Hindutva Blues In Bengal
It appears that Hindutva has always maintained an underground presence in parts of Bengal, funded and supported by Marwari businessmen and migrant Hindu labourers from eastern UP and Bihar. Even if they don’t have an organisation, they have money. Their cause has been helped by a section of conservative middle-class Hindu Bengalis (of the bhodrolok stock) who resent and fear Muslims they themselves helped ghettoize – by refusing to sell them land in Hindu majority areas, by refusing them accommodation in cities, by denying them even lower-end jobs, by discriminating against Muslim children in public schools etc.
Their bigotry (instead of their wealth) trickled down to Hindus lower down the socioeconomic ladder, managing to weaken whatever interreligious class-based solidarity there was. Mamata Banerjee’s policies of applying cosmetic changes to widespread structural violence against Muslims instead of bringing about substantial changes in the system (say the education and housing sectors), backfired as the “Muslim appeasement” narrative got a boost. Ironic, because such limp policies were probably meant more to appease conservative Hindu bigots than Muslims. But what I do know is that our freedoms as Indians are under attack. The Constitution, which gives us those freedoms, might come under attack. The minorities, the marginalized, the vulnerable, have always been under attack; those attacks have just been amped up in the last few years.
Hindutva, in India, has never been relegated to the fringes. Rather it has always been allowed to float around in the corridors of power, in one form or another. “Sardar” Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister was a virulent Islamophobe, which is one reason why the Hindu far-right has always tried to claim his legacy to burnish its respectability. Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President, stewarded the effort of conservative Hindus in the Constituent Assembly to impose a ban on cow slaughter, leading to the formulation of Article 48 – a constitutional provision enjoining the Indian state to prevent cow slaughter that has opened a Pandora’s box and has given violent Hindutva a backdoor entry into the mainstream.
GB Pant, first CM of Uttar Pradesh, provided protection to MS Golwalkar, the RSS chief, even as he was conspiring to carry out a pogrom against Muslims in the State. All these were straight up abuses of power. And yet hagiographies dominate public discourse around these men. This historical tiptoeing around ignoble abuses of political power by “great” men in independent India set the course for the pernicious and unchecked growth of the Hindu far-right, led by the RSS, which has now become a veritable empire, and is only becoming more influential. With Hindutva finally tasting the power of the kind it did in 2014, it has allowed dubious personalities to be sanitized and presented to us as saints. Thus began the age of gaslighting and fake news in “New” India. Then the virtual institutionalization of attacks against differing opinions and ways of life. Continued vicious efforts to break “other” spirits, hearts, minds, people, cultures….. The rest of the story is well known. We might soon have to deal with alleged terrorists making laws for us.
So I felt it last Tuesday. The sense of debilitating, thought-impeding fear at militant chants of Jai Shri Ram ringing in my ears, something that seemed to have temporarily hacked into my system and engulfed my entire being. So let me address the elephant in the room that gets bigger every minute it is ignored. I am not scared of the chant because I am a gutless atheist trembling at the sudden expression of righteousness by the devout, but because of how the self-righteousness of the profane – masquerading as aggressive religious devotion – is manifested in it. An aggressive mob screaming Jai Shri Ram, wielding swords, tridents and machetes – for those who remember Gujarat 2002, for the survivors, and for those who care about and love other human beings, evokes a sense of terror. It was never meant to be. No right-thinking Hindu thinks that Ram (critiques of which mythological character deserves separate space) should be a metaphor for fascism or horrific violence against Muslims, just as no decent Muslim thinks that Allah ought to be invoked by suicide bombers in the name of ‘jihad’.
No morally upright Jew thinks that the virulently Zionist Israeli state represents the interests of all Jews by colonizing West Bank and Gaza Strip, and by systematically violating the rights of Palestinians. One needs humans to have faith. Even an atheist like me has faith in humanity because I know it exists. Once certain articles of faith are weaponized, once hate politics wears the deceptive garb of faith, once the symbol becomes more important than the substance, faith loses its humanity, even as humanity struggles to retain its faith in itself. The deliberate play-act of Hindu victimhood, liberal use of the “Muslim appeasement” lie, dangerously and mendaciously criminalizing Muslim-majority areas and enclaves in Bengal, falsely claiming that chanting Jai Shri Ram is banned in the State – all this was used as a ruse by Hindutva elements to then “allow” themselves to chant the same aggressively, no doubt meant to recall the terror of Gujarat 2002. Model Code of Conduct? What’s that?!
Violence is a desperate attempt to establish the dominance of one’s own rules and order, therefore it doesn’t play by rules others might recognize. When masters of violence capture the idiom of democracy, of peace, of order, their objective is to pathologize and disintegrate them, or otherwise sequester violence to a convenient underbelly using a narrow ideological outlook. Violence is like that sore itch which once scratched, itches some more. No amount of violence is ever enough. It escalates like a nuclear chain reaction. It destroys and recreates itself. It’s a human sin at once fatal and fractal. In time, violence comes to be consecrated in society’s unjust order. It unleashes a slew of ironies upon us. Injustice becomes justice. Lies and distortions become knowledge. Gaslighting becomes education. Massive socioeconomic disparities become the “norm”. When people start protesting and asking questions of the unjust order, it becomes paranoid. Reason threatens the comfortable reign of violence. Reactionary violence is therefore used as a political tool to suppress reason. Violence is again needed to “restore order”. It is meant to force compliance with the unjust rules of an innately violent society through fear or misplaced awe. Reactionary violence is a manifestation of the paranoia and insecurity of the beneficiaries of an unjust social order. Dissent and truth, thus, become “anti-national”; dissenters and truth-tellers fair game for violent attacks.
Vidyasagar stood for reason, for resistance, for change, however limited or imperfect. These had come to define politics and culture in colonial Bengal and established its link with India’s freedom movement. These were never things Hindutva ever stood for. Lest we forget amid all the petty political squabbling that the Kolkata incident inevitably generated in an election season, the need of the hour is to restore the famously capacious skull of Vidyasagar that the thick skull of anti-intellectual Hindutva decapitated with a headbutt. And it will take a lot more than a mythical cosmetic surgery to do that.