Hindu Nation, Hindu Rashtra, de facto

There is nothing wrong with a Hindu Nation, and it will not be run by the principles of Hinduism but will be run by radicals who are hell-bent on killing others or forcing others in into obedience.   Nothing wrong with Islamic, Christian, Jewish or Buddhist nation either, but none of them will be ruled by their principles. Among Hindus you have RSS group, Christians you have the Neocons, You have the Settlers among the Jews, ISIS among the Muslims and the radicals among Buddhists.

Religions are beautiful and a majority in each one of them are afraid of the tiny number of radicals and have in effect allowed the radicals to be the poster boys of their respective religions. 

We should look to have democracies and the rule of law where a criminal is a criminal and you don't felicitate them with flowers ( BJP Ministers), or March in the support of rapists, or encourage them with your silence (like Mr. Modi). Religions are personal and we should respect the otherness of each faith, and knock off the arrogance that one is more privileged than the other.

Mike Ghouse



https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/hindu-rashtra-de-facto-bjp-rss-gau-rakshak-mob-lynching-5301083/

Hindu Rashtra, de facto
It is at once a society, civilisation, nation — and state

Written by Christophe Jaffrelot | Published: August 11, 2018 12:16:34 am
Hindu Rashtra, de facto

Most of the lynchings reported between 2015 and 2018 were perpetrated by vigilante militias or the result of the atmosphere they created, often using social media. (Illustration: Mithun Chakraborty)

The media often presents cow-related lynching cases as spontaneous reactions of the mob. Certainly, some ordinary people take part in them. But the perpetrators’ ideological orientation could be surmised from the fact that they often make their victims raise slogans such as “Gau mata ki jai (Hail the cow-mother)” or “Jai Hanuman (Hail Hanuman)”. That the choice of victims for assault had less to do with cow protection than with underlying hostility toward Muslims is clear in the way Hindu cow-breeders and transporters have been spared during attacks — Pehlu Khan’s truck driver got away with a mere slap, whereas the others, all Muslims, were beaten (one of them to death). More importantly, most of the lynchings reported between 2015 and 2018 were perpetrated by vigilante militias or the result of the atmosphere they created, often using social media.

The most visible Hindu nationalist organisation in this domain, the Gau Raksha Dal (GRD), has chapters in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Delhi and Haryana. In Haryana, one of the movement’s strongholds, the GRD emblem is a cow’s head flanked by two AK47s. Elsewhere, daggers replace firearms on the movement’s coat of arms. In practice, its members use cruder instruments like cricket bats, hockey sticks, lathis and so on.

In Haryana, the GRD and police have arrived at a division of labour. The president of the Haryana GRD, Yogendra Arya, told Ishan Marvel, the author of a remarkable piece of investigative journalism (‘In the name of the mother’, The Caravan, September 2016): “We have a huge network of volunteers and informants. […] As soon as someone sees something fishy, they call us up, and we then inform the volunteers of the relevant district, and the local police, who then set up joint nakas — checkpoints — to catch the smugglers. […] Police can’t do what we do, they have to follow the laws. They don’t have the resources and network we have.” The GRD thus acts as a community cultural police, with members closely monitoring the deeds of those who deserve not only to be reported, but also punished.

In Haryana, the convergence of two types of policing — official and unofficial — has reportedly been strengthened by the creation of a “cow task force” within the state police. An IPS officer heads this network, which has specialised officers in each district. These officials allegedly work with the GRD: In some respects, the state subcontracts policing tasks to non-state actors, turning them into a para-state force.

The other Indian state that criminalised beef consumption by law in 2015, Maharashtra, has taken similar steps. The state government appoints Honorary Animal Welfare Officers to implement this new law — former gau rakshaks have been hired for these jobs.

In Haryana, the osmosis between vigilante groups and the state goes well beyond this. Yogendra Arya, the national vice-president of the GRD, sat on the board of the Gau Seva Ayog, a Haryana government institution devoted to cow welfare, along with 10 others, who like him are longstanding members of the Sangh Parivar. The lack of distinction between non-state actors and government authorities has probably never been so great.

