The Concerned Indian's Guide to Communalism
edited by K. N. Panikkar; Viking; pages 252, Rs.395.
The show
of moderation is deceptive and is intended to deceive. Atal Behari
Vajpayee does not enjoy command over the Bharatiya Janata Party. It
suits its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), to leave him
alone till it is able to muster a solid majority in its own right. The
allies will then be discarded - along with the mask of moderation. None
should be surprised at the recent recruitments made to the BJP. Some
joined it for the lure of power, others were closet Hindutva
adherents anyw ay.
The
situation lends added relevance to this collection of essays edited by
an academic who combines scholarly pursuits with active espousal of
causes he holds dear. Professor of Modern History at the Centre for
Historical Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, K. N. Panikkar
has written extensively on the cultural and intellectual history of
modern India.
An
anguished concern at the present situation is reflected all over his
incisive introduction. A religious concept of nationhood led to India's
Partition. The two-nation theory was propounded by V. D. Savarkar in his
book Hindutva in 1924. M. A. Jinnah b egan to advocate it from 1939
onwards. But as Nehru wrote in his Autobiography, "many a
Congressman was a communalist under his nationalist cloak."
Rajeshwar Dayal's memoirs, A Life of Our Times (1998), record
how, as Chief Secretary of Utt ar Pradesh, he found damning evidence of
the RSS boss M. S. Golwalkar's complicity in a conspiracy to stage
anti-Muslim pogroms but the man was protected by the Chief Minister,
Govind Ballabh Pant, from arrest and prosecution. Pant foiled Nehru's
and Pat el's attempts to undo the forcible conversion of the Babri
Mosque into a Hindu temple in the night on December 22/23, 1949.
Gandhi's
assassination and Nehru's strong commitment kept the Hindutva forces at
bay. The situation has "changed dramatically, particularly during
the past two decades", Panikkar writes. Hindu communalism has
spread its tentacles in civil society and als o succeeded in gaining
access to state power. In the process some of the vital principles and
practices of a secular state and society have been either undermined or
endangered. The essays collected in this volume seek "to join the
public debate made imp erative by the communal initiatives taken by the
government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party" during its brief term
and by the social and cultural interventions of the members of the Sangh
Parivar, particularly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the RSS a nd the
Bajrang Dal.
The
contributors are writers of repute, each distinguished in his/her own
intellectual discipline. It is only appropriate that historians should
lead the charge against obsucrantism. "For, the Hinduised history
is a deliberate construction, which seeks t o valourise the Hindu in the
chequered history of the nation. It traces the lineage of the nation to
the ancient Hindu past, claims the Hindu scriptures as the source of all
knowledge, the Indian civilisation as superior to every other
civilisation, and ancient India's achievement in science, mathematics
and other branches of knowledge as unsurpassed by other civilisations.
The political history of India is interpreted as a record of the heroic
Hindu resistance against foreigners and the last one thousa nd years as
a period of continuous conflict between the Hindus and Muslims."
Panikkar
recalls that a Maharashtrian intellectual in the mid-19th century,
Bhaskar Pandurang Tarkadkar, distinguished the Muslim rulers from the
British. The only instance of foreign rule in India, he held, was
British colonial rule. Although they ruled for about 200 years the
British distanced themselves from Indian society. Unlike earlier rulers
such as Mughals and Turks, they drained wealth out of India.
"The
politics of Hindutva, as the essays in this volume bring out, is
primarily engaged in defining the nation as Hindu through a process of
cultural homogenisation, social consolidation and political mobilisation
of the majority community and at the sam e time, by stigmatising the
minorities as aliens and enemies."
ROMILA
THAPAR, one of India's foremost historians, metes out deserved justice
to the communal interpretation of India's history, a subject on which
she has written extensively. British contribution to the writing of
India's history was baleful in its per iodisation of Indian history as
that of the Hindu, Muslim and British periods. Muslim and Hindu
communalists took over and constructed two monolithic communities,
uniformly hostile, utterly free from diversities, immune to interaction
and indifferent to a nationalism transcending the communal divide.
Romila
Thapar writes: "The tragedy is that actually the study of the past
sends us very different messages but we choose not to read them. Indian
society has always been a multi-religious, multicultural society where
identities have inevitably been multi ple. Such a society is not in
itself secular but is conducive to the evolving of a secular society
protecting the civil and human rights of all its citizens. Our history
in India has been very different from that projected in the two-nation
theory and th e Hindutva ideology. If we can read our history with more
sensitivity and insight, it would contribute to avoiding a fascist
future."
What
Nehru wrote of the Hindu Mahasabha applies to the RSS and its political
front, the BJP. Their communalism "masquerades under a nationalist
cloak," he wrote, and added insightfully: "The test comes when
a national and democratic solution happens to i njure upper-class Hindu
interests." It is a test in which the Mahasabha "repeatedly
failed". So have the RSS and the BJP, repeatedly.
