IDEOLOGICAL STATE
IT HAS BEEN NOTICED BY MANY THAT THE Indian republic today is slipping into a perilously dangerous zone of losing its moorings. Scholars have seen this coming, with the constitutional soul of India being given a ‘thousand cuts.’i The arrival of an authoritarian dictatorship is also evident in the way its institutions are increasingly being rendered hollow.ii A more appropriate frame to understand this change is the emergence of an ideological state, as society and polity are rapidly being transformed into both sites of discursive and physical violence, shattering in the process the unique democratic arrangement envisioned by the founders of India’s democratic republic.iii A very violent Hindu communal ideology has rapidly been enthroned replacing secular nationalism as the guiding principle of the state.
Indian nationalism, as it evolved through the anti-colonial freedom movement, saw the coming together of diverse people of the Indian subcontinent into a nation, defined by an acceptance of their diversity into a shared foundation of secular and democratic principles and an acceptance of the telos of a ‘just and equal society’. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the fountainhead of Hindu communal ideology, however, never embraced this template.iv For the Sangh and its intellectual mentors, India (Bharat) had always existed as a ‘Hindu nation’, which was vanquished by foreign marauders, mostly Muslims, and the only duty left was to reestablish that Hindu nation once the British left India. The RSS and associated Hindu communal groups such as the Hindu Mahasabha used the open and democratic space available to them, even after their being under a cloud of suspicion for assassinating the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, and actively propagated their ideas against the secular democratic character of the Indian polity. Literature, rumours and electoral rhetoric as well as their active role in fomenting communal riots have sustained communalisation of society on the one hand and allowed anti-democratic trends to be part of Indian politics on the other.v
Lacking in public affirmation of their ideology, however, the RSS trained its political formation, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to capture the state and state apparatus to institutionalise the basic postulates of its communal ideas into an institutional and governing structure of the state. Whenever, therefore, the Sangh Parivar became part of state power either at the provincial or the Union levels in 1977, 1997 and 2014, they prioritised instilling the idea of a ‘Hindu nation’ as the normal template for Indian nationhood as against the idea of a secular state.
However, modern Indian nationhood and a great part of nationalism and the republican sensibilities of contemporary Indians were a product of the way the
freedom movement was fought and the ideas of citizenship, secularism, socialism, internationalism and constitutionalism became ingrained in common knowledge and sensibilities. Hence, Hindu communal formations also needed to delegitimise the repertoire of all such modern sensibilities, as the idea of a ‘Hindu nation’ did violence to these modern sensibilities. Thus, the Hindu communal ideology was to be anchored as the normal and natural template for India’s modern political, social and cultural sensibilities. The work involved twin processes, namely, delegitimisation of the modern democratic and secular nation on the one hand, while normalising and institutionalising a communal ideological template on the other. The first required an overall attack on all institutions, practices and personalities that embodied secular, democratic and universal sensibilities; the second required forcing its assertions to become the natural running template.
DELEGITIMISING INDIAN NATIONALISM AND ITS SOURCES
The Hindu communal propaganda since Independence has been focussed on delegitimising the freedom movement, its ideas and leadership. Mahatma Gandhi, who symbolised the core of the national movement, its popular and secular characters and its ennobling features, was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, who is quite often glorified to attack Gandhi and the national movement.vi Not satisfied with the assassination, the complete obliteration of Gandhi’s place and memory in the popular psyche is consistently being worked out by separating him from his colleagues in the Congress and the national movement and projecting him as a non-political persona having increasingly lost his place in the final years of his political life owing to betrayal by his disciples, most notably Jawaharlal Nehru. If making his bespectacled face a symbol of the BJP government’s cleanliness drive (Swachhata Abhiyan) is any indication, conditions are being created to present him to the coming generation as a placid semi-religious Hindu icon located within the Hindu phalanx rather than the mentor of the anti-colonial freedom movement at the head of the Congress, whose constitution he changed in 1920 and whose movements for freedom he designed for close to 30 years.
Delegitimising the national movement also involved continuous spread of calumny regarding leaders in the public domain; in this sense Nehru has remained the most vilified, as his personal life, political leadership and international role have been regularly tarnished with untruth, false and opinionated statements by ideologues and leaders of the communal phalanx. Nehru, in more ways than one, was also the singularly strong pillar of the secular ethos of the movement and the post-independence government, and therefore he is vilified and attacked almost incessantly.
