The Tainted Republic: Hindu Rashtra and The Loss of Civic Nationalism
The bhumi pujan ceremony that occurred a few days ago is a symbolic event in Indian political history. Some have even suggested that Narendra Modi has laid the foundation of a new republic which is based on hyper-nationalism and majoritarian politics and is bound to have severe consequences for Indian constitutional democracy. I would argue, however, that the current BJP government has been chipping away at Indian democracy since the day it came to power in 2014. Back then many had believed that Modi, and the BJP, will take India to a new direction of economic prosperity and good governance. But little did they know that the BJP would start sowing the seeds for the downfall of the Indian republic.
In the article, I highlight the institutional decay that has led Indian democracy to its deathbed. Moving forward, I frame four key pillars- Delegitimising Academia; the Liberal-Elite Delusion; the Hindi Public Sphere; and the Inheritance of a Wounded Past- which form the veneer of legitimacy behind this decay that India seems to be in, which has led to a ‘BJP-dominant system’. While they might seem independent of each other at first glance, they are in fact locked in an intertwining dance which has led to this moment in contemporary Indian society.
Is Indian Democracy Dying?
A recent book by Steven Levitsky and Daniell Ziblatt explores how democracies die, which is also the title coincidentally, and become fascist regimes overtime. They argue that most of the times, it is not one single moment — like a coup or an insurgency or martial law etc — rather most democracies die a legal death. It starts in the form of passage of laws to favour the incumbent government to win elections. The electoral bonds scheme is one such law that comes to mind that the BJP government controversially passed in 2017. Nitin Sethi’s excellent work details how the law is a loophole that allows large scale funding, claiming to be anonymous while it is not. Another way is controlling information. A recent legislation passed by BJP was the dilution of the RTI Act by making the appointment of the Chief Information Commissioner on the whims of the government, in effect making it less autonomous. India has always had certain draconian laws like sedition, which is used freely to suppress citizens’ voices, or preventive detention laws that have been historically used to arrest people without a warrant based on their association with an alleged terrorist organisation. A recent amendment to the UAPA, however, takes it up a notch by declaring any individual a ‘terrorist’ based on the state’s assumption. The earlier law labelled a person the enemy of the state based on their association with an alleged terrorist organisation, but now the state can arrest any individual on ambiguous grounds under this law, if they are seen engaging in so-called ‘anti-national’ activities.
The second way is through controlling the media and in the Indian context, mainstream TV news media has hardly ever been critical of the government in power. An interesting observation by a prominent YouTube channel showed that most primetime coverage over the course of a month did not focus on pressing issues like unemployment or economic distress, and instead focused on Pakistan or a communal news angle. Another tactic is to bully journalists into self-censorship and things have gotten worse for journalists as while some receive constant death threats (Rana Ayyub, for instance), others have also been killed rather publically (Gauri Lankesh). Citizens or political opponents who are critical of the government face harassment in the form of tax raids or faulty cases filed against them. Similarly, the emergence of a “committed judiciary” coincides with these developments easing the path of any government to dismantle democratic norms. In a recent post, eminent law scholar Gautam Bhatia, explores the current developments in the Indian judiciary from sealed cover jurisprudence to judicial evasion, which is tending towards a constitutional crisis.
These are not just solitary moments of breakdown, but rather, are a part of a systematic attack on the democratic foundations of the country. Those who criticise the government for overreach or abuse of power are often dismissed as exaggerating, or worse, as ‘anti-nationals’. While these examples show us how democratic foundations are broken down by compromising the various institutions necessary for a functioning democracy, there is something else that happens underneath to create a veneer of legitimacy to this dismantling of democracy that makes people oblivious to it. I now turn to the four key reasons for society’s state of oblivion.
Delegitimising Academia: Whose Facts are They Anyway
Kellyanne Conway in 2017 coined a phrase which, little did she know, would end up defining the Trump presidency. On a live interview, she said, in context of crowd numbers during Trump’s inauguration, that there are ‘alternative facts’ and Donald Trump has a right to his views. Many have termed this development as a new political paradigm — the post-truth era. But roughly three years before Conway’s statement, the newly elected Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi started his, and BJP’s, journey of experimentation with lies and falsehoods. It began with a simple reworking of established myths. In October of 2014, Modi asserted that since Karna was not born from his mother’s womb, it is a sign of genetic sciences being available during the time of Mahabharata. In the same speech, he went a bit further and said that there must have also been plastic surgeons in ancient India using the God Ganesha as a case-in-point. Seeing this as a clarion call for making dubious claims, various BJP leaders and MPs have made statements of similar wavelengths. The biggest claim came during an Indian Science Congress address where a physicist claimed that Einstein’s theories were wrong and gravitational waves should be renamed as ‘Modi’ waves.
