Secular cum laude
The French India
scholar Christophe Jaffrelot has collected his recent papers in a hefty volume:
Religion, Caste & Politics in India
(Primus, Delhi 2010). I had hardly been following his work ever since I took a
break from the contemporary period of Indian history to focus on the ancient
period, but events pull me back from time to time, so I participated in the
European Conference on South-Asian Studies
(Zürich, July 2014), and in the Primus bookstall my eye fell on this
book. As I had already bought a few and the publisher, end of conference,
wanted to get rid of his stock, he offered me a copy for free. In return, I
agreed to review it.
In its 802 + xxxii
pages, it deals quite thoroughly with many aspects of contemporary politics,
particularly the rise of OBC and Dalit politics, affirmative action, the
relation between religion and ethnicity and the ensuing conceptions of the
Indian state, the genesis of Hindu nationalism, the conversion issue and its
evolution over time (from Shuddhi to Dharma Parivartan and Ghar Wapasi, with
Dr. BR Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism and the Meenakshipuram mass-conversion
to Islam, and the so-called anti-conversion laws), the intra-Parivar relations
between the rather diverse organizations federated around the RSS, the Ram Setu
controversy (“Adam’s Bridge”, a rock formation between the mainland and Sri
Lanka said to be a remnant of the bridge built for Rama), India’s version of
democracy, and the foreign policy of India and of the Hindu movement, specifically
the relations with the American world champion, with a Europe in decline, and
with a rising East Asia. Merely as an
introduction to what contemporary Indian political life is all about, I would
certainly recommend this book, brimful of data.
This book is a relief
after reading the more usual secularist or South-Asianist accounts of Hindu
nationalism. This guy generally knows what he is talking about, he has actually
read or met the stalwarts of the Hindu movement, and many of his quotations are
non-standard. For raw data, the book is indeed a must-read. Anyone unfamiliar
with this debate might even be taken in that finally, the objective scholar of
Hindu nationalism has arrived.
The author’s ideological placement
Jaffrelot does take a
different line from most students of Hindu nationalism. Thus, he is one of the
very few to note that the movement’s official ideology is Deendayal Upadhyaya’s
Integral Humanism, studied by all RSS members yet conspicuous by its absence
from most “expert” studies, apparently because it sounds too innocent, not
fitting in the gory enemy-image they were constructing. Expertise on a movement
without even acknowledging its official ideology, it only shows how uniquely
abnormal Hindutva studies are.
Jaffrelot once related
how everyone around him was simply describing it as “Hindu fascism” while he
objected to this dismissive term as historically inaccurate. Thus, democracy as
such was not questioned, and to the extent that the RSS’s (as opposed to the
BJP’s) internal functioning honours the Leader Principle, it is gerontocratic
and more inspired on native Guru worship than on the submission to autocratic young men of action characteristic
of the European interbellum. He admitted the RSS’s principled opposition to
what was the first priority of the fascist movements, viz. the seizing of
political power (p.189) underlying this contrast is the fascists’ valuation of
the state as crucial actor versus Hindu society’s self-reliance with only a
limited role for the state. Race thought too, in spite of the deceptive occasional
appearance of the word “race” (then more general in meaning), failed to become
central to Hindu nationalism; on the contrary, he notes that the central
concept of Chiti (ca. Volksseele, “national
soul”, p.172) logically favoured assimilation.
So, no “Hindu fascism”
here. To others, the term “Hindu fascism” seemed unproblematic: it gave them a
killer weapon against the Hindu enemy, provided an easy superiority on the
moral plane, and socially brought them in the good books of the powerful
Nehruvian establishment and its dupes at the helm of the “South Asia”
departments. So, why bother about a trifle like “historical accuracy”?
To be sure, there is
still something debatable with his otherwise judicious use of political
categories as a consequence of his uncritical acceptance of anti-Hindu history.
On p.311-312 we learn that Rama is “not that prestigious in the Dravidian
South”, an estimation that shows the influence of the non-indigenous modern
theory that Rama’s adventures are but a code for the “Aryan” conquest of the
Dravidian South, supposedly resented in the South, with Ravana as a Dravidian
king. In fact, Ravana was a Brahmin immigrant from the North and a relative of
a Vedic sage, just as “Aryan” as Rama himself, and Rama made friends with the
locals, leaving Ravana’s family in power in Lanka instead of occupying it.
