Hindutva and its counter-narratives

At the heart of the Sangh Parivar’s strategy is an irreducible contradiction between a modernity that augments high-end capitalism best symbolised by the rhetoric of growth and the bullet train, and a politics that systematically destroys the social form necessary for capitalist growth. This is a tension that will effectively decide the future of rightwing political mobilisation in India.

One way to read this growing contradiction is to argue that the Right under BJP is attempting to tie both ends of the spectrum. In other words, they are laying roads to fast-paced globalisation and neo-liberal reforms and also mobilising the growing discontent against it. This in effect seems to be the global current with the election of Donald Trump in the US. He is the first ‘White President’ symbolising the ‘White backlash’ of the countryside that has struggled to cope with the consequences of two decades of neo-liberal reforms. That is precisely the reason that more the discontent with neo-liberal capitalism, the more pro-corporate governments are put in place by the electorates.

In India too, the discontent began with the poor implementation of welfare policies such as the NREGA by the Congress but the electorate chose a government that in effect cut funds for such welfare schemes. What we have today is a right-based politics that both introduces globalisation and also provides its antidote. We have the rhetoric of development but also a rise in the so-called fringe groups that mobilise against the very modernity necessary for capitalist development, including principles of rule of law, civil liberties, right to privacy and dignity, diversity and contractualised social relations. In effect, these are the principles that challenge and undermine the communitarian sensibilities.

Capital by its very logic displaces community through the processes of individuation and consumerism. The insecurity of communitarian sensibilities is mobilised through mass lynchings, growing protests against films such as Padmavati catering to Rajput pride, Love Jihad, countering demands for criminalising marital rape, among others. Majoritarianism is being constructed by disallowing and humiliating the same communitarian sensibilities of the religious minorities, such as the Muslims, by legislating on Triple Talaq, raising the issue of Pasmanda Muslims, and further sharpening the conflict in Kashmir. Exclusion of the Muslims and disallowing a monolithic imagination for the religious minorities is to by default allow the majority to consolidate.

Further, the right, therefore, lays emphasis on constructing a monolithic Hindu Community by taking up or inventing issues such as beef or sanctity of the cow as a common practice among the Hindus across the nation, which also sharpens the divide with the religious minorities.

The tension between the two-pronged strategy of Modern Capitalism and Communitarian Hindutva is reflected in the anxieties of the liberal elite’s concern about the image of India globally and its impact on global investments, which compels the Prime Minister to issue a warning against the ‘cow vigilantes’ being a mafia and one cannot allow this, but without any follow-up action against them. The PM also issues statements in favour of freedom of press and rule of law, even as his fellow party men issue open threats to artists, journalists, academics, students, and anyone who opposes or critiques the current political dispensation. The critique is signified through the discourse of nationalism, in effect equating the party, and the leader with the nation. Further, the electorate is mobilised against any effective critique through the discourse against corruption. Corruption and Nationalism are the two ‘empty signifiers’ that tie up the loose ends in the two-pronged strategy.

How long can the right hold on to this two-pronged strategy? There have been chicks in the script laid out by the right in the recent past in relation to the dip in the GDP as a result of the populist policy of demonetisation, issue of employment on account of the model of jobless growth, discontent among traders with the effects of GST, as far as the economy is concerned. These are the inherent limitations of capitalism itself. However, there have been other kinds of counter-mobilisations erupting when community concerns have been raised, not as issues of culture, identity and recognition but as issues of social backwardness and economic opportunities reflected in the rise of opposition from the Patidars, Jats, and Marathas with relation to the demand for reservations, or those of the Dalits such as that of the Bhim Army in Uttar Pradesh, or the movement lead by Jignesh Mevani in Gujarat demanding land and social mobility.

The right in effect has no plausible strategy to accommodate such demands, except to opt for downright intimidating tactics of arrest and foisting false cases or releasing videos and implicating the representatives of these political movements. The situation would not be very different if Rajputs were to raise issues related to social and economic mobility in place of community pride

Rightwing mobilisation correctly identifies communitarian and cultural anxieties and at best converts them into street violence with impunity. Street violence has been a sustained strategy of the right in order to articulate anxieties that have neither historical nor sociological reasoning but have investments in collective memory, imagination, and undirected emotions. These strategies are less effective when it comes to hard and more visible issues of social and economic mobility, where the right, at best, is unimaginative and, at worst, mediocre.

How long will the two-pronged strategy work also depend on the counter-narrative of the opposition parties? The Congress is playing a waiting game. Its imagination and strategy are driven by a belief that it is the only default alternative to the BJP at the national level. It, therefore, is in no hurry to script a counter-narrative but emerge as a natural alternative out of the discontent that they understand best gets accumulated in a country with vast diversity and deep economic and social inequalities. Regional parties are playing the game of collective bargain, given the fact that they have local compulsions to cater to. While in the case of Nitish Kumar, who has no independent social base, he opted to undo regional competition by switching sides; with Mamata Banerjee, she is allowing space to the BJP in order to undermine the Left in Bengal. She assumes the BJP will take time to grow but, meanwhile, the Left would go into terminal decline. Between the strategies of the waiting-game and collective bargain, there is no effective emphasis on a counter-narrative.

The space for the narrative too has shrunk with the collapse of social democracy in Indian politics. What remains is hard number crunching and who does it in a more disciplined and organised manner is what matters, unless some of the political movements that are working beyond the pale of pragmatism begin to have some impact on regional and national parties as signposts for a counter-narrative, which at the moment needs a fair stretch of imagination and optimism to believe in.

(Ajay Gudavarthy, Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University)