The pattern involves propaganda by instilling in people a sense of victimhood, that is, making people believe in a new common sense that they were not the inheritors of the Independence in 1947 but were victims of it because of the machinations of the Congress Party, its leaders and, more particularly, Nehru and his followers, who were presented as agents of the British, who not only bartered the country through bad negotiation in accepting Partition but also misgoverned and, for instance, allowed China to grab land and also lost the war with it. They also allowed the enemy population, read Muslim, to increase in population, thereby threatening another demand for partition by Muslims in the future.
To delegitimise the idea and legacy of Independence, a heightened sense of victimhood has been entrenched by making Partition and the continued powerlessness of the Hindus a regular political issue. A new stage in the making of this victimhood permanent was reached when the BJP government announced August 14 as Partition Horror Memorial Day. This was to further emphasise how Independence was just a sideshow to the violence which Indians (meaning Hindus) had to weather.
Similarly, every effort has been taken to portray the freedom movement as an ordinary affair, a mere cunning game of politics, quite akin to fighting the electoral politics of today, that is, all against all. The idea of playing Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose against Gandhi and Nehru on the one hand, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel against Nehru on the other, is part of the same game. The leading personalities were shown to be mere men of straw and weak characters against those unsung heroes who either existed before the freedom movement had taken a concrete national shape or who got martyred. Living
leaders cannot match the martyred, and hence living and fighting the British has been relegated to a secondary position in this effort to minimise the importance of the leaders of the freedom movement. Such a template is what seems to have the background for the strangely named Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav launched to commemorate the 75th year of Independence.
Similar efforts to dilute the role and participation of many political parties and leaders in the movement while regularly bringing up V.D. Savarkar or Godse or other nondescript leaders of the Hindu communal pantheon as having participated in the freedom movement is to give them a facelift and constitute a new common knowledge. This helps to sanitise the role of Hindu communal leaders and intellectuals in either not participating or siding with the British during the anti-colonial movement.
An important pathway to delegitimise the basic spirit of the Indian national life and national movement is through an increasing militarisation of the common psyche through discursive and political engagements. The military doctrine that constituted the core of the RSS and the Maharashtra group of its enunciators such as Dr B.S. Moonje came to be associated with the demand of compulsory military service and conscription, alliance with Israel and the world’s most powerful country, the United States, and possession of a nuclear bomb. With such a heightened demand for military sensibilities to become a natural civic sensibility, a mythical history is invoked.
The history of India, particularly that of the medieval period, is shown to be an indication that the Indian state today needs to be on constant alert to avenge the defeats at the hands of foreigners such as Afghans, Turks and Mughals. Paradoxically, the past needs to be purged of all military defeats on the one hand and a rather glorious and victorious local, regional heroes installed in some sort of Hindu national pantheon on the other. Where there is a lag, the military and police feats are to be appropriated as the Hindu nation’s feat as a proxy. This has made Hindu communal groups to attack history and historical scholarship consistently and bring in mythical explanation of local and regional victories to become the new historical common sense.
This is made to go along with the enunciation of a new militarism to boost a kind of aggressive military nationalism. A new vocabulary of nationalism is now on the anvil, which privileges the idea of enemy, war, defeat and strike. Thus, a heightened sense of martyrdom is increasingly made to occupy the privileged position, which then comes back to dilute the importance of the sacrifices that people made during the freedom movement. Hindu communal groups seek to espouse power, valour and strength without being scrutinised for their absence in the freedom movement when common men and their leaders displayed these virtues.
NORMALISATION OF THE COMMUNAL TEMPLATE
Three basic components of the normalisation of the template projected by communal formations are visible, garnered through the enormous resources of the media and other state institutions for constituting a new universe.
a. The Indian state as a ‘Hindu’ one has been propagated through a nationalising state. The world over, states have continued a nationalisation through state institutions. During the national movement, the Indian leadership understood that any nationalising effort could also easily be consumed by imperialist desires. After all, colonialism in many ways was an extension of nationalism as evolved in the 18th-19th century European context. Thus, there was an effort to prevent this national project of creating a common people from getting channelised into making people from different regions and religions look alike or follow the models of the demographically dominant population. The Constitution was the guarantee that such nationalising desires did not get into the imperial channels.
The movement to government transition in India in 1947, therefore, though smooth, was saddled with the new government trying hard to not let the state slip into the hands of those who in the name of nationalising would make it a Hindu state in the aftermath of Partition and the accompanying violence. It seems that the national movement was too long and too strong a cementing factor for Indians to be swayed by the sectarian definition of a state. Thus, it became a secular state even while Hindu communal attitudes also survived in many quarters.
Muslim communalism, too, survived similarly, and helped legitimise Hindu communal organisations and their ideas. However, it was Hindu communal organisations that aimed at communalising the Indian state and making it an ideological state. The model of the state was, however, more akin to dictatorial states