Anyway, it follows
that “the notion of the ‘Hindu race’ was
never used by the ideologues of the Hindutva movement as it would have
introduced a line of cleavage between ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’”. While Jaffrelot
correctly outlines the insurmountable difference between Nazi race theories and
Hindu Nationalism, he attributes to the latter a belief in the Aryan-Dravidian
divide because he assumes it is a historical reality that even the RSS could
not deny. In reality, while the Hindu Nationalists before the 1980s mostly
refrained from questioning the prestigious Aryan Invasion Theory, they never seriously
interiorized this belief in an Aryan-Dravidian divide. Western observers,
particularly those wedded to Ambedkarism, have projected Western assumptions
about this divide onto the Hindu nationalists; not a very big deal, but it
clouds their understanding of the Hiindu Nationalists’ worldview.
Though the secularists
and their foreign allies are having a very good time while the Nehruvian sun
shines (and now under incipient BJP rule, Nehru remains normative), they are
bound to go down in great dishonour for their large-scale distortion of facts.
With his greater respect for facts and accuracy, Jaffrelot will be more
favourably remembered. That said, there is still a lot of Nehruvian prejudice
here, though the untrained eye might often not notice it. Typically, its most
striking appearances come in the company of quotations from secondary sources, and there
are also some conspicuous and telling omissions. While I am willing to give
Jaffrelot himself the benefit of the doubt, he has clearly gulped down the
influence from his Nehruvian friends and colleagues. If one is determined to
get at the bottom of Indian communal relations, one has to free oneself from the
reigning secularist paradigm. He has acquired sufficient primary knowledge of
Hindu Nationalism yet misses the chance to develop a realistic and balanced
account of the same, staying too close to the dominant hostile narrative.
Secularism in the Constitution
It all starts with the
Constituent Assembly debates. In that first chapter, I learned that “Composite
Culture is not Multiculturalism”. Indeed, India’s Founding Fathers, an ad hoc
coalition of secular Jacobins (state nationalists around Jawaharlal Nehru) and
Hindu traditionalists (who saw Indianness as essentially Hinduness), saw to it
that India did not become a federation of communities. While not imposing
Hinduism on the minorities, their formula facilitated a soft assimilation in
which communal identity would blend into
a common national identity which mostly amounted to the Hindu legacy. That is
why real secularists consider India as “essentially” a Hindu state, wilier but
no better than the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The Constituent secularists
were not secular enough.
To locate Jaffrelot
more precisely in the ideological spectrum, let us see what he makes of the
much-invoked word “secular”. In the very first page of his introduction (p.xv),
he lists as one of the four points of the “Nehruvian model” that it was and is
“socialist”. He explicitly relates this to the Constitution, viz. to point out
the effective socialism of the Nehruvians, but then admits that the word
“socialism” was only “introduced in the Preamble in 1976”. It would have been
only normal to admit the exact same thing of secularism. It is characteristic
of practically all texts lauding India’s “secularism” that this inconvenient
truth is omitted, and secularism is attributed to the unquestionable authority
of the Constitution and its supposed author, BR Ambedkar. But it is
characteristic for Jaffrelot as only a lukewarm secularist that in the next
paragraph, he does bring himself to writing it, if only in passing. He repeats
this same observation on p.170: “secular” was a product of the Emergency.
Yet, even he can’t
bring himself to mentioning the really problematic part of this interpolation
of “secular, socialist”. The word “secular”
was not part of India’s political parlance in the days of the Constituent
Assembly, and even the Republic (let alone India itself) was not founded as a
“secular” state. On the contrary, the Constituent Assembly through its
chairman, BR Ambedkar, explicitly rejected the two S words. India became a
“secular socialist” republic under the Emergency dictatorship (1975-77) without proper Parliamentary debate.
“Secular” is one of the few words in the Constitution that was enacted without
democratic basis, and this is only fitting for a “secularism” which has always
and unabashedly been despotic and anti-majority. There may be many things wrong
with democracy, but it is not anti-majority. Indeed, that is precisely what is
wrong with democracy, according to the secularists.
