New roles: Modi to Yogi

There are now definitive signs of the next major shift in the leadership of the BJP-RSS combine in times to come. While Modi broke the ranks by shifting the tag of the BJP as a ‘Brahmin-Bania’ party by invoking his backward class/caste status, the induction of Yogi Adityanath will lend the next major shift to creating a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ with a militant Hindu at the helm of affairs. The BJP-RSS also believes that this carefully crafted image of a yogi becoming the head of state will revive the age-old Hindu tradition of a sanyasi taking up political power to cleanse the system of its inertia and revitalise it with valour and militant Hindutva.

There are parallels and subtle shifts in the symbolism of the imageries of Modi and Yogi. Both have sacrificed their family lives to adopt the nation as their family. Both have led ascetic lives detaching themselves from worldly temptations. While Modi as ‘Bal Narendra’ fought crocodiles and was a fearless child, Yogi took the tough decision of taking up a life of a sanyasi without informing even his parents, even though he was close to his sisters. While Modi joined as a pracharak and emerged as a Hindu Hriday Samrat, Yogi joined the Gorakhpur math and emerged as a militant Hindu voice. Both are considered good orators with the ability of issuing open threats against Islamic jihadi forces. Surprisingly, both of them escaped narrowly from grave death threats or attempts on their lives. While Modi preempted and the security forces eliminated Ishrat Jahan, who was allegedly conspiring to assassinate Modi, Yogi narrowly escaped a bid on his life at a guesthouse in Gorakhpur. Both seemingly understand human suffering, Modi on account of his poverty and eking a life by selling tea, Yogi took to voluntary poverty. Both have brazenly justified the need for violence to contain threats of Islamic expansionism. While Modi watched over the Gujarat riots of 2002, Yogi issued a clarion call to kill and abduct Muslim women in response to the alleged threats to Hindu women on account of ‘Love Jihad’.

The shift is obviously from Modi as a social and political symbol of Hindutva to Yogi as perhaps the decisive religious symbol of Hindutva. There has been a very carefully designed and planned move from a centrist-humanist sounding Vajpayee to the more robust Advani to the militant Modi to the explicit religious symbolism in the rise of Yogi.

Yogi is taking the discourse and politics of Hindutva many steps ahead. He is not merely a political symbol of religion-based politics of brand Modi but, in fact, a figurehead of a religious cleansing of politics. Modi cleanses politics through demonetisation and Yogi purifies politics as a sanyasi. ‘Purification’ is an important symbolism that is now extended from Salwa Judum as the ‘purification hunt’ to Jauhar as the symbol of purity of Hindu women. This purification is done through ‘direct action’ circumventing the effeminate liberal institutional and procedural delays. It could be in Yogi’s open defence of encounter killings of criminals to even eulogising attempted suicides as the only alternative left for criminals under his regime (in a recent interview on AAP Ka Adalat, hosted by Rajat Sharma). Yogi is a counter-point to the uncertainties of liberal democracy, as he is armed with certainty and truth and clarity of vision that comes from ancient religious knowledge. In times of endless debates and deliberation, Yogi is a symbol of religious certainty. In times of growing criminality, Yogi is a symbol of religious violence.

Modi had already introduced an everyday language in popular mobilisation. He crafted simple symbols and coined acronyms and articulated everyday concerns of the citizenry through his Mann ki Baat. Yogi takes it a step further in talking about even personal habits of cleanliness, bathing and brushing regularly, keeping surroundings clean, among others. It gives a sense of a return to an ancient Hindu way of life.

It is now more than ever clear as to why Gandhi could not have been tolerated by the right-wing forces. Gandhi had a similar mode of articulating and linking the every day to the political. He had similar interests in personal ethics, personal habits of cleanliness, and symbolism of an ashram, among others. Gandhi had already occupied the space that the figureheads of Hindutva are experimenting with today in bridging the gap between the private and the public. The symbolism of the Yogi allows for politicising everyday emotions of fear, anxiety, alienation, anger and hatred.

Added to this shift in the model of leadership is the near-absolute clarity of the BJP-RSS combine in how to usher in a Hindu Rashtra. Yogi is the first step under whose tutelage the remaining agenda can be carried out, including the building of a Bhavya Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, repealing Article 370, implementing UCC, Amendment of the Constitution, reconfirming reservation from caste to economic criteria and finally perhaps disenfranchising the religious minorities. Right is the only political force today that has near-absolute clarity of agenda and purpose in comparison to the rest of political groups in India.

It has now become common place to compare Hindutva with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, though in spite of all the comparisons we do not have a clarity as to where does this kind of a mass consent to militant right-wing politics comes from, except from a perceived construct of a hurt pride, of being victims of history of invasions, sense of inferiority and humiliation. Both the Germans then and the Hindus now continue to suffer the sense of being ‘taken for granted’ for being polite, accommodative and peace-loving. Further, the economic crisis of the Second World War and the current global crisis marked by massive rise in inequalities are also comparable to why Hindutva has become a viable project, including blatant use of fear, street violence, physical attacks and elimination of those opposed to their politics, but this again too has some degree of social consent, if one is to believe the social media. Beyond this we need a more in-depth understanding of how a social-psyche is being created that replicates itself from political and institutional heads to the common man on the streets. The social has a deep psychological root, and an ability to reproduce itself, what Michel Foucault refers to as, ‘Fascism in us all’.

Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, was forced by the British to write his autobiography in the interim period between his capture and execution. Hoess was in charge of a concentration camp in Poland that murdered some three million Jews. Some of his early reflections include self-observations such as ‘my two sisters were attached to me…But I never wished to have much to do with them…I was never able to have any warmer feelings for them. They have always been strangers to me’.  He further adds, ‘I had the greatest respect for both my parents…but love..I was never able to give them. Why this should have been I have never understood. Even today I can find no explanation’. He narrates of his memory of being repeatedly deceived and double-crossed… as a result ‘my only desire then was to run away…and be alone, and never see anyone again’.

Finally, his chilling account of mass killings where he admits, ‘the killing of this Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time. The order had been given, and I had to carry it out’.

What other lessons need to be learnt from histories of secrecy, conspiracy, violence, masculinity and misogyny, hatred and genocide, suffering and humiliation still is open to scrutiny as long as we have possibilities of politics of hatred gaining mass consent, out of fear or admiration.

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