These developments have triggered a new dynamics of state formation, as defined by Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale. In their study The Unhappy Valley, Berman and Lonsdale distinguish the formation of the state as a social institution and state-building as an administrative process. Reasoning solely in terms of state-building tends to reduce authority only to official agents and their actions. Berman and Lonsdale take into account private actors who work their way into the process of state formation through the “vulgarisation of power”, which involves commandeering public authority to further private ends. This approach has obvious heuristic advantages for the analysis of Hindu vigilante groups and their relationship to the state.

Collusion between police and Hindu nationalist movements is indeed evidence of the start of a transition from a state-building process, in which the administrative and coercive apparatus is supposed to treat all citizens equally, to a state-formation process wherein majoritarian non-state actors impose a social and cultural order. What adds a layer of complexity to Berman and Lonsdale’s model is that in India, these non-state actors enjoy state protection. Though the authority they exercise is illegal, it is nevertheless seen as legitimate by the state in that it is inspired by the values and interests of the dominant community to which the government is accountable. In that sense, the Sangh Parivar is more of India’s deep state than a parallel government, all the more so as the BJP is part of the Parivar. This shift from a neutral state to an ideological Hindu Rashtra illustrates a form of violent majoritarianism that can be observed in all countries where vigilantes bring minorities to heel with the more or less tacit agreement of shadow forces that share their biases or ideology (the relationship between white supremacists’ militias and the police in the US could provide other examples).

In addition to the Sangh Parivar’s influence at the grass roots and within the state apparatus, another variable needs to be factored in, as evident from the way a police officer recently bowed to UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Guru Purnima. In that case, the authority of the saffron-clad chief minister was not only due to its temporal power but also because of his spiritual authority, a status no political leader has had in India. That is conducive to still another type of state, theocracy.

Not only has the prime minister abstained from condemning lynchings, some legislators and ministers have extended their blessings to the lynchers. Only a few of the lynchers have been convicted so far. Whenever lynchers have been arrested, the local judiciary has released them on bail. If the executive, legislature or judiciary do not effectively oppose lynchings, India may remain a rule-of-law country only on paper and, in practice, a de facto ethno-state.

The Hindu Rashtra label, in fact, perfectly describes the process at stake: It refers as much to a people united by blood ties, culture and social community codes, and a political framework. It is at once a society, civilisation, nation and state. In this way, the Sangh Parivar’s work partakes in a new formation of the state, the formation of a de facto Hindu Rashtra based on unofficial, societal regulation with the blessing of the official state. If one day the Constitution of India is amended, it may become a de jure Hindu Rashtra.

Birth of a Hindu Nation

The following paragraphs in quotes is the one of the most important paragraphs of the article - if we understand this, we may proceed further in finding solutions. In 2003 I had a talk show radio in Dallas, and for a full hour we carried the conversation on a similar theme... it is good to see someone put their thumb on the issues. Indeed for believers reason and logic don't mean a thing. Yes, Ayodyha is beyond time and history; faith never looks for evidence.
This site MikeGhouseforIndia.blogspot.com has a many articles on Ayodhya worth reading.

The solution is there, but Muslims are afraid of the extremists among Hindus who will demand a pound of flesh, there will be no end to their demands. Whereas the right among Hindus have an attitude of revenge and punishment against people who did no no harm to anyone. No Muslim in India has anything to do with Babar, just as no Hindu has anything to do with Krishna Deva Raya.  We appreciate their work, but they did not do anything for Muslims or Hindus respectively - they were for themselves like all the kings in the world.  We need to understand this clearly - that the kings were for themselves and it is wrong of us to put a religious label on them.

Here is the paragraph.

"Left secular historians questioned if Ayodhya was the birthplace of Rama and whether present-­day Ayodhya was the Ayodhya of the Ramayana, thus perhaps putting more wind in the sail of the project. Let alone eng­age it, they failed to even grasp the working of the believing Hindu’s mind: for them, Ayodhya was beyond time and history; faith never looked for evidence. Hard-line secular politicians and Muslim leadership failed to anticipate the upheaval. When Advani talked of relocation of the mosque, it could have been an entry point for talk and bargain; however, the secularists relied entirely on the constitutional/legal solution, fearing any dia­logue would privilege the Sangh parivar. Political and electoral calculations, rather than minority interest, were the guiding principles. Once the RSS gauged the mass support behind its project, it showed no interest in rapprochement as it could reap a political windfall only through a violent assertion."

