Narendra Modi has an approval rating of 70 percent. He is the most popular elected leader in the world. Yet Project Syndicate does nothing but vilify him. Why? What is the point? I suppose you might say 'British citizen, Tunku Varadarajan is on its board. He is trying to compete with his brother, an American citizen who edits the Wire'.
The Slow Death of India’s Secular Democracy
Jan 19, 2024
ASHOKA MODY
Violent Hindu nationalism has accelerated at critical moments when putatively secular politicians have used religion to gain an electoral advantage.
The cow protection riots in Bihar occurred in 1917. Gandhi's sojourn in Champaran was designed to draw attention away from this. The Muslims agreed to give up beef in return for support for 'Khilafat'. But Gandhi unilaterally surrendered in 1922 leaving the Muslims in the lurch. Violent Hindu nationalism reached a peak in 1947 when millions of Muslims were expelled. Delhi's Muslim percentage fell from 33 to just 5 percent. Nehru brought in an ordinance preventing Muslims who had fled from returning and claiming Indian citizens.
The next big wave of violence was against Sikhs in 1984. Rajiv Gandhi got elected with the biggest majority in Indian history.
This process, a century in the making, is now culminating in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s open rejection of any pretense of secularism.
Mody thinks pretence is a good thing. Why is Biden not pretending to be an African American transgender Lesbian?
PRINCETON – On January 22, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will preside over the consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Executive power will symbolically fuse with the Hindu religion –
as happened when President Rajendra Prasad presided over the consecration of the Somnath Temple almost 75 years ago.
harking back to myths of Indian rulers as incarnations of Supreme Lord Vishnu
Nehru was anointed with Hindu rituals and given a golden sceptre a few hours before India became independent.
– at the former site of the Babri Mosque, demolished by self-styled “angry Hindus” in 1992.
Why 'self styled'? They genuinel
Indian children will celebrate the mythological Lord Ram.
Like the celebrate the birthday of the son of a Jewish carpenter in Palestine.
State-owned railways have promised to transport more than a thousand trainloads of pilgrims to Ayodhya, boosting tourism-related stock prices. Possibly a hundred private jets will fly in tycoons and notables. This ecstatic moment will cap an unyielding century-long journey to a vision forged by the anarchist ideologue Vinayak Damodar (Veer) Savarkar.
Savarkar was not an anarchist. He was a nationalist. However, the BJP was set up by the RSS as an alternative to the Savarkar's Hindu Mahasabha.
In his 1923 booklet, Hindutva, Savarkar presented an audacious Hindu-centric Indian nationalism.
The Bengalis had got there first. Maharashtra was playing catch up.
Breaking from the Hindu religion’s message of transcendental equality,
Which is why Brahmins used to love hugging and kissing Dalits- right?
he divided the world between friends – those rooted in India through ancestry and devotion to the Fatherland – and all others, who were deemed enemies.
Tagore got there first. He warned Hindus against Christians and Muslims.
(A decade later, the German jurist and prominent Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt advocated the same friend-versus-enemy conception of politics.)
Whereas Churchill advocated sucking off your enemies and giving them all your wealth.
In 1925, the Savarkar-inspired Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)
it was inspired by the Congress Seva Dal started by Dr. Hardikar who was a friend and fellow student of Dr. Hegdewar. Both were inspired by the Bengali Anushilan Committees from before the Great War.
became Hindutva’s military wing.
Nope. The Seva Dal remained the muscular wing of the Congress Party which, as Gandhi said in 1939, was a Hindu party.
Recruiting and training youth in martial disciplines and the glories of the Indian past, it promoted political violence and intolerance inherent in the friend-enemy distinction.
Whereas the Muslim League never went in for ethnic cleansing- right?
Perhaps the most famous RSS graduate is Modi.
He is still a member of the RSS as was Prime Minister Atal and Deputy Prime Minister Advani. I may mention Congress's candidate for CM of Gujarat was Shankarsinh Vaghela- Modi's senior in the RSS.
