP focuses precisely on these belts with their Vanvasi Kalyan Kendras which do some measure of charity work (Jaffrelot, 2005). The charity of the VHP creates communal Hindus from among adivasis but it does not empower those communities to seek a strengthened social status for themselves (Mathur, 2008). The RSS activist poured scorn on Christian charity. As a frequent visitor to the Kandhamal district in Orissa which had seen murderous assaults on and forced conversion of Christians in recent years, he had been active among local Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra projects. Asked about their mode of operations in this turbulent district, he made no distinction between the Kendra’s welfare projects and its anti-Christian campaigns. When I asked him his reasons for the latter, he spoke eloquently about the ‘fraudulent’ methods with which ignorant vanavasis (their name for adivasis) were converted: Paracetamol is mixed with milk and is then offered to patients in pain as proof of Christian healing. I asked him if this was sufficient reason for the massive violence against Christians in the area. He replied circuitously: while the Quran explicitly commands that infidels be killed, the Bible insists on converting pagans; both intend to destroy Hindus who alone are democratic and tolerant, who want to attack no religion. But faced with terror, even Hindus must fight back with terror. If all Muslims are not terrorists, then all terrorists are Muslims, he quipped, and who can deny that Christians convert by terrorising people with the threat of hell in afterlife.
Hindu violence—verbal and physical—was not denied. But dressed as counter terror, it was offered as necessary and just. In this connection, it is interesting to raise a point first made by John Zavos. Neither the orthodox Santanists nor the reformist Arya Samaj in the early 20th century would agree to grant caste Hindu status to Muslims and Christians—many of whom had been low castes before conversion—whom they tried to convert to Hinduism. Their efforts to convert low castes thus petered out after a promising start (Zavos, 2000: 99–126). The conversion of tribals—people without caste—consequently became all the more urgent, which, in turn, brought them into bitter competition with Christian agencies. Pralay Kanungo (2008) has shown that in Orissa, their conversion campaigns proceeded more through violent and spectacular intimidation of Christian missionaries, pastors, nuns and converted tribals than through Vanavasi Kalyan Kendra activities in the area of charity. In fact, Kalyan Kendras provide the bases from which forced conversions are organised.
Let me, in the rest of the chapter, tease out some of the strands that lie embedded in the story of my temple visit and try and put them in a larger perspective. Let us start with a rather old point in the Hindutva discourse: the unity and diversity of Hindus. The Hindutva people are proud of the internal religious plurality within Hinduism and the tolerance that ensures a harmonious coexistence. They describe their faith as a garland, made up of many different flowers. At the temple, several described it as a sign of a uniquely Hindu ‘democracy’. The VHP tries to inhabit a rather Archimedean standpoint of universal validity—it privileges no particular order and promises equality among Hindu sects. The plurality has a strategic function within the discourse. The Sangh has taken this equality and diversity to a point where they do exist but they do not matter since all are Hindus and all are patriotic Indians. Therefore, difference exists, but, like divine enchantment or maya, it is a second order reality; it does not actually exist on a real plane. No one could tell me what exactly had been Saddhvi Rithambhara’s own sect and what is Saddhvi Pragya Thakur’s. They could not say if Thakur’s religious name—Chetanamritanand Giri—refers to an affiliation with Dasnami Nagas. The evacuation of doctrinal concerns helps to deny and, eventually, to eliminate the significance of doctrinal difference, theological debates, ultimately, of diversity itself. Moreover, it reduces to the point of non-existence, the importance of doctrinal knowledge, of sacred canon and philosophy. We seem to be back with Savarkar’s original aim: Hindu unity achieved by making religious concerns obsolete.
