The Hindu : After Gujarat

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 19, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

After Gujarat — I

By Radhika Desai

Emboldened by the Gujarat victory, the Sangh Parivar can be expected to try hard to make this the country's future.

FOR ATAL Behari Vajpayee, the BJP's election victory in Gujarat inaugurated the party's "vijay parva". He was not wrong in invoking the Mahabharata. For, if we do not witness, now, politics of a certain epic quality, it will be so much the worse for India — both Mr. Vajpayee and I agree here, if for opposite reasons and with opposite hopes. For, the coming parva (phase) of Indian politics will show if there are any forces in the country which can stop Hindutva — turn the "vijay parva" of Mr. Vajpayee's hopes into a "yuddha parva" in which they will acquit themselves honourably, and hopefully arrest and reverse the advance of Hindutva.

But if a "yuddha parva" it is going to be, it has had a dismal beginning: it seems to have begun with Arjuna relinquishing his Gandiva, not picking it up. The Congress put up no fight at all, preferring cousinhood with Hindutva and its upper and middle class and caste constituency over principle and betraying, once again, the millions of lower caste and class and minority voters whom the polarised development of Gujarat has offered to it as its natural constituency.

The Congress appointed a former RSS man, Shankarsinh Waghela, as PCC chief; gave the party ticket to other disgruntled BJP-ites; soft-peddled the post-Godhra violence — pretending it was not an issue, rather than making it one and fighting for justice and security for the Muslims and other persecuted minorities.

The last was, surely, particularly galling: how can a state-sponsored pogrom which took the lives of thousands not be an election issue? Not surprisingly, when the time came, those who wanted Hindutva voted for the real thing, but to those who did not — and let us remember that the BJP has been voted in on 50 per cent of a turnout of 63 per cent, i.e. 67.5 per cent of the electorate of Gujarat did not vote this Government in — the Congress failed to provide an alternative which was sufficiently different and worth voting for.

The Congress' claim that it was defeated by Hindutva amounts to an official application for political bankruptcy. This is like a general saying he lost his country a war because the enemy had an army! Of course, the BJP was going to peddle Hindutva and hate! It was the Congress' job to counter it, not buckle under it.

So far, the Congress has been unable to come up with politics of secularism, equality and development which can mould the majority of Gujarat, and with the help of kindred groups, of India, into an effective opposition. If this does not change, Hindutva will win effectively unopposed in the rest of the country too.

What we are witnessing in Gujarat is an entrenchment of the politics of Hindutva in a upper-and middle caste/class constituency which is, as Gujarat shows again, not effectively opposed by any politics of the bottom half of society. Emboldened by the Gujarat victory, the Sangh Parivar can be expected to try hard to make this the country's future in the course of the State Assembly elections due soon and the national elections due in 2004.

The Sangh Parivar's task is all the easier because of the particular combination of neo-liberal economic policies and high and middle-caste Hindu assertion which has become accepted in the country as the direction of India's development. Neo-liberal economic policy enjoys almost complete cross-party consensus. It exacerbates economic inequality and creates a large and, relative to the poverty of the majority, a very powerful and unified propertied class. Whereas it was once thought that the rural and agrarian propertied in India had economic interests which pitted them against the urban and industrial propertied, today these two groups increasingly intermix, particularly as rich farmers invest in other spheres of economic activity. They thus have interests in common and against those of the workers and the poor.

Politically, Hindutva at once justifies this inequality in terms of an imputed cultural superiority of the upper and "sanskritised" middle caste propertied over the minorities and lower castes, unifies the otherwise caste-divided propertied class, and helps the propertied to keep the rest in their place — whether by directly othering them (as, pre-eminently, with Muslims) or patronisingly "including" them in the Hindu nation as defined by them on second class terms (as with tribals).

The propertied class has been especially successful in doing this because it works with the grain of Brahminical biases which its core constituency already holds.

As one of India's most economically and industrially advanced States, Gujarat sports a particularly substantial propertied class, which, moreover, is highly unified across the rural-urban divide. Perhaps, particularly because there are more caste divisions in Gujarat, and little sense of Gujarati identity, Hindutva provides the only ideology which can unite this propertied class politically. It is not a little ironic that it is Hindutva which has given the idea of "Gujarati asmita" real currency for the first time.

The so-called Mahagujarat movement actually moved very little, Gujarat had its "statehood" virtually pushed upon it by the far more powerful Maratha movement on the other side. Finally, Gujarat's significantly higher rate of emigration hitherto has meant that there is an NRI factor: the NRIs' pro-Hindutva inclinations have a demonstration effect on their kin back home while their funding and activism within the Sangh Parivar have a power to influence Gujarati politics rather more directly.

Gujarat is not different, not sui generis as we may be tempted to think in the aftermath of this stupefying BJP victory. It does, however, exemplify how Hindutva works at the leading edge of India's development. It also exemplifies another grim reality.

The social groups, castes and classes whose interest lies in opposing this politics of Hindutva based on the upper and middle castes and classes — the poor, lower castes and the minorities, the famous KHAM groups — have over the course of the past three decades not only become the natural constituency of one single party, the Congress, they have also been repeatedly betrayed by the Congress. December 2002 was only the latest chapter in this fundamentally abusive relationship.

A sober scrutiny of the record reveals the true scale of the BJP's victory and the Congress' surrender. These must be understood if they are to be prevented in the rest of the country in the months and years to come.

(The writer is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canada.)

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