A foreign outlet interviewed me this week and at the end of it, after we had wrapped up, the interviewer said he was surprised. He said he did not know that this was the position India was in, and I find this is quite a common reaction. Other than the academics who study India and foreign correspondents posted here, few realise how much India has changed from the image they had of it.
I will recap what was asked of me in that interview and how I replied so you can get a picture of what the interviewer grasped. You can also compare it to your own assessment of where India stands today.
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He first wanted to look at Hindutva – its origins, ideological foundations and how it differs from Hinduism as a religion. I told him Hindutva was formed from the words Hindu and tva and meant Hinduness. The word was used in Savarkar’s book a century ago in which he wrote that India and Hindu come from the same root as Indus and Sindhu. He felt that one could only be Hindu and by extension Indian if one’s holy sites were in India and not in Jerusalem or Mecca or elsewhere.
To the second part, I said that Hinduism was a religion and was concerned with personal belief: Gods, prayers, fasts, festivals. Hindutva was concerned about the other person’s belief and what they could not eat, where they could not pray, who they could not love and where they could not stay.
He then asked how Hindutva became increasingly influential in Indian politics, particularly through the rise of the BJP. I said that though it was formed in 1951, for four decades the BJP/BJS had only a single-digit vote share nationally and did not win a single state without alliances till 1990. The party did not know which issue to mobilise on through all those years. What made it popular, and doubled its vote share to 18% was the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya. Some 3,000 Indians were killed in the violence that made the BJP ascendant. Two other demands, stripping Muslims of their constitutional autonomy in Kashmir and taking away their personal law, kept the pot simmering.
He then wanted to discuss how Hindutva has affected India’s political institutions and the wider political environment, including the treatment of religious minorities. Here there was nothing to do other than recite the numbers which show us the total exclusion our ruling party practices as revealed by its ministers, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members and its state legislators.
Laws criminalising possession of beef started in 2015, triggering beef lynchings, and laws criminalising interfaith marriage started in 2018. He was aghast to learn about the reversal of burden of proof and the presumption of guilt. How can you call yourself a democracy with all this around you, he asked. I shrugged.
He then asked about the prime minister’s role in the normalization of Hindutva politics and why this political project has remained electorally successful. I said Modi was more open and honest about his championing of Hindutva than the BJP leaders before him. This made him popular with his votaries and had taken the BJP nationally to 38% where it has remained.
The BJP was also, I said, enthusiastic about permanent polarisation through law and policy (I referred to the bulldozers and absence of due process and he was dumbstruck).
He then asked how Hindutva has affected India’s Muslims and other minorities, and whether the rise of majoritarian politics is changing how minorities understand their place within the Indian state. I answered as best as I could. The main point was that India’s minorities collectively numbered more than the population of Western Europe.
Asked about Hindutva beyond India’s borders, I told him Israel puts us on display as its trusted friend and ally when asked to justify its actions against Palestinians.
I said our ambition since 2014 had moved from a global one to a regional one and our obsession was with getting the better of our neighbours. We had stopped competing with China and I gave him the numbers on the economy and the position since 1991.
He asked: Do BJP leaders not see the damage they are doing? I said that in my experience they genuinely believed in their ideology. To them it was not a means to an end but an end in itself and for this reason what was happening by way of exclusion and persecution would continue no matter the fallout.
Finally, he asked me to look ahead and discuss India’s future – whether the country can move away from majoritarian politics, what role the opposition and India’s democratic institutions may play, and whether India’s pluralist tradition can withstand the growing influence of Hindutva.
I said our natural state was one of pluralism and that broadly society did not reflect the ideology of our government. However, so many years of it being imposed on us top-down had meant the ideology had seeped into institutions and into society and this would remain after the party had gone from power.
So far as the future was concerned it was dark because we have no ideas about how to transition half a billion people out of poverty, where they will remain. More importantly we no longer discuss this with any urgency nor is it the primary basis of politics in our country. We would remain poor and irrelevant but content in the knowledge that our minorities were worse off than us.
