KARACHI: Communal attitude and business-mindedness are compatible. This was stated by Dr Thomas Blom Hansen while answering a question after delivering a lecture titled ‘Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism’ at Habib University on Monday.

Dr Hansen, a professor in anthropology and director of Stanford’s Centre for South Asia, started off his talk by telling the audience that he first met Narendra Modi at a press meet in 1990 when nobody knew who he was. The current Indian prime minister was then accompanied by the livelier Pramod Mahajan and preferred to speak either in Gujarati or Hindi.

Dr Hansen said the story of the rise of Hindu nationalism was rooted deep in pre-independence idea of ‘what India is’, though the movement had its limitations. Juxtaposing quotes by M. A. Jinnah and M. S. Golwalker, a leader of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangh), he said the Sangh was the other side of the Two-Nation Theory, a Hindu response of what the Muslim League was proposing. It considered Islam and Christianity the antithesis to the practice of religion in India. Its key idea was to ‘tolerate everybody as long as they’re tolerant in our way’. Communal fervour was seen in the 1920s but it was in the 1940s that it grew tremendously, as the movement had more branches such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) which was initially founded to fight Hindu conversion to Christianity and subsequently became one of the leading fundraisers for the movement.

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Dr Hansen said the rise of Hindu nationalism was witnessed in the 1980s in the razing of Babri Masjid (1992). At that point he mentioned that he also liked to analyse it as Oedipal Nationalism and reasoned that the nationalists referred to their country as Bharat Mata or Mother India. The symbolism was shaped by the RSS to defend Mother India where emphasis was given to physical training to be able to fight for motherland.

‘A way of life’

Dr Hansen then looked at the movement under the rubric Hindu Zion. He said the people he worked with in India were not interested in visiting temples; for them it was all about defending India as a Hindu nation. For them Hinduism “is a way of life”. The RSS styled the movement like an organised religion, which was why after the demolition of Babri Masjid Hindus started to do maha aarti, a direct response to Muslims’ Friday prayers.

Dr Hansen carried on with the argument and spoke on the 1990s political yatra for liberating the Ram Janambhumi that created Hindu symbolism akin to St Peter’s Church. Mr Advani’s long yatra had the décor and music taken from a 1980s TV series that people recognised; the symbolism changed from Ram to Ram-bo, from a mild-mannered sweet boy to a new depiction of warrior Ram. The Babri mosque episode became a triumph for the BJP, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L. K. Advani (belonging to the pre-independence generation) were looked at with veneration as they came to power. Their movement was based on Hinduism and anti-Muslim campaign to liberate the birthplace of Lord Ram.

Dr Hansen also touched upon other reasons for the rise of Hindu nationalism such as the movement against globalisation, and although the BJP accepted some of its aspects, the shining India drive backfired. Among a host of things denoting what changed in the 1990s was the rise of the lower caste in the electoral process, reducing the percentage of the upper caste MLAs and MPs from well above 50 per cent to 15pc in a decade, with the fact that Muslims from north and west India began to move to the Gulf for good labour jobs. “Modi is take 2 of the Saffron wave,” he remarked.

After that Dr Hansen shifted his focus to colonial Bombay and described it as South Asia’s first cosmopolitan city having a big number of festivals with Ganpati being the signature festival aimed at bringing Hindus together. According to one nationalist, the festival was designed to counter the Muslim festival of Muharram and draw a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. Shiv Sena was formed in 1969 by Bal Thackerey as a populist ‘sons of the soil’ movement, a parallel power structure for Marathi-speaking Hindus.

Indian Muslims

Speaking on the casualties of the whole nationalist campaign, and quoting a judge, Dr Hansen said the Indian Muslims were the most deprived, poorest and excluded community in India because the anti-Muslim sentiment was accepted in the country. As to whether the RSS and BJP could thrive with a ‘Muslim menace’, he said Modi was able to sell the promise of development though there was a ‘lunatic centre’ in his movement. However, he iterated, the underlying fear of Hindu nationalism was not deeply ingrained in the anti-Muslim sentiment, but it’s ‘fuelled by the fear of being a beleaguered majority’. He said it was a “fickle majority” and the “RSS can fall apart”.

Following the lecture, replying to a question about the recently held Delhi elections put to him by Dr Aaron Mulvany, who had earlier introduced him to the audience, Dr Hansen said many kinds of logic existed in India.

In response to another question he said the BJP’s outward-looking would happen. The Indian corporations wanted the party to be there not because of Modi but because they wanted to see India as a new great power. He said the idea that communal attitude and businesses were not compatible was wrong. He told the attendees that he knew of large conglomerates who wrote substantial cheques to Modi; they wanted to engage with global economy.

Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2015

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