Hostile intentions

Fifty years after partition, communalism is undermining the foundations of India's secular democracy. Achin Vanaik calls for a popular, progressive force to defend diversity and fight for the rights of all the people

Over a million lives were lost in the Partition that created Pakistan and India in August 1947. A few months later in January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi was shot by a fanatical Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, a one-time member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or National Volunteer Corps. The public trauma of these opening acts was so great that India enjoyed relative communal peace for the first three decades of its history as a free country. It was the commonly held belief then that never again would this communal beast be allowed to rear its head. This was not to be.

Today, Hindu communalism, embodied in the organisations that make up the Sangh Combine, threatens to overturn India's one great achievement of the last 50 years ­ its preservation of a real and functioning liberal democratic political system. The RSS, the parent body in the Sangh, is estimated to have two million ideologically committed members. Its political-electoral wing is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which, with 162 seats in the 542-member Lower House (Lok Sabha), is the single largest party in the country, though a United Front of 13 non-Congress and non-BJP parties currently governs. The BJP's rise since it won two seats in 1984 has been truly dramatic.

The Sangh's international wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council (which is also active in Britain, the USA and the Netherlands) pursues cultural activities in an aggressive and often explicitly anti-Muslim manner. Despite tensions between these three bodies they work broadly in tandem in pursuit of their basic goal - the establishment of a Hindu Nation and State or 'Hindu Rashtra'. This would be the death knell of Indian democracy. So grave would be the consequences of the Sangh's winning power to shape India in its own image as a cultural and political monolith ­ not only for the 12 per cent of Indians who are Muslim ­ that most on the left have been tempted to see such an outcome as a form of Indian fascism.

Fortunately, we are still a considerable distance from such a worst-case scenario. India remains an extraordinarily diverse and segmented society; this obstructs the thrust of the Sangh Combine towards centralised uniformity. But it should never be doubted that the BJP has an authoritarian agenda which it would try to carry out.

But how did India arrive at this danger point? The watershed was the beginning of the decline of the Congress some 30 years ago. Until then, there had been a fair measure of economic and social progress. Liberal democratic institutions had established their place, there was reasonable social cohesion, and a policy of foreign non-alignment seemed to best meet the needs of the growing national bourgeoisie. These first two decades of Indian freedom were the era of the Nehruvian Consensus, dominated and defined as it was by Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister from 1947 to 1964.

The founding principles of this Nehruvian nation-building were state socialism, secularism and non-alignment. But secularism in practice all too often involved an active balancing and promotion of different communalisms, in the name of showing 'equal respect to all religions'. In the post-Nehru political vacuum, this was simply a recipe for instability. The Emergency of 1975-77 was an attempt to overcome instability in a decisive and authoritarian manner. Yet not only was this Emergency mild compared to the average Third World dictatorship but its collapse was another affirmation of the vibrancy of the democratic system. Nonetheless, the Indian paradox, of instability plus democracy, is apparent in the overall drift towards 'authoritarian democracy'. Indian democracy is undemocratic and violent at the micro level, yet at the macro level it is very difficult to institutionalise authoritarian rule.

As in the case of many other emerging elites in the Third World, the Indian elite wanted to pursue a path of capitalist development but at the same time maximise the national independence of its class and of the Indian state. They succeeded for a time ­ but at a cost for the hidebound Congress. The social base for Congress had been the landed elite and the rural habitations they controlled. The industrial classes were not the only new social groups outside Congress domination; so too was the rising 'kulak' class with its mass of aspiring capitalist family farmers. And becoming more volatile in their loyalties were the 'core minorities' of Muslims, Dalits (Untouchables) and tribals, making up close to 40 per cent of the electorate. Congress rhetoric had raised their expectations, but state practice had failed to deliver. Delivery on social justice now seems further away than ever.

Up to the early eighties India had the most insulated of large Third World economies. It was both among the most advanced of these economies in the diversity of its industry and skill patterns, and among the most backward when judged by standard indices of poverty, social welfare, literacy and health. A powerful bourgeoisie had emerged, as had tens of millions of consumers who could afford more expensive commodities. This, along with growing neo-liberal influence on the apex of the Indian bureaucracy made possible the rightward economic shift in the 1980s. This has pulled India towards integration into the world economy along the lines espoused by IMF/World Bank doctrines of devaluation, deregulation and deflation.

The key government measure here was Congress's new economic policy of 1991 when it accepted a 'long-term solution' of Structural Adjustment and Stabilisation drawn up by the IMF/World Bank. Commitments to social justice were thrown out of the window in pursuit of a more polarised and unequal economic model.

In the five years since, the proportion of those living below the poverty line has remained between 36 and 40 per cent. Annual average growth remains at a little over 1 per cent in agriculture and allied activities, 4.5 per cent in industry but around 10 per cent in services with the elite end of the market booming. But agriculture and industry together account for two-thirds of national income and four-fifths of national employment opportunities. Meanwhile, primary and secondary education and basic health care for the poor languish, while private tertiary education preparing internationally mobile professionals, and private state-of-the art hospitals charging exorbitant fees, are flourishing. India's literacy rate is a dismal 52 per cent while China has near total literacy, yet neoliberals boast that India has six times as many college students as China and will soon dominate the world software market.