At the same time, in a circular fashion, the Achara Samhita or the VHP code of domestic conduct takes care to restore matters of belief and practice, albeit, with as much internal uniformity as possible.3 It lays down a minimum common core of essential Hindu conduct and habits: daily worship of the Gita, cultivation of the sacred tulsi plant at home, worship at the domestic shrine of family ishta devata or the icon of the lineage, observance of three life cycle rites instead of the conventional 16—naamkaran, marriage and death ritual—the ubiquitous display of the sacred Om symbol on personal and public spaces, frequent visits to the local temples, pilgrimages and festivals. When I asked the people at the temple about the relative superiority of nirguna and saguna bhakti, they impatiently said that both were important. The basic injunctions and prescriptions, however, recuperate and implant rituals connected with saguna bhakti: image worship, temples and pilgrimages, domestic ritual. All of them, moreover, require priestly intervention, augmenting brahmanical authority. Let us remember that VHP trains priests, temple as well as domestic ones. Priests and temples, pilgrimages and festivals, fill up spaces that are at once public and private, domestic and collective, routine and charismatic. Pilgrimages are occasions of public VHP discourses on Ram Janambhoomi and similar issues. Note also that the entire prescribed religious schedule is emptied of intellectual—philosophical—mystical imperatives and depends centrally on ritualism. While routine ritualism keeps them alive as part of everyday lives and activities, at points of violent Hindutva movements, they provide already familiar faces and fora which now preach a new message. There is a marvellous economy in mobilisation for violence, doubling up as the routinised-quotidian and the charismatic-exceptional.
Scholars in the field of religious studies have observed that saguna cults, relying as they do on image worship and ritualism which require brahmanical-priestly mediations, tend to be more hospitable to caste hierarchies. Caste continues to be an urgent problem for this combine, which does not want to work towards its abolition or mitigation and, yet, which needs to mobilise large masses of Hindus beyond the numerically insignificant upper castes—for pogroms as well as for electoral success. When I asked VHP–RSS activists about caste, they said it was meaningless. They also said that it was a division of labour, no more, no less. The utter insignificance of the issue, as they saw it, makes any reform of the system, let alone active abolitionist efforts, unnecessary. Saddhvi Rithambhara had gone further. She had said that since it is unimportant, a repeated reference to caste is divisive of Hindus, it is a dangerous social partition. Her stress on the divisiveness that critiques of caste carried was one kind of resolution to the perennial problem of caste that the Sangh’s social project faces. Savarkar found a more skilful resolution by adopting a strategy of simultaneous acknowledgement and dismissal. He admitted that Aryans had invaded and enslaved the indigenous people and had relegated them to low-caste status. At the same time, he said that over centuries of miscegenation, castes have become so intermixed that they now form an indistinguishable mass, a family of Hindus who share the same bloodline despite social differences (Savarkar, 1989 [1923]). The family metaphor is useful since families are based on many internal differences. Caste difference gets translated as intimacy of blood.
I had gone to the VHP temple at a critical time. Delhi state elections were round the corner and the national elections of 2004 were not too far away. More, stories of a Hindu bomb factory, of the involvement of female ascetics and army officers—equivalents of Caesar’s wives on whom no suspicion should ever fall—were embarrassingly rampant in the press. It may appear strange that at this point in time, the RSS–VHP should spend time and energy in order to coordinate a season of festivals. However, the endeavour was far from frivolous or innocent. Savarkar had pointed out the importance of popular religious festivals as mobilising cement of great importance. If among such vast congregations of devotees in an exceptionally pious frame of mind, holy men can command violent action against enemies of Hindus, the message will be utterly compelling. He had attributed the militancy of 1857 to this conjunction. It appears increasingly clear that the efficacy of RSS shakhas in continuous daily mobilisation and combat training is now on the decline—caused, perhaps, by a changed tempo of contemporary everyday life which leaves little time for the slow and patient long-term preparation and discipline of the shakhas. Temples and festivals will perhaps replace them with their more thinly spread out yet punctual appearance.
Victor Turner calls pilgrimages, festivals and collective public rituals communitas: a liminal staging of oneness that transcends the social separations of everyday life and creates a temporary but vivid bond of equality as well as a transient, but momentarily real, felt community of equals (Turner, 1969). I suggest that among the schedule of collective festivals, we should also include pogroms. While VHP temples and ritual occasions do promote a sense of communitas to otherwise caste ridden Hindus, they do so most effectively during pogroms where all caste and class differences are temporarily suspended in an equality in violence which produces a sense of collective ecstasy. Riots now unfold with loud expressions of Hindu solidarity, with music, songs and dancing, as men and women, low and high castes, middle-class professionals and tribals are drawn into this dark festival of death. Many of the Gujarat survivors later recalled that when they first heard the mobs approach on the morning of 28 February 2002, they thought a barat, a wedding procession, was coming their way (Sarkar, 2002).
