Encore Soft Hindutva?

Dr Sudhir Parikh is a practising allergist and President of the Federation of Indian Associations in USA. Does the name sound familiar? Definitely not. But all those people who have been closely following the Gujarat genocide and the dubious role played by Narendra Modi and others from his Parivar know this man for another facet of his persona. He happens to be associated with the Hindutva brigade there and was the one who took the initiative to organise a ‘Gujarat Gaurav Yatra’ on the streets of New York City in the aftermath of the genocidal killings in the state. It was a futile attempt to whitewash Mr. Narendra Modi as he was facing lot of flak at the national-international level for his ‘successful Gujarat experiment’.

It is worth noting that a professedly secular dispensation at the Centre selected Dr Parikh to be one of the recipients of the prestigious Pravasi Bharatiya Samman which was given to him during the three day meet held at Hyderabad. It was quite logical that a small group of Indians residing in the USA who were present during the programme deemed it necessary to lodge a protest when he was presented an award by the President of India. This group was part of a larger coalition of secular organisations and individuals based in North America called ‘Coalition against Genocide’ which had spearheaded a successful campaign last year to stop Modi from coming to USA.

But can it be said that it is for the first time that the dispensation at the centre has been found to be wanting in its actions vis a vis upholding secular principles? The meeting of the National Integration Council, which was held after a gap of 13 years last year, inadvertently underlined the fact that government has yet to come out of the mindset of the past NDA government. The agenda papers circulated before this gathering in a way tried to peddle a convenient lie, which is very dear to the Sangh establishment. It said that forcible and fraudulent conversions (to Christianity) are the main cause of civil unrest in tribal and other rural areas. We very well know that within the Hindutva weltanchaung, ‘Conversion’ is a very convenient ploy to put the religious minorities on hook. Under this pretext Hindutva front organisations have played havoc with the lives of the tribals and have been successful in re-converting may such tribals to their ‘original’ religion. As far as facts are concerned it can be said that the unrest in such backward areas is primarily because of the material- cultural deprivation felt by the local population vis-à-vis policies of the establishment.

Leading Christian rights activist and a leader of the All India Christian Council conveyed his disapproval over the understanding of the government on this issue. The letter stated that it “[I]s a malicious myth propagated by obscurantist and fundamentalist – and often violent – political groups and their frontal organisations of a well known exclusivist ideology which believed in the thesis of One nation, One people, One Culture” totally negating the Indian reality of Unity and Diversity. (The Milli Gazette, Wednesday 31, August 2005).

The way UPA government went back on its promise on the issue of POTA repeal with retrospective effect was for everyone to see. When it was out of power Congress had called the law draconian and had promised that it would be repealed with retrospective effect. Once in power it conveniently forgot its promise leading us to a situation where hundreds of innocents are still languishing in jails without any trial. The number of arrests made in Gujarat under this law in the aftermath of the carnage has been repeated ad nauseam. And we very well know that despite the fact that goons of the Hindutva brigade engaged themselves in a planned genocide with due connivance of the state machinery all of those who were apprehended belonged to the religious minorities.

Mukul Dube, a leading writer in an introductory essay to ‘The Parivar Raj and After’ (Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, Mumbai, August 2005) had rightly underlined “Can the Congress not see what POTA has left behind of itself? …POTA will continue to apply to those who were arrested under its provisions. People who have suffered on account of a bad law will be tried under the provisions of that very bad law—although that bad law has been thrown out precisely because it was a bad law. It is difficult to conceive of a more putrid example of brahminical double-speak.”.

Lot of eyebrows were raised when one witnessed the way Congress Party, the leading constituent of the UPA government, went all out to admit in its ranks rebels of the Shiv Sena, a Fascist formation mainly based in Maharashtra. One has seen the way its Supremo Bal Thackeray openly praises Hitler, spews venom against the minorities and dalits and was instrumental in demolition of the historic Babri Mosque. Justice Sri Krishna Commission, which went enquired into the infamous riots in Bombay in 1992-1993, had on several accounts held the Shiv Sena itself responsible for the tragic happenings in the city. Questions naturally arose in people’s minds that how could these very people who till the other day were henchmen of the fascist formation and some of whom had criminal cases slapped against them on such occasions could overnight metamorphose into beacons of secularism.

Close watchers of the Congress recall with horror the way it embraced the path of soft Hinduism in the eighties and thus facilitating the rise of the ‘hard Hindutva’ forces. May it be the issue of Meenakshipuram conversions in the early 80s or the genocide of Sikhs in 1984 or the opening of the gates of Babri Mosque supposedly to ‘free’ Ramlalla one could see the growing commonalities of views between the ‘secular’ Congress and the Hindutva brigade. The then Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi started the election campaign for the Parliamentary polls in 1989 from Ayodhya itself. And in his opening speech he gave a call for the formation of ‘Ram Rajya’ It was not for nothing that majoritarian forces of the Hindutva kind gained an upper hand at the cost of secularism. Looking back the eighties could be said to be the turning point in the fortunes of the Hindutva brigade, which helped bring it to the centrestage of Indian polity from its margins.

The dubious role played by the Congress in facilitating the ascendance of the Hindutva forces may be a thing of the past but it cannot be said that it cannot repeat its feat if it finds that it would be beneficial to it in the short term. Professor Aijaz Ahmad rightly says that Sangh-BJP may be programmatic communalists but as far as Congress is concerned it is pragmatic communalists.

It should not be surprising that looking at the disarray in the Hindutva camp and the slackening secular vigil the Congress Party may reinvent itself in a soft Hindutva garb? An inkling of this churning within the Congress can be had from the grassroots level dynamics where at times one finds local cadres of both the formations speaking same language vis-à-vis ‘politics of appeasement’.

The ‘soft Hindutva detour’ of the Grand Old Party of Indian democracy is definitely a wake up call. It remains to be seen how the motley coalition of individuals, organisations which with their consistent strivings helped turn the tide against the resurgent communal BJP reinvigorates itself so that their cause celebre does keeps marching ahead.