While the last one did get a lot of rebuke from most people, the ones made by Modi were left to create a ripple in the conscience of the Indian people. Typically, a Prime Minster’s post and office denote democratic mandate and legitimacy, and Modi is the head of the Indian government. He may say a lot of things during a campaign trail, which is largely false and part and parcel of a campaign, but to say things that question scientific temper and propagate ‘alternative facts’ as a leader of the country — is a deliberate act of muddying the waters of truth. His speech, as a head of government, carries a legitimacy that many, not only will not question but will consider having strong merit in. What this does is that it legitimises the discourse around alternate version of history, myths, and sciences, and in the process throws a wrecking ball at the edifice of the scientific and academic community.
In an insightful book, Sidin Vadukut argues that even before when WhatsApp forwards of ‘historical facts about India’ was a thing — there were blogs and pages where these exact posts were conjured up. It was, in his view, the diasporic way of reinventing a glorious Indian past that the Indian diasporic community could be proud of. While it is one thing to have alternate versions of past and views on science that exist in Internet sub-cultures but when these are uttered with an air of legitimacy that the post of Prime minister has — it enables a culture of incredulity towards science and academia among the people. An already existing gap between the institution of academia and the common people — a point which I’ll come to later — turns into a complete disdain towards it among the people.
Tukde-Tukde Gang and Urban Naxals: When the State Goes After Academia
This disdain became a flashpoint in 2016 when a video purportedly went viral on social media showing alleged slogans that were deemed to be ‘anti-India’ in their content made at one of the premier universities of India, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The university, which is known throughout the world as a leading research university, became the locus of debate around nationalism. Mainstream media outlets did nightly polls to determine whether academia has gone too rogue. They even coined the phrase ‘tukde-tukde gang’, meaning a group of people who want to break up India.
In this context of vitriolic hate, where random students of JNU were being harassed, the term ‘Urban Naxal’ was coined. Although Vivek Agnihotri, a controversial director, claims to have coined the term but irrespective of the question of origins he did play a vital role in its construction by writing a whole book on this newly constructed phenomenon. Urban Naxals, according to Agnihotiri meant people in academia and their alleged role in inciting insurgency against the state. While there’s no evidence to support the claims but the term became associated with anyone in academia who questioned the government and their policies — they were seen as intellectual terrorists. In 2018, this resulted in the arrest of intellectuals, artists, and activists like Varavara Rao, Sudha Bhardwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, and Arun Ferreira due to their alleged involvement in the Bhima Koregaon riots. Till date, they are in prison and still awaiting trials for crimes invented by the state as they haven’t been proven guilty yet. To make matters worse, Varavara Rao’s health condition even worsened in the current pandemic scenario but was still denied bail.
The discursive practices around academia in India have led to a point that common people start berating any academic argument as “leftist”, “sickular” or “libtardu”. This is a sign of a society that not only has lost faith in academic practice but also shows that it sees scientific research and academic research is just another point of view — a toxic point of view. People receive messages on WhatsApp or on Facebook pages or videos on YouTube showing alternate versions of Indian history, further fuelling the discourse around that “leftist-historians” slant which has deprived people of true history. While it is okay and sometimes necessary to have a disagreement with people, as it shows at least there’s a conversation happening but when a society at large delegitimises the academic endeavour as creative fiction, it leads to a precarious situation of each and every view having an equal value. Ignorance itself becomes a point of view rather than a blissful state of forbearance.
The Liberal-Elite Delusion
It in this context that one can make an argument that the liberal-elite comprising the academic community has been caught off guard. One reason, among many, has been the sheer disconnect between academia and society, which has been increasing over the decades. Academic research and its output are behind a paywall in journals and databases far from the hands of the common public. It has inadvertently created a hierarchical structure of knowledge where certain elites with access can gain higher knowledge. The common people, even if they want to learn and know about the society are bereft of the means as it sealed closed behind an academic paywall. It has led to the creation of a gated community — no information comes out and is circulated within, leading the people who are outside to feel discriminated against. It is based on this incidental discrimination that the discursive practices discussed in the previous sections build upon and in effect empowering the common person to feel equal to the academic community.