Hindu activism outside the Sangh
For another example of
subtle bias, he chooses not to discuss the work of Sita Ram Goel, though he
regularly uses it as a source. He
clearly knows of his work, and though (or rather, because) it is far more scholarly and compelling than the
sensational sound-bites of the more visible leaders, it is simply not
addressed. More generally, he seems unaware of a trend (but then, before 2010
it was only beginning) that ever more Hindu activism is taking place outside
the Sangh. Like the Sangh itself, and like the secularists, he is effectively
identifying all non-suicidal Hinduism with the Sangh. For the secularists, the
logic is: “We have successfully blackened the Sangh, now let us use it to
blacken Hinduism as such.” For the Sangh, the logic is: “Let us draw all of
Hinduism to our very specific and modern organization, and bask in the borrowed
glories of all Hindu great men.”
When polemically
useful, secular columnists like to point out that Hinduism is not the same as
the RSS, yet they celebrate every defeat of Hinduism as a blow for the RSS. In
this respect, Jaffrelot shares in the narrow look of the secularists, who
always use the term “Hindu” in whichever manipulative sense is most opportune. He
clearly knows of enough data that should make him see through the manipulations
of the secularists, yet fails to break with them and misses the chance to
describe the true picture.
The Sangh is also an
easy enemy. It doesn’t seek to defend itself as a matter of principle, and
whatever polemical writings it puts out (e.g. around the Ram Setu) are
caricatures of a premodern mode of thinking. So, for secularists suffering from
laziness because of having enjoyed their hegemony for too long, it is tempting
to single out the Sangh for attacks.
Riots
Sometimes Jaffrelot
emulates the secularists in getting his facts plainly wrong. Thus, he complains
of RSS killings of Marxist Communist Party activists (p.312), yet usually the
killing is in the other direction. Like the secularists, he falsely presents
the Muslims as a poor and vulnerable minority, rather than as the local arm of
a worldwide movement flush with money and military resources. He always
minimizes Muslim rioting, only starts describing it when Hindus start
retaliating (as if they started it), and hastens to call it “retaliatory” (e.g.
p.639).
Thus, he mentions an
“unprecedented wave of communal riots of the 1990s” culminating in the “Gujarat
pogrom of 2002” (p. xxiii). According to his own table of riot casualties per
year (p;180), the year with the maximum riot death toll was not in or near the
1990s, but 1964. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, though triggering
Muslim-initiated riots in many places culminating in a terror attack simultaneously
hitting many different places in Mumbai on 12 March 1993 (setting the template
for many later terror attacks), ultimately ushered in a period of relative calm
when compared to the preceding two decades. The largest communal riot in
post-Partition India took place in 1984, when Congress secularists took revenge
on the Sikh community, for the murder of
Indira Gandhi, killing some three thousand. It was a real pogrom, with only
perpetrators on one side and only victims on the other. Another real pogrom,
the slaughter of Hindus by the Khilafatists in Kerala in 1920, is described
here as “Hindu-Muslim riots” (p.189).
By contrast, the
sizably smaller Gujarat riots were two-sided. A genuine pogrom was, however,
what triggered them: Muslims setting a train wagon on fire, killing 58 Hindu
pilgrims. In the original East-European setting, if 58 Jews got killed, that
was called a pogrom, right? So, Muslims committed a pogrom, and then riots
ensued; big riots but by no means “unprecedented”. And completely dwarfed by
the treatment the Pakistanis gave the East Bengali Hindus in 1971, where the
death toll was at least a million, the immense majority of them Hindus, with
even the Bengali Muslims killed for anti-Hindu reasons (Sanskritic language and
script, non-Muslim dress habits, non-Islamic linguistic nationalism, secularism).
The average victimnof communal violence in independent South Asia is a Hindu,
though you wouldn’t say it if you trust this book, let alone Indian secularists’
writings.