Initially, the Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, countered Hindutva’s appeal to India’s Hindu majority with a unifying secular ideology
which involved cow protection, giving up sex, and spinning cotton yarn
anchored in freedom from British colonial rule.
Gandhi said that the Brits must not leave till they turned over the Indian Army to the Congress Party. Otherwise the Muslims and the Punjabis (regardless of sect) would band together and rob the non-violent Hindus who dominated Congress.
But Hindutva forces saw Gandhi’s call for religious harmony as pandering to Muslims, and in 1948, a Savarkar-inspired ideologue assassinated him.
Gandhi was saying India should give Pakistan money even though India was at war with it. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the maha-crackpot was killed. Sadly, an American caught Godse, the assassin. Otherwise the fellow would have gotten away despite the presence of plainclothes detectives at the prayer meeting.
Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, promoted a progressive secular Indian ideal precariously held together by the hope for material and social progress.
He was a blathershite. The Chinese took down his pants and made fun of his puny genitals.
But after Nehru’s death in 1964, communal forces within and outside the Congress party gained momentum.
Nehru's own state of U.P had draconian cow protection legislation from 1955 onward.
Secular ideals suffered a major blow on April 19, 1976, when the younger son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used the dictatorial powers of emergency rule to brutalize Muslims.
What people objected to was forcible sterilization. Sanjay Gandhi had plenty of Muslim acolytes.
The day began with humiliating forced sterilizations near Delhi’s Jama Masjid and culminated in a massacre of slumdwellers resisting eviction in neighboring Turkman Gate.
Mody doesn't care about the Hindus killed by Indira. Only Muslims matter. Why does he not mention the millions of Muslims forcibly expelled from India on Nehru's watch?
As Muslim electoral support for Congress waned, Gandhi shifted her focus to the Hindu vote, thus opening the door wider for hardline Hindutva forces.
No. Indira outflanked the BJP as did Rajiv. However it was Lohia and JP who had opened the door for the parliamentary rise of the Jan Sangh. Atal was quite a good minister in Morarji's Cabinet.
She established backchannel communications with the RSS, and increased her use of Hindu symbols
because she actually was a Hindu who wore rudraksha beads and spent a lot of time visiting Sankaracharyas etc.
as Hindu-Muslim riots became more frequent in the early 1980s. Her pandering to Hindus in the Jammu and Kashmir elections, and her support for the Sikh militant Sant Bhindranwale in Punjab, further stoked Hindu identity politics.
What stokes Hindu identity politics is crazy Muslims or Sikhs chopping off our heads.
After her assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, the anti-Sikh violence orchestrated by Congress leaders catalyzed mobs of unemployed – even unemployable – men as Hindu nationalism’s foot soldiers.
Plenty of Bangladeshi Muslims took part in the pogrom. The RSS tried to protect Sikhs.
Two key developments in the 1980s gave vivid reality to Savarkar’s vision of an India united by politicized Hinduism. In 1983, emboldened hardline Hindutva forces launched the “Ekatmata Yatra,” loosely defined as a “march to celebrate India’s one soul.” Organized by the Sangh Parivar (the umbrella term for Hindutva groups), multiple processions crisscrossed the country with Hindu emblems.
Why were they not using Taoist emblems?
In 1987-88, instructed by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (Indira Gandhi’s older son), state-owned television Doordarshan serialized the much-loved Ramayana epic, which spawned a Rambo-like iconography of Lord Ram as Hindutva’s avenger.
only in the mind of this cretin.
Rajiv Gandhi also reignited the Hindu-Muslim contest for the site on which the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid stood. With Hindu zealots claiming that it was Lord Ram’s birthplace, Gandhi declared himself a champion of Hindu ideals and opened its gates, sealed since 1949 to contain communal passions.
Hindu worship was ongoing because a priest was admitted to perform required rituals once a year. It was on this basis that the temple deity won his suit.
Then, in December 1992, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s Congress-led government dithered as frenzied Hindu mobs demolished Babri Masjid, triggering bloody riots and further bolstering the Hindutva cause.
