Hindutva's Paradox

With general elections in India around the corner, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recently promised to a construct a temple in Ayodhya if elected to power – on a site that has been disputed between Hindus and Muslims for centuries.

In India’s increasingly fractured polity, it is clear that the BJP will find little support among India’s 130 million Muslims. The party’s move is aimed at galvanizing political support among India’s majority Hindu population in the run-up to the elections. Staunch Hindu revivalists have always been known to support the BJP and its revivalist agenda but interestingly, over the years, the party has developed another strong constituency that is far removed from the religious right: the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum.

This is arguably the ‘new India’ that is unabashedly capitalist, and that has suffered excessive political intervention in the economy over the years. It is a demographic that openly admits that the poor, the marginalized and the minorities are holding the economy, and the country, back. In their mind, a vote for the BJP is a vote for globalization and for a stronger, more successful India in the world.

But in India, somewhat counter-intuitively, the policies of globalization and nationalism don’t get formulated in opposing camps. They are both self-reinforcing policies of the BJP, and this is no accident.

The BJP is really two distinct parties, two ideologies, that have been fused together. The fiery rhetoric of economic and cultural nationalism, or swadeshi, rallies the masses and wins votes. But once in power, the government paradoxically pursues an agenda of decentralization and globalization which seduces the upper classes and in turn, feeds the country with stronger ideas of national and religious identity. It’s a brilliant, yet vicious, circle.

It’s also self-contradictory. On one side of the BJP you have the ‘swadeshi Sangh’ cadre of aging, austere ideologues from hardline Hindu outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) who preach morals, religion and nationalism. The Ayodhya temple issue is but one example of their use of religious fervor to gather support. But on the other side of the BJP, you have the so-called ‘saffron-clad yuppies’ whose religious ideals are secondary to their economic ambitions. The yuppies are less interested in Hindutva, and more interested in stimulating investment, globalization and generally making India ‘shine’ economically.

How the BJP balances its right-wing nationalist and religious views with a liberal, globalizing economic policy is one of the grandest exercises in hypocrisy. Yet during a severe global economic downturn that has seen sharply rising food prices in India, many voters are genuinely looking to the party to provide a more ‘favorable’ pro-reform economic agenda. They are looking for a party that can provide them with a reprieve from the crippling effects of rising food prices, a falling bourse and diminished demand.

Given the myriad economic and social challenges that India finds herself in today, the question is whether the BJP will resort to grand yatras, and canvassing for votes on the parochial platform of religion or whether it will take the high road to South Block by addressing the people’s more fundamental economic worries.

It must be easy for them to divide India’s polity along its religious fault lines. The Sangh’s organizational strength and support networks at the grassroots level allow these outfits to issue grandiose appeals to Hindu nationalist sentiments, and win mass support. Though it must be noted that such attempts by the self-proclaimed sentinels of saffronism would not be very different from the tactics of fundamentalist groups like the Taliban. Indeed the greatest beneficiaries of right-wing Hindu rule in India are the fundamentalists across the Wagah border – it allows them to move even further to the right, and to posture as the defenders of flag and faith.

It is unfortunate that the neo-liberal economic policies pursued by the BJP decision-makers fly in the face of the Sangh’s swadeshi ideals. But the trouble is that the two wings of the BJP have entered a marriage of convenience, both realizing that they have few alternatives. So the Sangh sacrifices a few of its more expendable ideals in return for cabinet seats, and the yuppies continue to give lip service to Hindutva causes in return for a free hand in running the economy.

Most liberal voices will agree that the Narendra Modi’s unpardonable complicity in the Gujarat pogroms have irreparably damaged both the BJP’s credibility as well as India’s constitutionally-enshrined secular tradition. But the BJP’s election and governance strategy requires it to conduct inquisitions like in Gujarat for electoral success – how else you rally 800 million Hindus, so diverse in their practice of religion, to one cause?

The BJP’s idea is not to give all Hindus one voice, but rather, to give them all the same problem, as well as a shared, semitized perception of faith. Tragically, however, few among India’s middle-class electorate pause to think what exactly this swadeshi, this economic and cultural nationalism and religious pride, means for India’s minorities in places like Gujarat and what it means for India’s secular ideals.

The BJP’s divisive electoral strategy may have worked ten years ago, but the bitter taste they have left in the world will make their fortunes more uncertain in this year’s elections. What’s scary, however, is that if they do come to power, it will be when in the aftermath of a national tragedy and during seriously troubled economic times.

India’s masses are angry and they’re afraid. And that makes for a lethal mix.