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/birth-of-a-new-hindu-nation/299581

Birth Of A New Hindu Nation

It can’t be without reason that the RSS now says a mandir alone will come up at the disputed site. The Sangh has been carving a Hindu India since ’92.

PRALAY KANUNGO

A quarter century has passed since the Babri Masjid demolition. Every year, Hindutva forces celebrate this day as ‘Vijay Diwas’ (Victory Day), as a ritual, but perhaps with a sense of guilt and helplessness—for them, Ram, despite being ‘liberated’, rem­ains homeless all these years. In the changing political context, the silver jubilee year marks a watershed as the RSS gears up for what they offer as a grand metaphor—the return of Ram to Ayodhya—by turning into a reality the ‘Mandir wahin bana­yenge’ slogan, once considered merely rhetorical.

Symbols and rituals are embedded in the Hindu nationalist agenda; hence, the first step in this direction has already been initiated with the symbolic return of Ram to Ayodhya this Diwali by lighting almost two lakh lamps on the banks of Sarayu, creating a great spectacle. Now the Sangh parivar is zealously taking up the next step by fast-tracking the temple construction agenda. Thus, without waiting for the Supreme Court decision, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat recently ann­ounced that a mandir will be constructed, asserting that there will only be a mandir, and no other structure at the disputed site.

With this announcement, the RSS has entered a new phase of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement: construction of a temple as a new symbol of a Hindu India. Bhagwat’s confidence needs to be understood in the context of an all-powerful RSS now being in control of the levers of political power at the Centre and in a majority of the states. The hegemonic rise of the RSS owes greatly to the Ayodhya movement, of which demolition was a symbolic as well as a substantive event.

The Sangh has always shown an instinct for survival when chips are down. Of late, it has a flair for expansion and pursuit for power. 

The demolition was not a sudden act, but an outcome of a decade-long mobilisation and agitation under a calibrated strategy by the Sangh-VHP-BJP combine. Though the seed was sown back in 1949 when Ram lalla ‘appeared’ in Babri Masjid on a cold December night, the lord still failed to go beyond the local to capture the nat­ional religious imaginary. The humiliating electoral performance of the BJP in 1984, winning only two seats in Parliament, compelled the RSS to go for a militant religio-political strategy around Ayodhya. The Meenakshipuram conversions of 1981, Shah Bano, the unlocking of the temple doors by the Congress government, all provided ideal fodder for a mammoth pan-Indian Hindu mobilisation, which became the largest mass movement in independent India.

Till then, the ideology of Hindu rashtra was by and large confined to the Sangh cadre. Ayodhya allowed the RSS to spread its worldview among ordinary Hindus by imaginatively projecting Ram not just as a great Hindu god, but also as a symbol of repressed national pride. Thus, Hindu­ism and nationalism were skilfully woven, and this struck a chord with millions who never really related to a vacuous secularism. On the other hand, BJP veteran L.K. Advani’s cogent argume­nts on ‘mino­rity appeasement’ appealed to many.

Left secular historians questioned if Ayodhya was the birthplace of Rama and whether present-­day Ayodhya was the Ayodhya of the Ramayana, thus perhaps putting more wind in the sail of the project. Let alone eng­age it, they failed to even grasp the working of the believing Hindu’s mind: for them, Ayodhya was beyond time and history; faith never looked for evidence. Hard-line secular politicians and Muslim leadership failed to anticipate the upheaval. When Advani talked of relocation of the mosque, it could have been an entry point for talk and bargain; however, the secularists relied entirely on the constitutional/legal solution, fearing any dia­logue would privilege the Sangh parivar. Political and electoral calculations, rather than minority interest, were the guiding principles. Once the RSS gauged the mass support behind its project, it showed no interest in rapprochement as it could reap a political windfall only through a violent assertion.

RSS turned Ram into a symbol of repressed national pride for Hindus, enhancing Advani’s views on minority appeasement. 

Historically, the RSS has always shown the right instinct at the right time for its survival, expansion and pursuit of political power. It kept aloof from the freedom struggle, strategically opting to exp­and quietly. During Partition, it endeared itself to Hindu refugees as their ‘saviour’. During the hard days of its ban after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, it conceived the political front, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (1951), and then strategically expanded, opening other affiliates, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (1964). In 1975, it took the bold political decision to challenge the Emergency by joining the JP movement, and soon became a dominant player in the Janata Party and in mainstream politics in 1977, acquiring respectability, legitimacy and political power.