But the bigger issue within the academic community is not this divide, however important, rather the liberal-elite being comforted everyday by this delusion of superiority over those who do not have access. The academic community is seemingly more like a bubble where members produces knowledge for each other and the rest of the community, rather than the larger society. They publish in gated journals — for other academicians to consume. These journals also work due to academic communities that pay for them. It is a self-sufficient machinery that, at first glance, doesn’t need outside intervention. What this does is that it ends up narrowing the field of view of this elite community. While research and academics do broaden a person’s horizon, but when this knowledge is constrained within the confines of paywalls — one ends up in a dangerous loop of confirmation bias.
The myopic vision, due to this dangerous loop, has played an important part as the academia could not predict the expeditious rise of the right-wing in India. It also tells us that the academic community failed to fully understand the society that they were studying. Their lenses of inspection got blurred by their own hubris. While there are some, to use Gramsci’s term, organic intellectuals who have and keep continuously working hard towards the betterment of the society. But the broader understanding within the academic community felt short of anticipating this radical change in Indian democracy
It is in the context of this loop the liberal-elite academicians found themselves when Modi took over. Many of the intellectuals at that time felt he was the right person to lead India into a new era of inclusive development. The same intellectuals are now writing obituaries of Indian democracy. One of the reasons that they felt hopeful in 2014 was because they believed that their worldview, founded on academic research and liberal-modernity, is a worldview shared by all. The liberal values of modernity, secularism, and of civic-nationalism, in their perspective, were common to all and it was based on these values that the people chose Modi. But as years have passed, the academic elite bubble started to break and realisation crept in for the liberal-elite that the common public is on a different tangent altogether. The BJP stumbled upon this divide and made it sharper.
The Hindi Public Sphere
However, it is important to look at the project of Hindu India, which has its origins during the nationalist movement. Various scholars have talked about the importance of RSS and the entire Sangh Parivar in the rise of the Hindu-militancy over the decades. Much has been said about the local groundwork of each wing involved within the parivar and how each shakha, each program, and each arm of this large behemoth has tried, at times successfully, to create a hindu consciousness. I, however, will look at the Hindi public sphere (major Hindi newspapers and publishers) and show how within this sphere there has lived an India that the elites, that I mention in the previous section, had taken for granted.
If one were to see the top five newspapers by circulation, only one is in English and the other four are in Hindi. Similarly, if one were to rank them by readership, none of them are in English as four of out five are in Hindi and one in Malayalam. Furthermore, if we looked beyond the top five, it is the vernacular dailies that have a dominance over the English dailies, barring a few exceptions. It is in these vernacular public spheres that notions of India and Indianness are discussed, navigated, and understood across diverse publics.
In this context of diverse publics and vernacular public arenas, I narrow my focus to the Hindi public sphere. It must be said, before I move forward, that it is not out of disrespect for other vernacular languages and their diverse publics but rather it is to show how the BJP (or the RSS machinery in this case) has systematically used the Hindi language as a tool to carefully mobilise the people over the years to its influence.
Hindi newspapers have played a key role in what Jeffrey has called the “newspaper revolution” in India. By the late 1990s, Hindi newspapers had become an integral part of the ‘Hindi heartland’. Sewanti Ninan, in a timely work, argues that this rapid rise in the circulation of Hindi dailies led to a creation of a Hindi public arena within this region. Another media scholar, Tabrez Neyazi, while talking about vernacular public arenas argues that it was during the ran-janambhoomi movement, a key event in Indian politics and a driver of BJP’s rise, that the Hindi dailies played a vital role in their support of the movement through chauvinistic coverage in general. The coverage went so far that the Press Council of India had to chide the Hindi press “for offending the canons of journalistic ethos”. This unbridled support to Hindu chauvinistic forces, led by the RSS and the VHP, led to various scholars calling it the ‘Hindu’ press. Neyazi and Ninan, however, show that Dainik Bhaskar was one of the exceptions as it adopted a liberal-secular approach as it pleaded for communal harmony.
But to go beyond the Hindi dailies, there is one press organisation that played an extremely important role in not only the Hindu right but in defining the very idea of what it means to be a good Hindu. I am talking about Gita Press, one of the oldest Hindi publishing houses in India. Akshay Mukul’s enthralling book on Gita Press captures a significant aspect of the rise of Hindu nationalism which scholars had not touched upon before. He chronicles the active role of Gita Press in the shaping of a ‘Hindu’ nation, in close proximity of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha.