Emulating the Other
One of the
contributions henceforth associated with Jaffrelot’s name is the theory that
the modern Hindu movement emulates its enemies in crucial respects. This, he
opines, is but a Hindu tradition. Shankara famously emulated Buddhism when he
struggled against its influence, bringing Nagarjuna’s Buddhist idealism and
Shunyavad (“doctrine of emptiness”) into Vedantic thought as Mayavad (ca. “illusionism”,
the belief that reality is but a fata morgana of eternal and irreducible
consciousness) and establishing a Sangha-like authoritative monastic order. Similarly,
modern Hindu Revivalism emulated its then threatening Other, the Christian
West. The Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj
interiorized the positive valuation of monotheism, of Revelation and of
aniconism. The RSS brought in uniformism and nationalism.
Some facts mentioned
are, if true, rather problematic. Thus, concerning the Ram Setu, Indulata Das
is credited with saying: “Insulting Rama is insulting India.” And the
(partisanly hyphenated) “saintly” Swami Dayananda Saraswati is said to have asserted:
“Sentiment is sacred”, and: “Sentiment does not ned logic.” (p.308) This is at
any rate the position of many Hindu activists regarding the Ram Setu and other
issues of established religious convention.
It is an odd reduction
of traditional religious beliefs to pop psychology, worthy of religious
sceptics. I doubt you will ever hear a Muslim describe the duty of pilgrimage
to Mecca as a mere “sentiment”. It is at any rate a weakness bid, and an
implicit admission that the belief in the rock formation between India and
Lanka as a remnant of a bridge built for Rama’s invasion is beyond proof. Some
things are unhistorical simply because they pertain to something else than
history, and as such the convention of treating this rock formation as an
inviolable sacred site could be defensible. But to assert that “NASA satellite
photography has proven the rock-formation’s man-made origin”, as too many
believers have done, is simply false.
BJP secularism
It has been an
interesting aspect of my particular reading experience that this has been a
peep into a bygone age. Or at least, so it seems. When this book was compiled,
the BJP had just lost its half-hearted bid to recover power which it had lost
in 2004. Indeed, it slid further backwards, and the secularists congratulated
themselves that they had defeated the dragon. Now, a “post-Hindu” India would
develop, and in this secular utopia, the evil of Hindu nationalism would soon
only be a memory. Such was the mind-set of the secularists in 2010: that this
annoying and ridiculous Hinduism would now peter out beyond recovery. (Many
secularists don’t care about Hinduism one way or the other, and not being of
zealous temper, they wouldn’t go out of their way to either protect or destroy
it; but their Muslim and Christian allies are there to provide the dynamic for
its destruction.) At the institutional level, this prediction has proven
spectacularly wrong: only one election later, the BJP enjoys a solid majority.
But that would only be
a reversal if, as Jaffrelot has assumed all his career, the BJP really is a
“Hindu fundamentalist” party. As I have shown in my 1997 book BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence, the BJP uses
Hindu feelings and concerns among the electorate, but isn’t motivated to
struggle for them. The BJP has two reputations among the supposed experts: one,
that it is fanatically Hindu, and two, that it only uses religious “sentiments”
to get into power. Or rather, into office, for “power” means the power to
change things, to realize a plan, and the BJP time-servers don’t have any plan.
They only want to enjoy the perks of office (starting with photo opportunities,
the modern equivalent of trinkets) and be in a position to dole out some jobs
or advantages to their relatives, thus gaining some prestige. There may be some
ideologically committed people in there, the kind who write reader’s letters to
Organiser (quoted here and there by
Jaffrelot as illustration of how fanatically Hindu this movement is) but who
don’t have the opportunists’ knack for climbing into office.
So, the anti-Hindu
power equation that formed the background of Jaffrelot’s book editing, may well
still prevail. The BJP hands out goodies to the Muslim community, and this was
the hallmark of the past Congress Government’s conception of “secularism”. After
nine months, it has not taken up any specifically Hindu concern, though some
points could quietly be realized without ruffling any feathers or antagonizing
the minorities. Some BJP stalwarts told me, truthfully or not, that they don’t
even know about the VHP’s 40-point “Hindu agenda” formulated before the 1996
elections. They let on that, at any rate, they had better things to do than to
deal with these quaint Hindu matters.