The RSS man at the VHP temple spoke of Bande Mataram with absolute respect. Indeed, the song enjoys a canonical status in the Hindutva scripture. Shakhas chant it daily, it is inscribed on walls of RSS schools, RSS posters carry it along with their visual material (Sarkar, 2005). Anandamath, the 1882 Bengali novel by Bankimchandra which contains the hymn has innumerable translations in all Indian languages and the large novelistic context is very familiar to the RSS combine. So are its frequent war cries: ‘kill, kill the Muslims … scatter their wretched houses across the four winds … brother, when will we demolish their pigsties that they call mosques and build temples of Radhamadhab in their place?’ (Chattopadhyay, 1953: 768). The hymn did several radically new things in its own time which have since functioned as important resources in RSS imaginaries. It invented the new Goddess of the motherland and, simultaneously, placed her in a temple as well as in the land of Bharatbarsha. Invention of a new goddess is nothing new in Hindu devotional activity, but this is a Goddess without any mythology, any life story attached to her, she comes with a single purpose, a message—to kill Muslims. While her icon is inspirational, it is her devotees who will save her from her present humiliation. Divine action thus flows away from the divine icon to the Hindus; they become saviours, not just of themselves but of the Goddess herself. War becomes worship, the new ritual. In the novel, Bande Mataram is both a mantra and a battle cry. In the temple, the Goddess reigns as vindictive demon slayer, calling out for the blood of her enemies and the novel leaves us in no doubt about who the enemy is. Finally, as land, she belongs to Hindus alone. The VHP has built a gigantic temple for Bharat Mata at Hardwar which dwarfs all other temples there (McKean, 1996). By locating the motherland in the sacred city of Hindus and housing her in a temple, they make her inaccessible to Muslims and Christians, who are then disaffiliated from any warm or real connection with the land of India.
Savarkar had moved restlessly from faith and ritual of Hindus to an essential cultural core that would, hopefully, be common to all true Indians, something independent of the lived beliefs and practices of faith. He wanted to marginalise philosophical-mystical-devotional resources of Hinduism, its quietistic and intellectual aspects, as no more than individual quirks, of little importance to the people as a whole. What would he replace them with? He first said Hindutva was Indianness; it is the idea of Indian nationalism. Then he went on to locate Indianness in the geographical features of the land. In this move, however, he returned the sacred myths about the geography to the mountains and rivers and landscapes of India which now became imbued with Hindu sacred significance. So a two way process begins. India becomes the land of Hindus, a sacred geography, while the Hindu faith is overwritten by Indian nationalism. In a penultimate move, he defined both Hindutva and Indianness as an inherited affiliation to the land, as a patrimonial inheritance—land of our fathers, land of our action. This, however, would render Hindutva wide open to all who have lived and worked here. In a final master stroke, he avoided that peril by making it the land of our gods and, consequently, of those alone whose places of worship are restricted within its boundaries. The spatial imperative, then, accomplishes several things at once as the hymn had done so in a different way—it melds nation with faith, and, in the same move, makes the land of India the property, in a literal sense, of Hindus alone, rendering Indian Muslims and Christians illegal aliens, squatters, in their ancestral birthplace.
Savarkar’s nationalism had to be founded on exclusion before he would develop an idea of what is included within Hindu and Bharat. Exclusion as a critical imperative demarcates Hindutva nationalism from all others. As Savarkar said, nothing unites a nation as much as the presence of an enemy. Because of caste and untouchability, a Hindu nation is more than usually difficult to unite. Hindus, therefore, would require much more than the usual dose of hatred and an everlasting supply of enemies to stay united (Savarkar, 1989 [1923]). Hindutva is a strange civil religion which crucially relies on select elements of traditional belief and practice.