Established in 1923, Gita Press initiated a journey of rekindling the masses of India with Hindu epics and religious texts. The press grew in numbers and popularity, especially the magazine Kalyan, for which many leaders of the time wrote for — including Mahatma Gandhi. The magazine, however, had a skew-eyed view of what it meant to be a Hindu as its understanding felt eerily similar to RSS’s vision, which was also founded around that time. To make it clear where the press stood on issues of Hindu-Muslim harmony, the journal openly supported a ban on cow slaughterhouses, took an active part in perpetuating communal disharmony — which led to Gandhi’s detachment from it by the 1940s. Such was the level of disaffection between the two that when Gandhi was assassinated, the journal didn’t utter a word, and only after a month, it wrote an editorial piece on the issue.
Mukul’s book captures the way how the press played a vital role in the Sangh Parivar’s plans for reclaiming the ‘Hindu India’. Apart from imparting ways to be an ideal Hindu man or a woman, it led the way of how Hinduism as a religion could be practiced. It came up with imaginative ways to create newer forms of religiosity for the masses to practice their faith. It made Hindu religion accessible by printing portable size books of Ramcharitmanas and others. It came up with newer hymns to practice and vocalize religion. But most importantly, in times of communal tension — the magazine took a pro-militant stance, as after Independence it was largely dependent on the Sangh Parivar for donations.
What these examples show us is that within the Hindi public sphere — a different idea of Indian democracy flows to the vast people of India. Going a step forward — a different idea of what it means to be an Indian is propagated, which is not in line with the liberal-secular-constitutional vision. When a large majority of people — especially within the Hindi heartland — are told, usually subliminally, that ‘this is the right way to be a Hindu’ and some minorities, especially Muslims are outsiders or take a pro-Hindu militant stance during a communal riot in some instances, it would create an aura of legitimacy of to their imagined hatred for the other.
Inheritance of A Wounded Past
But probably one of the key unexplored reasons for this lingering imagined hatred towards the other — that the right-wing forces tap into — is the blatant societal denial of atrocities that have happened in India throughout its contemporary history. For a country that was born in blood — where the partition riots led to deaths of millions of people across religions — it is still yet to come to terms with the lingering trauma that has not only persisted over the decades but has fuelled even more communal riots. Before I list some of the major communal riots in contemporary Indian history, I must mention that I will not outline incidents revolving around Jammu and Kashmir, and the North East region, as both have complex histories and diversity of issues that both require a comprehensive article in its own right.
Almost every generation in India, after gaining independence, has witnessed the complete breakdown of social order resulting in deathly communal riots. In 1964, it was in West Bengal which resulted in the death of at least a hundred people and mass looting. Then in 1969, Gujarat became the epicentre for massive communal riots that led to at least 400 people dying. Then there were the Bhiwandi riots in 1970, which resulted in the death of at least 250 people. 1984, witnessed riots in the heart of the capital of India — as anti-Sikh riots in the aftermath of the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi led to the deaths of thousands of people. The beginning of the 90s witnessed the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the infamous Bombay riots that led to the deaths of thousands of people. As India entered the new millennium, it witnessed one of the deadliest targeted pogroms since the Sikh massacre as Gujarat burned for days which led to deaths to thousands of people. In recent memory, the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 and the recent Delhi riots of 2020, are worth mentioning. Even if they were much smaller in scale to other ‘bigger’ instances, they carry the same weight and historical hang-ups of communal tension and hatred towards the other — especially against the Muslims
While much has been written about communal riots in the context of India: from how politicians are intimately linked in engineering these riots, or how deeper the associational affiliations may vary the presence or absence of riots. But what has not been given due attention is what happens to a society when such riots take place. Urvashi Butalia’s exceptional work focusing on the women and children of the partition gives a harrowing account of what large scale riots do to the lives of countless people. It also gives an account of how — for the state — such riots become an exercise in bureaucratic maneuvering of handling bodies and ‘its’ property.
Such riots, apart from being a breakdown of law and order, lead to greater distrust among communities as social capital dissipates from the society. The physical wounds from violence and death become a memetic wound — reappearing in different forms that every generation inherits. The combined trauma of the loss of trust and wounds on the body and soul leads to the feeling of grave injustice across people from different communities. This injustice never finds any closure as one riot is forgotten in an amnesiac history while the other unfolds in front of our very eyes.