The launch of the Ayodhya agitation in the 1980s was perfectly timed as well. By then, the Sangh network had already become pan-Indian, making inroads into new regions and social groups. And yet, the RSS had remained largely a Brahmin-Bania, upper-caste, middle-class organisation of the cow belt, and it desperately needed to break out of this mould. Ayodhya equipped it with the language and symbolic tools required to penetrate rural and semi-urban India, and flow over the caste barrier: for Ram had a big appeal among backward castes and marginalised groups across regions. Thus, mobilising for the mandir became simultaneously a way of building a new social coa­lition, particularly integrating the Dalits, adivasis and backwards into the Hindu fold, not just in a token way as often alleged, but showing willingness to make them partners in power. Thus, the foundation of a ‘Hindu India’ was laid on a large and diverse social base. The BJP’s strength in Parliament surged; the movement brought it to power in key north Indian states; and the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh made way for the demolition with the tacit approval of the Congress government at the Centre.

Surely, the demolition was insane and barbaric for many, and such violent majoritarian assertion was considered anti-democratic and anti-minority. But the supporters gloated over their victory as though it ended the very symbol of historical Muslim domination and Hindu humiliation. But this ‘victory’ had some long-term negative repercussions. Mob frenzy and violence became a new normal for conflict resolution. There came to be a big question mark on the efficacy of the Indian state in protecting the rule of law and minority rights. The lofty ideal of ‘Hindu tolerance’ was once and for all consigned to history. The demolition and mob violence left a permanent scar on Muslims and scared other minorities. Trust in constitutional governance became a casualty, as Kalyan Singh, despite his affidavit as the CM to protect the masjid, became a wilful partner in demolition.

HUDDLE’S ON

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat with Hindu spiritual leaders

PHOTOGRAPH BY PTI

All this had no adverse impact on the RSS, of course. Rather, the riots and subsequent blasts in Bombay, a violent response to the demolition, further enhanced its credentials in a field marked increasingly by Hindu-Muslim polarisation. Its constituency was further consolidated and the momentum finally enabled the party to form coalition governments in Delhi from 1998 to 2004. Some key players of the movement, including some religious leaders, became lawmakers and ministers; thus, religion got legitimacy in the secular domain. The RSS, despite constraints, exercised a sway over the A.B. Vajpayee government: from cabinet formation and policymaking to key appointments.  The moderate Vajpayee, who chose to express remo­rse after the demolition, put the mandir issue in the backburner due to coalition compulsion; and only the VHP periodically continued with its symbolic rituals at Ayodhya.

In 2002, a train coming from Ayodhya was set on fire at Godhra, killing Gujarati kar sevaks, which led to the most horrific anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. Gujarati society got Hindutvaised to a great extent and the state has been in the firm grip of Hindutva politics ever since. The majoritarian assertion of December 6, 1992 had a logical link to events in Gujarat a decade later. But Narendra Modi chose not to be confined to the mould of Hindutva icon: adding administrative strings to his bow, and deploying development as a slogan, he graduated to become India’s prime minister with RSS support.

With Modi and Yogi at the helm and the RSS hegemony at its peak, why won’t Bhagwat exude high confidence?

The BJP’s massive electoral success in 2014, and later in the 2017 UP assembly elections, could be partly attributed to the base created during the Ayodhya days. The movement’s inclusive social coalition came in handy, though lying dormant and disillusioned with their temple aspi­rations going unrequited, the Sangh successfully brought them back to the fold, promising to address their concerns. Now Yogi Adityanath, directly engaged with the temple issue, poses as an enabler even as Modi stays largely on the dev­elopment plank. Modi is the new navigator of Advani’s rath; Yogi inherits the legacy of his prede­cessor Mahant Avaidyanth, a key figure in the movement. With two stalwarts at the helm, and RSS hegemony at its peak, why will not Bhagwat exude confidence?

Undoubtedly, the Babri Masjid demolition shook the very secular edifice of the country’s Con­stitution, signalling the onset of a Hindu India. The makeshift temple is the foundation for a majoritarian state. Since December 1992, pillars for a temple  are being quietly chiselled, while the RSS has been carving out the structure of a Hindu India—brick by brick.

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(The writer is ICCR chair for the Study of Contemporary India, Leiden University, the Netherlands.)