Nation-building à la RSS-BJP
When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, it seemed obvious to some that Narendra Modi’s government was going to aggressively remodel India into the nation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has always yearned for — Hindu chauvinist, theocratic, patriarchal, anti-Communist, anti-minority, and anti-“foreign”. Why obvious? After nearly 70 years in the wilderness, this is the RSS-BJP’s first (and maybe only) shot at high-impact nationbuilding, armed with a parliamentary majority and a Prime Minister nurtured in its fold. That’s the sound of opportunity knocking at the door. They’d be daft not to open wide.
Those who said this were dismissed as alarmists. “This is exactly the kind of extremist nonsense that hardens Hindus,” went the rebuttal from those who chose to de-contextualise the BJP and its leaders from their ideological roots, and to edit out the saffron dog-whistling in Mr Modi’s election campaigns.
Well, here we are, four years later, picking our way through the debris of that rebuttal. The RSS-BJP is building the nation of its dreams, pink-cheeked from win after electoral win in the last four years.
But it is not enough to win elections; all conquerors must win hearts and minds. Legacies are cemented by seeding physical and mental cues that reset the way people think.
The speed at which this project is proceeding is measurable in terms of the things that have gone from radioactive to normal. Five years ago, for all of the shortcomings of previous governments, the word ‘anti-national’ was not part of daily life. Five years ago the media was compromised, but did not serve as outright public relations for the government. Cattle fairs, slaughterhouses and the leather industry were thriving without fear of people’s lives. Citizens weren’t being made to prove their patriotism, least of all at the movies. Lovers were not being hauled out of hotel rooms for violating ‘Indian values’. Dissenters were not being told to go to Pakistan. The government did not openly justify bigotry. Science was not being degraded in the name of culture. People were not in court fighting to retain control of their bank accounts in the face of the Aadhaar Act. Army jawans were not denied a week’s pay for not appending the term ‘honourable’ before the Prime Minister’s name.
These things are now normal. Statues — building them in Gujarat, or tearing them down in Tripura and Kerala — are an obvious way to reconfigure the national imagination. Renaming roads helps. Giant hoardings of the Prime Minister’s face eclipse his many opponents. Flags serve as an aggressive
show of strength, as when men with swords attempted to place the BJP flag on the roof of a mosque in Uttar Pradesh after the state elections last year. The bhagwa dhwaj, the RSS’s saffron flag, is more menacingly visible, as when Hindu groups unfurled it at the entrance of the district and sessions court in Udaipur last year to show support for Shambhulal Regar, the man who posted a film of himself murdering a Muslim man with an axe, then burning his body, in Rajasthan.
This nation-building project has alternative icons — such as they are. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are being replaced by Deendayal Upadhyaya, the man who resented successful Muslims and criticised the distinction made between history and folklore, and V D Savarkar, who petitioned the British for mercy multiple times when he was in prison and dubbed himself ‘Veer’ Savarkar in a pamphlet he wrote pseudonymously.
Propaganda is vital, and the RSSBJP uses social media with ruthless efficacy. But the golden goose is the education system. It is in that context that the government’s Union Minister for Culture, Mahesh Sharma — the same Cabinet minister
who draped the tricolour on the corpse of one of the men accused of Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder — has set up a committee to rewrite Indian history. This minister believes that the Ramayana is a historical document, that the ancient scriptures are factual, and that Hindus are descended from the earliest inhabitants of this land.
The RSS-BJP political alignment is not bursting with brains. It is driven by the emotive, playing on fear, ego, religious sentiment, safety in numbers, and the impulse to dominate. Muslims are taking over! Hindus are being insulted! India is the oldest and best at everything! Majoritarianism over individual rights! Here’s what we say is your culture, follow it or else!
Changing the character of India is a matter of putting seeds in the soil of the information system, and letting time pass. India will then reap a vast bitter crop of brainwashed, illinformed young people to take forward the mission of building an insecure, small-minded, thin-skinned nation that foments fear and hatred. It will certainly be a New India.
But it remains to be seen how many citizens of the old India take to it.