Peoples' Movements Against Fascist Hinduism
Tanika Sankar
www.womenutc. com
We celebrate the coming together of peoples' movements that in innumerable ways
oppose and resist the domination of global capital. The event fills me with a
sense of incredulous wonder. Wonder is obvious; so many movements all over the
world refuse to accept the ways of capital as the laws of Nature, given and
unalterable. But there is a sense of unreality about it as well, as I stand
here and think of the time and place in which this is happening. In our
country, all around us, forces of fascism are consolidating themselves. What,
then, is the relationship between the time of fascism and the time of global
markets, or between anti-fascist struggles and social movements?
In a sense, the links are obvious. A politics built around ethnic violence and
hatred surfaced almost irresistibly from the end of the 80s. This coincided
with India's embrace of the dictates of the global monetary institutions.
Similarly, movements for social justice have repeatedly encountered violent
opposition from the institutions of ethnic hatred. Almost everywhere, struggles
for secular democracy and social movements have been intertwined. So have been
the agents of capital and of ethnic violence.
I'll give you two examples. In this city, a very powerful and effective trade
union movement among cotton mill workers was smashed by a political
organization – the Shiv Sena - that was also engaged in violence against Indian
Muslims and Christians. The Sena, like other Hindu extremist organisations, is
equally aggressive against the politics of cultural, political, religious and
sexual self determination. We may also recall how, during the Gujarat pogroms
a year and a half back, Medha Patkar was assaulted in full view of national
television cameras and had a very narrow escape. The Hindu fascists reacted
not just to her message of peace. Her movement against the big dam on the
Narmada river, her efforts to protect the environment and the livelihood of
thousands who are displaced by the dam, made her a threat to the rich in
Gujarat who see great commercial possibilities in the dam. So, the politics of
capital and ethnic hatred on the
one hand, and the politics of peace, secularism and social justice, on the
other, do not live on two different realms, locked in two separate struggles.
They are interdependent, contesting the common terrain of democracy.
At the same time, it would be wrong to dissolve Hindu extremism into the
phenomenon of multinational capital entirely, to see it as a mere effect or
symptom of global economic forces. For it is the ideology of Hindu
majoritarianism, its call for the establishment of Hindu nationhood that
provides it with its basic energies.
First, what is Hindu Extremism? Very briefly, it is a politics of replacing the
secular-democratic constitution of India, which guarantees equality to all
religions, with a polity which calls the nation Hindu and which designates
Indian Christians and Muslims as alien to the Indian civilisation: as foreign
implants, stooges of the British or of Pakistan.
But the politics does not stop with religious majoritarianism and ethnic
hatred. Their denial of the equality of religions is extended continuously into
an attack against all other concepts of equal rights which are then branded as
divisive, anti-national and foreign. Peace movements or calls for nuclear
disarmament have been branded as anti national for the Hindu nation must be
aggressive and armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. Movements
against caste oppression, are similarly seen as a ploy to weaken the Hindu
unity against Muslims and foreign powers. Anti-poverty issues are projected as
divisive for the same reason while gender justice is reprimanded as western
feminism that seeks to destroy Hindu domestic discipline and the innocent
chastity and sweet submissiveness of our women. In the name of authentic
Hindu-national values, textbooks have been rewritten and syllabi reformulated,
films and art objects vandalised, books banned,
lifestyles policed and disciplined. And, of course, there have been massacres
of Muslims and Christians.
All this as yet unfolds within the structures of parliamentary democracy. This
is not unknown to history, for Hitler, too, was voted into power. The
question, however, remains, how could this be done? How could ordinary people,
on the whole as decent and humane as anywhere else in the world, become so
widely complicit with, or indifferent to, the savagery and inhumanity that are
written into the activities of Hindu militarists? For the Hindu Rightwing is
not a small, hidden band of terrorists, insulated from the rest of society.
They now include middle class, upper caste professionals and traders, tribals
and low castes, women and men, urban workers and villagers. And their
supporters – these ordinary men and women - not only just vote for them, they
also kill, torture and rape. They kill people who are not a direct threat in
any physical, economic or political sense, but are profoundly helpless and
vulnerable minorities, deprived of
educational, social or political clout. They kill children, babies, unborn
foetuses. On the streets of Ahmadabad, on the days of Gujarat genocide, little
Muslim children ran towards homes of their Hindu playmates for shelter till
they saw that the mobs consisted of the fathers of their friends. At Khurjah,
a Muslim boy, hiding from Hindu extremists whispered to a team of us
investigating the violence "I saw my teacher kill my father."