The BJP still acts as
if secularism is the dominant ideology. It tries to score points by proving how
secular it really is. When the minorities raise a hue and cry about a Ghar
Wapasi event (as if they themselves hadn’t treated conversions to their own
religion as normal and desirable), the secularists treat it as a scandal, though
they had always laughed off any Hindu concern about conversions – and then the
BJP intervenes to call off the event. It goes on nominating secularists, esp.
in the intellectual sphere. With its inferiority complex and its consistent
refusal to develop its own worldview, it remains servile to hegemonic
secularism. The few specialists on Hindu nationalism, including Jaffrelot, have
failed to give a fair account of their chosen object of study by ignoring the
secularist strand in this movement.
Apology of the RSS
Since even the least
bad of the authors on Hindutva is partisan, the RSS should give an account of
itself. Unfortunately, this is only being done at the level of hagiography.
Regularly the RSS brings out another book full of self-praise, convincing only
the already-convinced. Slightly more factual is ICT consultant and RSS veteran
Ratan Sharda’s Secrets of the RSS.
Demystifying the Sangh (Vishva Adhyayan Kendra, Mumbai, first edition 2011,
second edition 2014). It contains many lesser-known facts and may be useful for
giving a taste of the insider’s perspective. It counters media distortions and
deliberate secularist lies, all while illustrating the secular-leftist mind-set.
That said, we will have to give the writer some feedback on the flaws in his generally
commendable book.
When I first heard of
“Hindu fundamentalism”, I did indeed think of “secrets”. Unlike straightforward
Muslim fundamentalism, the Hindu variety had to be something mysterious, like
Hinduism itself. However, there turned out to be little mysterious about the
Hindu-coloured nationalism taught at RSS gatherings, and nothing deep. RSS
volunteers told me they had for years been practising drills and digesting
sermons about patriotism, but been kept waiting to learn something non-trivial.
The present book
culminates into a chapter that promises to deliver the long-expected
revelation: “The ultimate secret” (p.205-207). Hardly three pages, for the
secret is very simple: the people. RSS members typically have joined or stayed
on because they got inspired by the dedicated selfless personalities of older
RSS workers. The anti-intellectualism of the RSS is defended: ”While people and
organizations supposedly equipped with much better intellectual armoury who
ridiculed the RSS have fallen by the sides in the march of history, RSS has
kept pace and grown with each stride. (…) Any movement must appeal to the heart
to grow and succeed; and its participants must be motivated with live examples
to drive them to give off their best with compassion.”
Well, the Indian Communist
movement, about as old as the RSS and equally spawned by the Bengal
revolutionary movement, has not died yet, though the collapse of its Soviet and
partly its Chinese backers has been a setback. After Modi’s accession to
central power, the Communist Party of India has even decided to bring some
Hinduism into its functioning. But with far fewer people at its disposal, its
anti-Hindu subversion has had a bigger impact than the RSS’s pro-Hindu work.
People’s hearts don’t need an organization, but their minds respond to one. The
RSS’s anti-intellectual poser: “Do you need a book to love your mother?” can be
turned around: “Do you need an organization to love your mother?” By contrast,
to acquire a developed doctrine and the skill to take on the world through it,
you need a structure accumulating and passing on the knowledge required. The
Communists worked on people’s minds and indirectly acquired influence on India’s
hegemonic secularism, effecting the transformation that the RSS deplores and
hopes to counter.
Anyway, the reader
will still like Guru Golwalkar’s formulation of the “secret” , here on p.98: “There
are only two secrets of our work – First is that there is no secret. And second
is, Kabaddi.” This is a native group sport requiring organization: “So much
power was generated by this kabaddi, power that saved lives, honour and wealth
of lacs of people during partition (...) Did we organize conferences or publicize
our views? We only played kabaddi.”
The part about RSS “secretiveness”
(p.208-215) contains only the usual accounts of media double standards, false
allegations brought prominently but the exculpatory outcome buried or never
even mentioned at all, the ostracism of dissenting voices from the
institutions, and other typical tricks used against a helpless RSS. The author
doesn’t seem to notice that the RSS comes across as an extremely slow learner,
mostly taking the slander lying down and never developing a counter-strategy or
acquiring the resources to turn the tables. But he documents how this situation
started with a conscious choice by Gurus KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar to rely
on the spoken word and face-to-face communication.
