Penguin, 2007

Rs 295

A new idea is suddenly becoming fashionable in a section of our media: namely, “secularism vs. communalism” is no longer a major fault-line in India; all our parties, barring the Left, now compete on the same terrain, to which free market-driven economic “modernisation” and governance are central.

This is of a piece with other dubious claims: The Bharatiya Janata Party has effectively abandoned Hindutva. The BJP-Akali alliance won in Punjab largely on “secular” issues. Narendra Milosevic Modi has put the 2002 Gujarat pogrom behind himself and made “development” into the state’s hallmark.

Much of this is unadulterated nonsense. Gujarat’s wounds haven’t healed. The culprits of the butchery haven’t been punished. Muslims have been ghettoised and live in terror. The Punjab results show little more than disenchantment with Congress misrule amidst an acute agrarian crisis. The RSS-BJP umbilical chord stands strengthened under Rajnath Singh. The party will depend heavily on RSS pracharaks for its UP campaign.

The BJP remains abnormal. It’s the only party that denies India’s multi-religious, multi-cultural plurality, wants to “get even” with India’s past “humiliation” by “outsiders”, and is controlled by another organisation unaccountable to itself. The BJP’s ultra-sectarian agenda of establishing Hindu primacy cannot be achieved without destroying our Constitutional order. Hindutva and the BJP remain the greatest menace to Indian democracy.

Nobody has shaped the ideas underlying contemporary Hindutva as decisively as Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, the RSS’s longest-serving sarasanghachalak, whose birth centenary the parivar has celebrated for the past year. The present book dissects Golwalkar’s core-ideology, his view of Indian society, and his faith in India’s “inevitable” emergence as a great nation understood in 18^th/19^th century terms.

Jyotirmaya Sharma focuses sharply on the content of Golwalkar’s thought, rather than his shaping of the sangh and Jana Sangh (which morphed into the BJP), or his intellectual formation under specific social processes.

The picture that emerges is “terrifying” to any rational mind. Contrary to “indigenist” claims, Golwalkar’s idea of Hinduism and Hindu/Indian society comes “from an uncritical acceptance” of the way European Orientalists defined it—involving a distorted depiction of “Eastern” societies in the “superior” image of the West. Golwalkar viewed Hinduism not as a living entity, with multiple sects, forms of worship and theologies, but as derived from a long-past “Hindu Golden Age” from which India has “fallen” into decadence. Hindutva must recapture this imagined past.

Yet not once does Golwalkar ask just who constituted that past. Was there a continuous civilisation or political entity called India? Does the term “nation” make any sense for something that really emerged in the Modern Age?

The bulk of Golwalkar’s ideas of self, society and politics were borrowed from 18^th/19^th century Europeans, especially the Romantics and ultra-nationalists. For him, the nation is not defined by bonds of geography or language. It is based on race and religion. This nation’s citizenship cannot be universal. Only the true-blooded Hindu who believes in Eternal India and sings the glories of Bharat Mata is an authentic citizen. The others must subsume themselves within this definition, or accept second-class citizenship.

For Golwalkar, pluralism is essentially abhorrent. Diversity evokes fear and disgust, not respect, even curiosity.

A recurring theme in Golwalkar’s writing is his hatred of politics—one of his “two permanent enemies” (the other being Muslims). Unlike in the Greco-Roman tradition, and the Enlightenment, for Golwalkar politics is not one of the higher pursuits of human beings, which tries to reconcile individual wills and endeavours with collective projects. Rather, politics is “the most insignificant part of life”.

Golwalkar counterposed society itself to politics: didn’t the Hindus defend their identity against the mlechhas despite not having political power? He considered politics as a recipe for loss of identity. Worse, he compared it with “a woman of the multitude”, “a prostitute”.

Golwalkar’s fear of politics, one might argue, stemmed from his suspicion of the multitudes, and resistance to dealing with and convincing the unwashed masses—a suspicion rooted in the inegalitarianism of the Hindu social order. This speaks of a deep distrust of democracy and points to Hindutva’s potential as an instrument of coercion against the low castes and women. But let that pass.

Even worse is Golwalkar’s suspicion of individuality, or the human self’s distinct personality. He saw individuality as violative of “the Hindu ideal of discipline, without which unity and love of the nation cannot be realised”, and as “the greatest impediment in the path of devotion to the nation.”

“Hindu” discipline requires that individuals “immerse their ego” into a larger collectivity. They can have no freedom in this regard. Each individual must become “a rashtrabhakta or worshipper of the nation.” Love for the nation is not a matter of choice. It’s mandatory.

This fanatical collectivism leaves no room for fundamental human rights and freedom within a framework of common social goals or projects. The individual must be subordinated to the collective and can have no personality of his/her own.

Such collectivism is oppressive and tyrannical. One is frightened even to imagine what Golwalkar’s Hindu Rashtra might look like—although we have had glimpses of it in Gujarat, and earlier, in Ayodhya, Bhiwandi, Meerut, Jamshedpur, Mumbai…

A pernicious theme that Golwalkar’s followers often emphasise is the idea that secularism is “alien” to India and never existed in Hindu civilisation. In fact, as Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen and others have shown, ancient Indian civilisation had many traits that could have evolved (and did evolve) into processes of secularisation, as well as tolerance of and respect for difference. Secularism in India has an organic, authentic, distinctive character because of the indigenous social conditions in which it evolved.

The book vividly brings out Hindutva’s xenophobic, philistine, irrational and claustrophobic nature, which is deeply offensive to any notion of tolerance of difference, and respect for the universal rights of citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity.

One wishes Sharma had delved into the provenance and social pathologies of Golwalkar’s ideas, and their relationship to the Hindu social hierarchy, casteism and male-supremacism of his time. Despite this absence, this slim volume is a good—yet terrifying—read.