Rao was more religious than Atal or Advani. Sadly, his favourite godman was a crook.
Only 16 years separated the Turkman Gate massacre of Muslims in 1976 to their humiliation with the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 and its gruesome aftermath.
Nobody greatly cared about Turkman gate. Why is Mody obsessed with it? The plain fact is Sanju was seen as headstrong but not anti-Muslim. The demolition of the Masjid did lead to some terrorism which helped the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra but it didn't do much to dent the caste based 'Samajwadi' parties. They declined because they were shit at governance.
Indian secularism was a receding shadow.
It was like Iraqi or Syrian secularism. The thing was part and parcel of some sort of thuggish Socialist ideology. But it was shit at running things and thus curled up and died.
The Hindutva juggernaut was marching ahead, triumphing in May 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party – the political face of Hindutva – gained a large parliamentary majority under Modi’s leadership.
Because Rahul had cut off Manmohan at the legs but refused to step forward. Thus, it was a case of Modi or nobody.
It must be said, the attempt to paint Modi as the Hindu Hitler gained him votes. But the man cares about governance not shedding the blood of innocents.
With the hardliners in power, Hindu mobs have gained license to lynch Muslims and assassinate anti-Hindutva opponents.
No they haven't. This nutter must be thinking of Hamas.
Matters could worsen. Hindu symbols and sentiments have infused state conduct ominously.
If you hate Hinduism you may find its symbols 'ominous'. But Hindus find them auspicious.
Modi has helped establish Savarkar as a demigod.
Rahul has promoted Savarkar because if Rahul is against you, you must have done something right.
Promoting a Hindu theocratic state, he inaugurated the new parliament building in a ceremony overshadowed by Hindu ritualism.
Like the rituals by which Nehru was anointed before the transfer of power. Modi took the 'sengol' or sceptre which Mountbatten passed to Nehru and placed it in the new Parliament building.
In November 2019, the Supreme Court, despite the absence of historical evidence of Lord Ram’s birth on the Babri Masjid site, authorized the Ram Temple’s construction in deference to Hindu “faith and belief.”
It was enough that the Temple deity had been receiving continuous worship to establish its claim according to Indian law.
Similarly, the chief justice recently presented himself as a modern Savarkar, remarking that flags flying atop Hindu temples represent the Constitution of India’s unifying force.
He represented himself as a devout Hindu- which is what he is. So what?
Meanwhile, hate-filled H-pop and cinema are normalizing Hindutva’s hard edge, as are Congress’s “soft Hindutva tactics.”
The new Congress government in Karnataka is holding a public celebration of the consecration ceremony. As their deputy CM says 'ultimately we are all Hindus'.
Although Hindutva’s rise over the past century has occasionally paused, it has never reversed.
It reversed in 2004. The price of onions matters more than slogans like 'India Shining'. The mistake made by the UPA was to turn anti-Hindu. Kharge and his son are repeating that mistake. Congress will be wiped out in the coming elections.
Indeed, it has accelerated at critical moments when putatively secular politicians used religion to gain an electoral advantage.
Paswan used an Osama look-alike to drum up Muslim votes.
They gave oxygen to Hindutva’s potent friend-versus-enemy narrative,
like Osama's potent narrative re. killing kaffirs with vim and vigour.
which gradually overwhelmed the secular interlude of early post-independence India.
Early post-independence India saw wave after wave of migration by Muslims because of incessant harassment.
Today, violent Hindutva – far removed from the peaceful tenets of Hinduism
which involved being sodomized by all and sundry- right?
– has infiltrated politics and culture, with elite acquiescence.
Very true. I often used to see Ratan Tata handing out swords to Hindutva activists and telling them to go kill Muslims and Christians.
As Modi assumes the persona of a priest-like ruler on January 22, the idea of a theocratic India appears impervious to secular opposition, regardless of the outcome of the general election set for April and May.
So, if the BJP is wiped out and the Communist party takes power, this cretin will continue to write about 'theocratic India' for Project Syndicate.
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