There were many ironies, some rather subtle, in the high-octane events related to the launch of Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book in Mumbai last week. There was the stoic Sudheendra Kulkarni, his face completely doused in black, glistening paint carrying on with his duties as head of the Observer Research Foundation that was hosting Kasuri. As TV channels splashed his paint-besmirched face endlessly across screens and featured at length his news conference where he vowed the book launch would go on as scheduled despite the Shiv Sena’s loutish behaviour, ingenious messages were being broadcast to the nation and the world.

The most flagrant was that while the Maharashtra-based Hindu chauvinist Shiv Sena was against freedom of expression, both political and cultural, the ruling BJP was determined to champion such freedoms at all costs. The Shiv Sena was once a close ally of the BJP, and its latest antics are all of a piece with its fiercely anti-Pakistan stance which it has been flaunting since 1991 when it dug up Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium to block the cricket tour by Imran Khan’s team.

Curiously, Kulkarni, although described as a former BJP member, was sporting the party colours of saffron and green in his clothing. A speechwriter for former BJP prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and a political strategist for BJP stalwart Lal Kishan Advani, Kulkarni’s dignified demeanour, made much of on TV channels, helped to take the pressure off the BJP at a time when it is facing nationwide opprobrium from writers over its illiberal policies. It is for the first time in India that so many writers have returned state awards to protest a government’s policies. They are outraged by the BJP regime’s studied silence over the killing of three southern writers by a Hindutva outfit and the lynching of a Muslim man three weeks ago by a Hindu mob over suspicions that he was eating beef. More than anything else, they are incensed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to condemn the perpetrators.

In the tussle for India’s cultural soul there is little understanding of how the country has come to this sorry pass

As the liberals take heart from this collective outrage of the writers, it is important to see where all this is leading. Modi and the BJP appear unconcerned by the revolt of the literati and shrug off their charge that his regime is fascistic. But in this tussle for the cultural soul of India there appears little understanding of how the country has come to this sorry pass. In the competitive politics of hate-mongering and communal politics between one-time allies, one of the more amazing ironies was the condemnation of the Shiv Sena by none other than Advani for what he called its intolerance.

Advani’s swipe at the Sena got big play in the media but there was nary a comment on the BJP leader’s pioneering role in setting the Hindutva agenda for the country and the communal polarisation that ensued in the wake of his infamous rath yatra, or chariot trip, in a souped-up Toyota minibus in 1990 to galvanise the Hindus to build a Ram temple in place of a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya.

It was this yatra that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, with the active participation of Sena hordes, and resulted in widespread communal bloodletting across the country. But it ensured the arrival of the BJP as a major political force. According to one account, Advani was accompanied on his toxic trip by some young Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) workers. One of them was said to be Narendra Modi who would ultimately oust him from the race for prime ministership in 2014.

It is the Advani legacy that the BJP, more so Modi, has built upon assiduously in subsequent decades, polarising the country in such a deeply communal way that it seems unlikely that the genie of religious and caste hatreds can ever be put back in the bottle. It was left to Modi to perfect this strategy of communal mobilisation to a fine art, first by capturing Gujarat in three consecutive state elections, starting with the horrific 2002 pogrom against Muslims, and finally storming Delhi in 2014. As a seasoned RSS pracharak or a dedicated volunteer, Modi has set the country on a ruinous trajectory that threatens to alter forever the secular character of India.

Why is the outlook so daunting? One reason is that RSS, as the bedrock of Hindu nationalism, has laid the groundwork firmly to achieve its vision of a 100pc Hindu nation. All the templates for radicalising Indian society were fixed a long time ago through the setting up of a vast network of Hindu organisations. The basic foundation was laid by its Saraswati Shishu Mandir schools that dwell on the glory of a largely imagined Hindu past and inculcate historical hatreds in the young.

The RSS has also spawned hundreds upon hundreds of Hindu outfits to mobilise every segment of society from housewives to forest dwellers and to avenge any real or perceived insults to Hindu ‘sentiments’. Each day’s news brings into the limelight hitherto unheard of Hindu organisations, such as the Sanatan Sanstha, which was responsible for the murder of writer-activist Govind Pansare and Sanskrit scholar M.M. Kalburgi in recent times. The poison thus runs deep.

Yet, political analysis, based on woefully short memories, tends to rely on the naive hope that all will be well since Hindus are on the whole committed to a pluralistic society. But are the Hindus any safer in the current dispensation than the minorities? What is at stake is not just religious freedom; it is the freedom to think rationally and question the authorities that’s under threat. Modi can be berated roundly by the liberals but this is unlikely to change his thinking or his strategies for mobilising popular support. He is neither interested in winning accolades as a liberal leader nor in earning plaudits for being a democrat.

His priorities lie elsewhere. To him, the ultimate certificate of good governance comes from the RSS. Last month, Modi and his cabinet subjected themselves to a shaming, three-day scrutiny of their performance by the RSS. It was these men in khaki shorts and black caps who still adhere to a quaint Fascist salute who gave his government a thumbs-up for its achievements over the past 15 months. That is what matters to Modi.

The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi.

ljishnu@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, October 19th , 2015

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