What this indicates is an exceptionally flexible and innovative notion of
hegemonic politics. Hindu extremism is not merely an electoral force. It is a
multifaceted organisational structure with many fronts that seep into
innumerable capillaries of civil society. It commands temple networks,
priests, schools and charitable institutions, it provides daily training
programmes to millions in martial combat and in Hindu militant ideology, it
controls cinema and TV stations, electronic and print media, it disseminates
popular tracts and children's literature. It runs trade unions and women's
organisations. It, therefore, penetrates into and makes over, leisure, faith,
education and politics. It makes over the commonsense of ordinary people.
This, moreover, is a politics that is over 80 years old, with links at one
time, with Italian and German fascism. Golwalkar, the ideological guru of
Hindu extremism, wrote in 1938:
German national pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the
purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging
the country of the semitic races… National pride at its highest has been
manifest here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races
and cultures, having differences ....to be assimilated into one united whole, a
good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.. the non-Hindu people
in Hindustan ..may stay in this country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation
claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, ...not even citizens' rights.
Golwalkar revered Hitler as a model for Hindu extremism. His able successors
have outdone in many ways the Nazi gas chambers. The burning alive of sleeping
Christian children or the prolonged torture, rape, dismemberment of Muslim
women or the pulling out of Muslim foetuses from wombs and roasting them had
been done in open daylight, on the streets, in front of the eyes of the world
without an attempt at concealment. The survivors were not given any relief by
the state nor have the named perpetrators been punished.
As I said, violence is not the end of Hindu Rightwing politics. Let me go
back to other aspects of Golwalkar's teachings which remain paradigmatic. When
independence came to India, he was profoundly disturbed by the new political
order, based on universal adult franchise, affirmative action for untouchables,
and parliamentary democracy. He reminded Indians that monarchy had been the
authentic Hindu political order and cautioned that "democracy will poison....
the peace and tranquility of the human mind." Equality was pernicious and
alien to Hindu thinking, unleashing competition and "warring egos." Indian
society needs to revert to a principle of order and stability that had
traditionally been founded on hereditary privilege and labour; in other words,
the institution of caste which he designated as "a great bond of social
cohesion" sanctified by the Vedas and other sacred classics. He congratulated
himself that his organization
was not made up from people of the lower strata of social life where people
act together like crows flocking together for a piece of flesh.
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya softened the language of power and privilege. He talked
not so much of the filth of the lower orders as of the interrelated mutuality
and organic wholeness of the caste system and of the regimes of labour and
capital whose health depended not on conflict or competition but on acceptance
of social divisions in the interests of a regnant nation.
Where the political rule of the Hindu Right has made the most insidious
and the most profound difference is to the discourse of social justice and
equality and welfare. In post-Independence India, the great, unforgettable
fact of Indian poverty was openly admitted even in ruling class proclamations,
though precious little was done about it. But, at least notionally, the
admission left a space open for welfare projects, social security, safety nets.
The public sector undertakings offered better employment terms to workers as
well as a larger measure of job security.
When the present government, dominated by the Hindu Right came into power, the
first budget speech by the Finance Minister was revealing. Industrialists were
to be allowed unlimited retrenchment capacities at will, interest rate on small
savings was slashed and all obligations to revive sick industries were
dropped. As a future project, it was suggested that privatisation of all
industries except strategic ones would be allowed. The formal sector of
employment which was kinder in terms of workers' wages and job conditions, was
to be reduced considerably through unrestricted "outsourcing" of labour through
short term contract jobs. Subsidies and public services were accused of
creating backlogs and blockages in growth rates.. The idea of growth became
one without minimal welfare or livelihood protection for the poorest people who
form the effective majority of the country.
These are but a few symptoms of a large transformation in a structure of
priorities that extends from governmental circles to popular constituencies.
The transformation would perhaps have occurred under any other political
formation in a somewhat mitigated form, given the pressures from global
monetary powers. The peculiar value of the Hindu Right to world capitalism
lies in that, alongside its compliance with the general directions, it also
delivers a system of moral values and principles that subvert older promises
and expectations. In the name of a strong Hindu nation, social movements for
justice are getting outlawed, at least within the new moral order. Hindu
devotionalism, which, in the past, had mobilised for struggles of the weak
against the strong, is now regimented within an order of obedience, deference
and submission. In sharp contrast to Gandhi's concept of Ramrajya, which
enjoined peasants to challenge colonialism,
the present worship of Ram and Hanuman exalt the principles of servitude and
servility. Bonds of deference and obedience are projected as the only possible
relationship between the powerless and the powerful.
As the demonising of Muslims meshes with imperialist strategies of the US war
machine, so do the new public values of a militaristic Hindu nation serve the
goals of international capitalism. Without this new moral economy, the
commands of the new economic order would find many more resistances in a
democratic India.
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