RSS was founded in 1925, Jan Sangh (predecessor of today’s BJP) in 1951. But Hindutva, in the form we know it today, has really emerged as a force in our politics in the second half of the 1980s. Following the 1984 general election, in which the notorious BJP won only two of the 229 seats it contested, leadership of the party was transferred from Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Lal Krishna Advani.
Under Advani, the BJP rapidly developed and deployed all the key elements of political Hindutva: extra-parliamentary methods, including intimidation of fellow citizens and the state; the use of vigilante groups not officially affiliated with the BJP to provide both manpower and legitimate denial; the renaming of peaceful coexistence as “appeasement”; a politics of resentment and humiliation that keeps our social energies moving not productively but toward vengeance for the distant past. None of these are exactly new; RSS has been fixed for Muslims more or less since its inception. But it was this combination that, under Advani, in the span of less than a decade, expanded the BJP’s class base and transformed the party into a national force.
In 2022, Hindutva becomes the electoral and social hegemon. One indicator of its hold on our collective lives is the behavior of the BJP’s political opponents. As the BJP-controlled NDMC continues to bulldoze Muslim homes and businesses in Jahangirpuri – contrary to Supreme Court orders – AAP’s Manish Sisodia has chosen to accuse the BJP of “housing for Bangladeshis and Rohingya”. hidden”. In Chhattisgarh, Parliament Chief Bhupesh Baghel is busy promoting tourist sites related to Lord Ram’s exile.
Scenes during demolition in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri
Hindutva’s victory was almost as much to the BJP’s opponents as to the Hindutva’s group itself. Baghel and Sisodia are not aberrations. Their actions fit perfectly with four decades of political response to the Hindutva challenge. When that challenge was first posed, between 1985 and 1989, it received two kinds of reactions: surrender (from Congress) and accommodation (from socialists and communists). .
The story of the Congress is better known, so let’s start with the second group. In 1987, VP Singh resigned from Rajiv Gandhi’s government. By 1989, he was the convenor of the National Front, which included Janata Dal and regional parties. But the National Front was one of three significant anti-Congress factions: the others were the BJP and the Communists. The Congress, even if Rajiv Gandhi was unpopular, could not be defeated by a fragmented Opposition.
As a result, the National Front pursued an informal election coordination agreement with both the BJP and the Left. It doesn’t take much convincing to work with NF. But on the matter of working with the BJP, the Communists were divided. One group, led by CPI(M) EMS Secretary-General Namboodiripad, warned that communalism was a serious threat to the republic and should not be activated under any circumstances. The “pragmatists”, led by West Bengal Minister Jyoti Basu, countered that the Left should only worry about the enemy of the moment, Parliament.
In the immediate future, the West Bengal faction won. In the absolute majority of seats, the Congress faced only one serious opponent. It won 40% of the vote nationally but lacked a majority of seats. The NF formed the government with outside support from its Left and Right partners. The BJP, which competes for two fewer seats than it did in 1984, has grown from two seats to 85 and has actually never looked back since. The respective orbits of BJP and CPM in Kerala and West Bengal have resolved many of the controversies between Basu and Namboodiripad.
In the decades that followed, the Non-Parliamentary Opposition continued to adapt to Hindutva wherever it seemed reasonable. Almost every non-Parliamentary party has chosen to stay at one point or another, literally from Kashmir (PDP/NC) to Kanyakumari (DMK/AIADMK). In Karnataka, the BJP’s path to power was eased at various points by both the Ramakrishna Hegde and Deve Gowda factions of Janata Dal. Even communists, who are ideologically opposed to all religions, happily worked with the BJP to try to abolish the UPA in 2008.
SP and RJD, after separating from Janata Dal, were against living with BJP. But their governance record, if any, has provided more oxygen to the Hindutva in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar than the accommodation itself could.
As for Parliament: in 1986 it chose to surrender to the forces of both Muslim reactionaries (in the Shah Bano affair) and Hindutva (in Ayodhya). Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to allow Babri Masjid’s locks to be opened was usually on the advice of his cousin Arun Nehru. Arun Nehru, however, cannot be blamed for Rajiv’s choices in 1988-1989, from banning The verses of Satan for Rajiv to launch his 1989 election campaign from Ayodhya himself, with the promise of “Ram Rajya“. At that time, Arun Nehru joined Janata Dal.
On the eve of the election, after months of deliberation and deliberation, Rajiv Gandhi allowed VHP to proceed shilanyas (base stone) in Ayodhya. In a comment that offered both a devastating assessment of the Congress and a chilling prophecy of impending events, VHP’s Ashok Singhal said at the time: “If the Government thinks it has been leveled, To allow for the laying of the foundation stones, we can further flatten them. The awakened Hindus won’t stop now.”
Three decades later, when Narendra Modi led Bhoomi Poojan in Ayodhya, Kamal Nath complained that the BJP should have shared the credit for building the temple with Rajiv Gandhi. He’s not wrong.
In not actively surrendering, Congress has gone for 30 years without propagating any unified or sustained ideology against Hindutva. At times, Rahul Gandhi directly attacked Hindutva. But the contents of his Twitter diary, no matter how admirable, are not the actual record of the Congress, or an ideological campaign.
What can we learn from this unfortunate history of accommodation and surrender? Firstly, Jyoti Basu is one of dozens of politicians who misrepresent the BJP and Hindutva. Second, too many of our political leaders are motivated by short-term fear; they are only concerned with the next election that the BJP builds permanently and, unlike the BJP, sees society itself as something static, rather than something they can actively change. This can be as simple as the difference between a side and a movement; Mahatma Gandhi’s congress was, after all, both. Third, as Uddhav Thackeray now knows all too well, accommodation means that the BJP eats your share of the vote from within.
At times, Arvind Kejriwal seems to have grasped these lessons. Accusing AAP of being the BJP’s “B-team” is historically erroneous. Team B’s bus has been full for a long time. The AAP has never been up against Hindutva, but at best, it has, in American political parlance, “changed the channel,” fighting on its own terrain. Unlike Rahul Gandhi, who today attacks the BJP on the basis of federalism, Kejriwal understood that a politically viable challenger to the BJP must be a nationalist, not a nationalist. nationalism with Hindutva. Sounds like the Congress used to win elections – the party has “desh-bhakti“curriculum, or party saying, ‘You will never rule the people of Tamil Nadu’?
Kejriwal understood that a politically viable challenger to the BJP had to be a nationalist.
Consequently, the AAP’s recent moves toward congressional surrender should be criticized not only on moral grounds, but also on strategic grounds. Why did surrender work better for Arvind Kejriwal than for Rajiv Gandhi? Arun Shourie, referring to the fixed economics of Narendra Modi, famously described his government as “Parliament plus bull”. “BJP plus mohalla clinic” can see AAP through MCD elections (whenever those elections actually take place), but if it really hopes to join BJP for higher stakes , it needs to do better than repeat failed strategies with every other challenge for the BJP. Stay with me, and surrender, Hindutva has brought us into this. They won’t take us out.
(Keshava Guha is a writer of literary and political journalism, and author of ‘Accidental Magic’.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.