Controversies
Sharda does mention
Sita Ram Goel’s book Hindu Temples, What
Happened to Them as the key to the Ayodhya affair (p.79 ff.), and that is
already progress. But he does not go into Goel’s actual message: that Muslim
rulers not only destroyed Hindu temples (that much is well-established, and his
list of destroyed temples has often been denounced but never challenged) but
did so as an implementation of Islamic doctrine. Plenty of Hindu ideologues
acknowledge the fact of the destruction but give the soothing explanation that “some
Muslims have misinterpreted the true, tolerant Islam as envisaged by its
founder”. Goel upsets that sweet illusion. It is not just the secularists who ought
to be shaken out of their false beliefs, but also the official Hindu movement.
The RSS has accused really existing Muslims of misconduct but keeps on
flattering Islam.
Then again, though
current developments make this analysis of Islamic doctrine necessary, the RSS
has a point when it defends this non-interest in the contents of Islam as an
existing Hindu tradition No one is asked to first prove the truth of his
religion before being allowed to practise it: “Going by the same yardstick of
scientific evidence, should critics of Islam doubt whether Prophet Mohammed did
indeed hear words of God or Allah? (…) No Hindu should raise such doubts.”
(p.47)
This book will fail to
convince the critics of the RSS. The really controversial issues are insufficiently
addressed. Thus, it is asserted that RSS volunteers suffered imprisonment for
opposing the Emergency dictatorship (including the author, then a student
leader agitating for democracy), but the Left exults in citing the many cases
of RSS prisoners begging for leniency, and this allegation goes unanswered. The
allegation that the RSS remained aloof from the freedom movement, however, is answered with the detail about RSS volunteers’
participation in the Quit India agitation of 1942 (p.233-239) But that too will
fail to convince because the critics will just ignore this book.
The two most common
assertions in any introductory text on Hindu nationalism are that one of theirs
killed Mahatma Gandhi, and that Guru MS Golwalkar was a Nazi. The standard answer
to the first is to deny it (which is only technically true) and to the second,
to deny that Golwalkar wrote the book in which some lines vaguely suggest a
Nazi connection (a transparent lie). I have at length analysed both allegations
and shown the first to be generally true but not causally related to the
murder, and the second to be false. But
the RSS has never made any use of these analyses, so I note with satisfaction
that Sharda does quote me in this regard (p.92, he even accepts my criticism of
their general handling of history research, p.81). He refutes the general
allegation of Nazi inspiration as at any rate impossible, for the RSS and its
rules and culture were already in place when Adolf Hitler became known in
India. In reality, it took its inspiration from Shivaji, secondarily from Sant Tukaram
and Sant Ramdas, and among foreigners, from Giuseppe Mazzini.
Dinosaur
A minor but disturbing
phenomenon about this book, disturbing for the reader’s ease of reading, is the
frequent mistakes against English usage, especially in matters of the article (the and a). Like in the Organiser,
the author has clearly not deemed it worth his while to correct his language or
have it corrected by someone fluent in English. This is illustrative for the
RSS contempt for proper communication, for this way the reader will be less
focused on the message and more on the language. Stunted language indicates
stunted thinking. I am aware that English is difficult and that it ought not to
have this central position in Indian life, but while it is there (due to
Indians’ own volition), it should be used properly.
My opinion on the RSS?
The common volunteers often do sterling work. Thus, the Gathering of the Elders is a beautiful example of international
bridge-building with other pre-Christian communities, achieved by an overseas
RSS office-bearer, Prof. Yashwant Pathak. A delegation from Arunachal Pradesh
testified to me how a handful of RSS men had generated self-organization and mobilization
for survival to the natives against the offensive of the Christian missionaries,
and thus stopped conversions. A well-known journalist testified how in his
district of Kanyakumari, the nervousness and fear of the Hindu community due to
Christian aggression evaporated once the RSS became active there. This book
lists and presents the many initiatives taken by RSS workers on the ground
(p.149-169), of which I particularly want to praise the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram.