As Jayati
Ghosh writes in her incisive analysis of the economic underpinnings,
"In the Hindutva world view, the only internal enemies are those
determined by social and cultural differences. There is no recognition
of classes or even of domestic economic antagonisms in this perspective,
and therefore no understanding of the constraining role on development
which can be played by certain classes such as large landed interests
and big capital." She points out that while the Hindutva brigade's
rhetoric is majoritarian, "in actuality it represents the interests
of a very small minority - typically male upper-class and upper caste -
and even of a relatively small sub-section within that group."
Tanika
Sarkar's essay exposes "the gender predicament of the Hindu
Right" with a wealth of documentation carefully sourced. She points
out a curious feature of its behaviour which has been overlooked. The
Sangh Parivar consciously projects women to the f orefront. But
"the women who are thus exalted do not come from women's
organisations, nor do they have prominent bases among the women of their
own political clusters. They also are quite indifferent to women's
issues, problems and demands."
Sumit
Sarkar's essay on conversions records how the fight against Christian
missionary activity was an early plank of the Jan Sangh. Even as Prime
Minister, A.B. Vajpayee sees nothing wrong in sponsoring officially
(January 10, 1999) a debate on the righ t to practise and propagate
one's religion. Rajeev Dhavan's analysis of the constitutional
implications of the secular credo rises far above the level of arid
legalism common to most lawyers. His interests are wide and his research
is extensive.
Siddharth
Varada-rajan caps the contributions with one of the ablest analyses of
the role of the media yet written. He is one of the rare breed who can
effortlessly glide from academia to journalism and back. The thesis is
made good convincingly. "Mass m edia's tendency to fragment news
serves to depoliticise the body politic... When combined with
fragmentation, the immediacy of news generates individual passivity and
a public sphere that is generally inert except when the mass media
itself is used by po wer politics to mobilise it. In the context of
communalism in India, the layers of combustible myths which accumulate
around most riots as time passes make this kind of memoryless media all
the more manipulatory and dangerous."
Nuances
and complexity are shunned in "junk food journalism, which one
author has labelled 'News McNuggets'." Varadarajan's essay, the
longest in the volume, briefly surveys the history of Indian journalism
to show how the communal slant became pronounce d over the years.
"Most Indian newspapers in the latter part of the nineteenth
century had internalised the colonial political culture to such an
extent that even when colonialism was challenged or excoriated, it was
often from a 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' poin t of view. Even language became a
bone of contention. The Urdu-Hindi divide began shortly after the advent
of British rule and was reflected in some newspapers using Devanagari
and others the Persian script."
Some
grave errors of lasting consequence were made by the Congress, not
least, by Gandhi. His "tendency in his capacity as a Congress
leader, to use 'we' and 'us' when referring to Hindus has also been
criticised for its alienating effect on Muslims. See R. Palme Dutt, Inside
India Today, London, 1940; page 326," a footnote points out.
Coming to
present times, Siddharth Varadarajan discusses the role of the media
during moments of trial - the Punjab crisis and the anti-Sikh riots; the
Shah Bano case, the Ayodhya movement and the communal riots of which
there seems to be no end. The Sha h Bano case, for instance, was
essentially a gender issue. The BJP made it a communal one. Large
sections of the media played the same tune.
"As
a manager of news, the BJP has proved to be much more skilful than the
Congress or any other political formation in the country. In the run-up
to the Ayodhya agitation, the party pioneered the use of press releases,
leaks and press conferences, which took place on more or less a daily
basis, thereby ensuring that the BJP and its activities and views
received continuous and prominent coverage in the newspapers. According
to the media analysts Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma, the BJP's forte is
the creat ion and management of the pseudo-event."
The print
media is not the only culprit, Doordarshan and All India Radio played no
mean role. Contrast Doordarshan's treatment of the film Tipu Sultan
with its generosity towards Ramayana whose serialisation many now
acknowledge was a mista ke of great consequence.
It is a
very thought-provoking contribution, altogether. "Communalism in
the media is a problem but it is only an instantiation of the largely
undemocratic nature of the mass media. What we need, therefore, is
journalism which raises the level of discuss ion in society by
addressing the concerns of the people. In modern market economies, two
obstacles need to be overcome. The first is the market mechanism
itself."
The other
is the stranglehold of the state. It is able to influence media coverage
and mould public opinion. In India, for example, the police and
paramilitaries are considered to be the authority on questions of law
and order; the Reserve Bank of India, the Union Finance Ministry and
investment banks on the economy; and the Defence Ministry and
quasi-government think-tanks like the Institute for Defence Studies and
Analyses, the last word on issues of defence and national security.
Journalists looking for an objective assessment turn mostly to officials
from institutions."
In
bringing such a fine group of thinkers around the table for an informed
discussion, Panikkar has rendered no small service.
(Source:
Frontline, August 28-September 10, 1999)