How is the hatred produced, especially towards people who are not aliens or invaders, who are far more vulnerable and disempowered than Hindus—at least in terms of the upper caste and upper-caste leaders of the community? In place of doctrine, dogma and theology, Savarkar would define the Hindu community through ‘history’—history of a sort that enables a Hindu will to violence. The RSS has continued with that. This history is told at shakhas, at satsangs, at akharas, in children’s literature, on websites, in RSS school textbooks, in government-sponsored textbooks, in BJP-ruled states like Gujarat (Hasan, 2007). Drawing its elements from a diffused popular commonsense, it builds on it, tweaking some of the points, altering and modifying others, combining separate elements to produce a new bricolage out of familiar stories. Because the constituent elements have already been widely known, the new stories gain an easy purchase on popular conviction. Its sources are historical fiction and fictionalised histories, discrete fragments from myths and legends, political gossip, rumours and scandals. All histories tell the same story—unprovoked Muslim attacks and necessary Hindu reprisals.
Let me mention just a few important links between the Hindutva historical lessons and the Hindu will to violence. In his history of the Maratha people, Savarkar warned Hindus about excessive generosity which, he says, is their typical characteristic. Shivaji would not rape the captive queens of Muslim invaders, hence Muslims felt free to invade India. In his history of the 1857 uprising, he talked at excited length about the killing of unarmed British women and infants—babies were cut down on their mothers’ laps, women were dragged back as they tried to escape and beheaded, sepoys waded knee-deep through the blood of children, saying that the infant snake is deadlier than the adult. All this, he says, is a necessary sacrifice, bali (Agarwal, 1995; Bhatt, 2001).
Necessary and just rape and killing of innocents—all these become an imperative for the survival of a community which, therefore, have the force of the highest religious prescription. This is something that no scripture sanctions and no patriarchy recommends. It required a break of monumental proportions with all known moral horizons to say and learn this lesson. A lesson well learnt and tested with especial success in the killing fields of Gujarat.
From faith to community, from community to nation, from Indian nation to Hindu Rashtra—in this cumulative transvaluation of Hindu faith, the protagonists of Hindu Rashtra take on an impossibility. Hindutva has to appear as the general will of both faith and nation, Hindus and India, since both, ultimately, are one in their vision. The universality of the claim must annihilate and disavow that which disrupts or questions its completion, its absolute fullness. So, Hindu India is haunted by two separate orders of particularities: of the low castes, the poor, the non-communalised Hindus whose existence reveals the class–class ideological particularities of Hindutva that its Hindu universality tries to conceal; and by Indian Christians and Muslims, whose presence contradicts its Indian universality. The new civil religion tries to answer the twin particularities by the theory of miscegenation among Hindus, by the threat of external others, by the doctrine of pithribhu, karmabhu and punyabhu. It is a claim that is difficult to sustain as it is contradicted by the lived experiences of so many Hindus who have vivid memories and experiences of struggles, work and culture that they have shared with other communities. Hindus also have equally vivid memories of oppression, exploitation and humiliation received from the hands of other Hindus. Hindus must necessarily inhabit what Gramsci has described as contradictory consciousness, which sets limits against Hindutva’s hegemony over Hindus.
That, however, may not demolish their strength, as many secularists like to imagine. In a tortuous manner, the very multifariousness of subjectivities, identities and locations may lead to a terror about fragmented selves and strengthen an identity politics whose violence is necessary to stabilise a centred selfhood, as Sumit Sarkar has pointed out (1999). So, on the one hand, the Hindu/Indian self is perpetually stained by particularities of both Hindus and Indians, and the Hindu Rashtra’s self image is doomed to be haunted by what it tries to abolish. On the other hand, the staining lends itself to a shrill paranoia, feeding from double sources. Its impossible claim constitutes, in the same move, the strength and the limits of Hindutva.
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1 Very colourful posters pasted on the outside walls of the temple announced the classes every week.
2 The Malegaon mosque blast case came up before the Maharashtra Police in 2008. Several ascetic leaders as well as Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur were named as prime accused in the case and police evidence suggested that these holy figures, along with a few trained army personnel, were involved in bomb making. Very recently, another key figure from among the sadhus has been arrested while he was absconding for the last two years.
3 A very detailed explanation of the provisions of the Achara Samhita was provided during an interview with Rekha Raje, Delhi, December, 1999.