Each generation inherits this loss of trust, the memetic wound, and untouched injustices in the form of anecdotes of loss. Worst, each generation then witnesses another riot and the same cycle continues unabated. This continuous cycle of inheritance of the wounded past leads to a reservoir of hatred toward the other. It is this very reservoir of hatred that BJP taps into, time and again. One prime example can be taken from the Home Minister, Amit Shah’s, speech in the parliament when presenting the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill (now an act), he mentions the memory of partition in justifying the bill. It is this reservoir of hatred that results in phrases like “go to Pakistan” whenever someone cheers a Pakistani cricketer, it is this reservoir of hatred that leads to political leaders phrasing Muslims as “invaders” or “termites”, and it is this reservoir of hatred that the Sangh Parivar keeps coming back to realise its agenda of a Hindu Rashtra.
Some Conclusions and Some Hope
In this essay, I have tried to map four key reasons — from my understanding — behind the reasonable success of the BJP in galvanising an effective majority to consolidate power. In effect, it has also managed to create a somewhat polarised society — much to its liking — where the divide seems to be between the liberal-constitutionalists, who believe in the Gandhi-Nehru-Ambedkar vision of a complex and diverse country based on civic nationalism, and the Hindu Rashtra based on the RSS’s idea of a homogenous nation formed around a common culture, language, and religion. All the four — delegitimisation of academia, the liberal-elite delusion, the Hindi public sphere, and the reservoir of hatred — are linked together in an intricate web, crisscrossing each other further making things too convoluting to unravel.
It may seem — and some rightly fear so — that India is on a path which will have dangerous consequences for generations to come. But there are still ways to resist and fight this, at each step. One of the key things that have to happen — be it now or decades later — is recognition of these atrocities spanned across decades which has led to a perpetual persistence of wounds across generations. After recognition and acceptance, truth and reconciliation commissions need to be set up so that people across generations and communities come to terms with their loss and have an open communication which is necessary moving forward. These commissions can also help in initiating rethinking communal relations between different communities. A democratic culture can only work if each and every community recognises and accepts differences with mutual toleration and forbearance. South Africa provides an example of how state-led reconciliation aimed to heal a nation from centuries of racism. These commissions may not be perfect at times but studies have shown that they are reasonably effective at healing divided nations.
The academic community also needs to rethink its ways in order to bridge the divide between itself and the overall society at large. Initially, they need to rethink the way they understand society and the diverse publics in it, in order to fully comprehend the changes in it. They can start by asking different questions by bringing in other perspectives to diversify the nature of the questions. Rigid compartmentalisation of disciplines also needs to go away as only through an interdisciplinary framework can it move beyond a myopic lens.
New and innovative ways of disseminating research ideas and findings need to be made available — without technical jargons — for the common public to engage in. With the advent of social media and mass Internet connectivity, the research community can experiment with making short YouTube videos, or making crisp infographics that can easily be shared on Facebook pages or on popular chat clients like WhatsApp.
Another issue is the rapid technological changes and the rise of the instant information society. One often gets bombarded with so much information and news that it is easy to get overwhelmed and difficult to weed out misinformation from actual news. Studies have shown that is such a surge of misinformation is by design to create censorship by noise. In this context, the focus should also be on expanding digital literacy programs across India — so that people learn how to navigate information online. Digital literacy will go a long way in helping India fight the battle of coordinated disinformation campaigns that have become a bane of contemporary society. One of the examples of a good digital literacy program is a ten-part series on navigating digital information by John Green.
Finally, the constitutional values, on the basis of which this country was founded, need to be brought forward from within the noise in multiple forms to educate the emerging youth of India. It was hopeful to see during the nationwide CAA protests that, apart from standing against the controversial law in support of Muslims, many came to the streets to support the ingrained constitutional values that once drove the nationalist leaders of the freedom movement. It is the constitution that not only binds us as one nation, with diverse publics with complex cultures but also it is the constitution that reminds us of the battles that were fought over the idea of India. Now, it is for the constitution that all of us have to resist and fight for, as it might be the only thing that is standing between a constitutional republic that India aims to be, and the Hindu Rashtra, the tainted republic where India seems to be headed.
(I would like to thank all the people who gave critical feedback on earlier drafts of this essay and helped make it better)
Anand is a PhD Candidate at the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