The appeal of the Sangh's communalism lies not in the newness of its message but in the new receptivity resulting from the decline of the Congress. The Sangh's ability to promote its shopworn message of building Hindu unity through organising hostility to the Muslim 'other' was immensely enhanced by the ideological vacuum left by the disarray of Congress. In fact the impact of the Sangh's message depends on the external pressure for Hindu unity. Hinduism itself is a very heterogeneous culture, lacking any single unifying principle. The Sangh has put Congress on the defensive by forcing it to dilute its secular tradition.

The Sangh also had the best and most committed cadre force. The Sangh's historical presence and substantial roots in the northern states of India put it in the best place to gain from the Congress decline. The cadre of the mainstream left, primarily the Communist Party of India Marxist, has suffered massive bureaucratisation and had its ideology eroded, not least because of the corrupting influence of over 20 years of unbroken rule in West Bengal state.

Most important, the Sangh was the one force prepared to play the polarising politics of mass mobilisation for communal status. Here the campaign to destroy the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, falsely alleged to have been built after razing an earlier temple supposedly commemorating the birthplace of the mythical Hindu God-King Rama, was absolutely crucial. This hate-provoking campaign propelled the BJP and its cohorts to national prominence even as it divided India. When Mahatma Gandhi was killed his last words were 'He Ram!' or 'Oh God!'. Today, the ideological and political forces morally responsible for his death have usurped Gandhi's invocation of that very God-King to promote a conception of militant Hinduism that neither Gandhi nor 'Ram' stands for.

The left did not pursue the politics of aggressive counter-mobilisation and mass confrontation. It did not engage in the struggle for mass cultural-political hegemony. Instead, it relied on the 'secular' state to fight such forces.

For Indian progressives to combat the communal danger they must understand the broad 'field of force' that exists today,and consciously intervene in it to move Indian society and polity in the desired direction. What are the forces whose interplay will shape that 'field of force' over the next 10 to 15 years? 

There are six features.

1. Hindu communalisation of Indian polity and society.

2. The forward march of the Backward (or intermediate) castes. Between the Brahmins and upper castes (together roughly 25 per cent of Hindus) and the Dalits-tribals (roughly 23 per cent) are the 52 per cent Backwards, themselves hierarchically organised. Led by its upper echelons, the Backwards have been asserting themselves and even on occasions forged an alliance with Dalits to confront the upper castes. Culturally, the Backwards can be attracted to the upward mobility offered by Sangh ideology through identification with the broader entity of 'Hindus'. But there is growing tension between the rise of the Backwards within the BJP and the desire of the upper castes to hold on to power.

3. There is Dalit assertion as never before. Unlike in the West, the most downtrodden in India are not the most politically apathetic but the reverse. Dalits are no longer content simply to trade their support to a centrist party, but want to have power directly themselves. This is of profound and positive significance for India's future.

4. Muslim ferment is growing. There is now a generation of young Muslims born after Partition and a growing and sizeable middle class replacing that which migrated to Pakistan. It is the secular problems of decent education, employment and social progress that most concern them and not issues of 'Muslimness' which the traditional conservative and Mullah leaderships have always promoted as their way of maintaining a hold on the community. Indeed, the growing Hindu communalism has pushed Muslims not into an equivalent 'politics of Muslimness' but into searching for secular alliances to confront the rising danger of the 'politics of Hinduness'.

5. The regionalisation of national politics in India is now a fact. The political space left by the Congress (though its decline should not be presumed to be terminal) has been occupied in part by the BJP, in part by regional political formations. This does not mean that coalition rule is inescapable at the centre. But regional forces are a new and powerful reality whose interests will have to be taken seriously by any force willing to stabilise its rule at the centre.

6. There is the rise of a hedonistic, self-centred upper class which is both enamoured of westernising-globalising values and also insecure enough to be attracted to the cultural essentialism of the Sangh. They are fertile ground for the emergence of an explicitly right-wing political force.

A new progressive force will have to respond to all these new developments with a new vision which is more socially just and people-oriented than the old Nehruvian one; and it will also have to construct a political vehicle to pursue that vision.

That vision can only be a new social democracy. The vehicle will have to be made from the existing left and the best currents within the most noteworthy of the new social movements (the women's, ecology and tribal movements). Organisationally, it will have to be more innovative, searching for stable political party connections between the left and other secular and progressive regional forces. It will need more enduring forms of co-operation with the best of the social movement structures, the variety of civil liberties and progressive citizen's groups, the workers' and other co-operatives, all of which are growing but scattered across the social landscape.

Finally, on the ideological and programmatic level, a New Social Democracy must pursue a more universalist politics of social justice which both incorporates and goes beyond the 'identity politics' of any one group. If the short-term task is to prevent the Sangh from coming to central power, the longer-term task is to further secularise and de-communalise Indian civil society, something best done by empowering ordinary people, economically, politically and socially. So a new social democracy would have to be a contemporary form of national politics that seeks to humanise Indian capitalism and to prepare for transcending it.

Such a vision must reject the neo-liberal pattern of globalisation in which poverty and illiteracy have become more entrenched, and opt for an economic programme in which India's integration into the world economy can produce advantages for the poor. The lessons of the East Asian experience are clear.

The contexts where the challenges to neoliberalism must be waged are not only in India and other 'Third World' countries but include western Europe. Though East Asian progress is a refutation of neoliberalism, this part of the world could never provide an ideological counter to the dominance of an Anglo-American neo-liberalism. Western Europe (possibly excluding Britain) is the only part of the world still holding out to some extent, and could launch such a challenge.

Achin Vanaik is the author of The Furies of Indian Communalism: religion, modernity and secularism published by Verso.