Older people have told me about the good work and even self-sacrifice by RSS workers
to save Partition victims or to defend Srinagar airport until the Indian troops
arrived. As this book documents, RSS volunteers have gone out of their way to
save Sikhs during the 1984 Congress-engineered pogrom against them (p.177-179).
So I refrain from calling the RSS a failure. My meetings with RSS foot soldiers
have mainly been positive.
On the other hand, as
SR Goel had observed, “the higher you go, the bigger the duffer you meet”. It is
the leadership that fails, it is the head of the dinosaur that has little
contents. The secularist capture of the institutions and of the dominant
mentality, the once pro-Hindu Western intelligentsia’s turning against Hinduism
(very relevant to India because it likes to emulate Western fashions), the growth
of the minorities and the implanting of anti-Hindu thought among the Scheduled
Castes and Tribes, have all taken place during a period when the RSS claims to
have provided leadership to Hindu society. The cluelessness and inactivity on
the Hindu front by the BJP ministers of the erstwhile Vajpayee and present Modi
governments show the limited (or even reverse) effectiveness of the much-flaunted
RSS grooming. The RSS has always refused to do what a leader does: take stock
of the forces in the field, devise a strategy, and then implement it. This book
cannot overrule that judgment.
A writer on Modi time
Vamsee Juluri,
professor of Media Studies at San Francisco University, exudes the enthusiasm
that gripped most Hindus worldwide when Modi won the elections. In his book Rearming Hinduism. Nature, Hinduphobia and
the Return of Indian Intelligence (Westland, Chennai 2015), he praises not
the RSS, but Hindu civilization.
The most obvious
achievement of this book is to launch into public usage the term Hinduphobia. While I am against this use
of psychiatric-type terms for cultural-political positions, it has the merit of
adapting the now-current term Islamophobia
to the situation of Hinduism, which is far more unfairly treated. While Islam
benefits of a very positive prejudice among politicians and in the media,
prompting them to twist any negative news facts including frequent and
large-scale terrorist acts into occasions for taking and expressing pity on the
poor hapless Muslims, Hindus don’t even have to do anything to earn plenty of hostile
stereotypes and plain abuse, while their genuine victimization in countries
like Bangladesh goes unmentioned.
The book dilates upon the
positive sides of Hinduism and the values it instils: “You will not forget that
somewhere, somehow, your grandmother taught you, even if your science teacher
didn’t, that your pleasure cannot be truly pleasurable if it is rooted in the
pain of another living being.” (p. 171)
The most prominent
target of the author’s criticism is Wendy Doniger’s book An Alternative History of the Hindus. It is falsely called “alternative”,
for there is no official history with which it contrasts. On the contrary, it
creates the same negative account of Hindu history as the British colonizers
and the Nehruvian hegemons did. It is also full of errors and in the US such a
flippant collection of faux witticisms would be unthinkable as an account of the
more established religions.
A somewhat negative
point is the author’s heavy reliance on Edward Said’s unjustly influential book
Orientalism, elsewhere exposed as
conspiratorial and full of errors, as well as pro-Islamic and thus by
implication anti-Hindu. This serves to underpin a heavy anti-Westernism, of
which I have become increasingly sceptical. It is usually an escapist focus for
those who want to avoid the demands on themselves of so-called “Western”
scholarship and the challenge of Islam, apart from the actual criticism being
partly wrong on facts, e.g. on the pro-Islamic role of the colonizers (cfr. The
British alliance with the Muslim League against
the Hindus) who are falsely depicted as neo-crusaders. On the other hand,
Juluri explores new trails of anti-Western criticism, and these are rather sensible
Thus, he finds that the Western mind easily projects violent scenarios and
explanations on natural processes, e.g. in evolution theory. But Hindu
experience is that life is only to a very limited extent a struggle, and mostly
a matter of cooperation and harmony.
All the same, this
book is a milestone. It is lucid, pleasant, well-written, liberal in the good
sense of the term, in tune with the scientific worldview all while avoiding
narrow scientism, and speaks the language of contemporary culture all while
being informative about and respectful of tradition. It is not “Hindu
Nationalist”, just Hindu, and proud of it.
