When country is turned into deity, then its citizens must become bhakts (devotees) or face the consequences of being termed apostates. To the saffron brigade, the image of India is an abstraction. Members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu supremacist organisation, which has spawned the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, will tell you in good faith that Bharat Mata is a divine personage to whom every citizen owes utter devotion.

But this idea of nation is modelled on calendar art depictions of Hindu goddesses. A crowned figure dressed in a sari, Bharat Mata sits astride a lion and holds a trident or a flag in her hands, sometimes both, and is invariably framed against a map of India. At one level this abstraction of the nation state and its reduction into sacred nationalism is one reason why the different ideas of India are coming into violent conflict, especially on its prestigious campuses.

At a more insidious level, the student wing of the RSS, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which is revelling in the political patronage it enjoys under the Narendra Modi government, is using this nationalism as a smokescreen to target its prime ideological enemies — left-wing student organisation and those of lower-caste students who challenge the brutal caste-based structure of Hindu society.

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This explains why the University of Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, which have a liberal ethos, have been labelled anti-national by the ABVP in a campaign that has been taken up enthusiastically by the government. In Hyderabad the systematic targeting of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) that represents the low-caste Dalit students by the ABVP with the help of several central ministers would not have caught national attention if one of the union members had not committed suicide in the wake of this political hounding.

The Hindutva brigade sets little store by the constitution of India.

While Dalit students are not exactly enamoured of their left brethren who have been equally guilty of ignoring the caste inequities rampant in universities, the suicide of Rohit Vemula has brought the two together in JNU in alliance that the ABVP perceives as extremely dangerous to its core beliefs.

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The greatest irony is that the Hindutva brigade which uses its war cry of Bharat Mata ki jai against all those that it deems seditious or anti-Hindu — both are interchangeable offences — sets little store by the constitution of India. The most influential ideologue of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar, did not bother to hide his disdain for the constitution even as late as 1966. In his Bunch of Thoughts, he found that it was “just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing which can be called our own. Is there a single word of reference in its guiding principles as to what our national mission is and what our keynote in life is? No!”

To many it would seem that Golwalkar’s views reflected in his book which is the Bible of the RSS, are more anti-national and seditious than the slogans for azadi (freedom) that were raised by JNU students some weeks ago. What the defiant JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar said in no uncertain terms was azadi from poverty, azadi from caste discrimination, and azadi from the machinations of the saffron outfits, a reference to the fake tweets and doctored videos used to implicate the students.

Kumar’s riveting speech after release from weeks of police custody was a direct challenge to Golwalker’s views. “I want to tell you that Babasaheb [Ambedkar] had said that political freedom will not be enough, will not do — we will establish social freedom, which is why we keep talking about the constitution. Lenin has said democracy is indispensable for socialism. That’s why we talk about democracy, that is why we talk about freedom of expression, that is why we talk about equality, that is why we talk about socialism — so that the son of a peon and the son of a president both can go to the same school.”

This is the crux of the conflict that is now sweeping across campuses in India. For the ABVP, problematic issues such as caste exploitation and discrimination are not to be raised in campuses where they would resonate widely because these upset the Hindutva idea of what is sacred. Thus beef eating becomes a flashpoint resulting in violence wherever Dalit students have organised such festivals to highlight the alternative discourse to the Brahmanical idea of Hinduism. To defile the purity of Bharat Mata with such concerns is akin to sedition.

And the sacredness of nationalism makes any questioning of the state taboo. Debates on the topic of capital punishment in the context of the secret hanging of Afzal Guru (convicted in the parliament attack) become dangerous grounds for inviting the tag of anti-national as do the screenings of films on recent communal carnages. It is on this slippery slope that the ABVP is basing its nationalism.

The ABVP project to capture campuses is by no means new. As the oldest outfit of the RSS, set up in 1948, its primary aim has been to foil the left. In the heady years after Independence, left ideology was the dominant discourse among the youth and the RSS was determined to establish its ideas of sacred nationalism in colleges and universities that were just being set up.

As an undergrad in Hyderabad’s Osmania University in the late 1960s, I had seen how ruthlessly the ABVP acted to fight left-wing student idealism. That was the time of the Paris students’ revolution of the anti-Vietnam war protests in the US and of Che Guevara, all of which inspired a left-wing movement under the leadership of George Reddy, a brilliant young student, who believed in a more equitable social and political order.

He was murdered and among the prime accused were RSS members. That killing did not stop a new students’ movement from sweeping the campuses. Now that the BJP is in power and with a clutch of former ABVP members in the cabinet apart from dozens more who work as the personal staff of ministers, it is clearly hoping for better success in its campus onslaught.

The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi.

ljishnu@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2016