India against Gandhi: Gandhi is now a major hate figure in Modi's India by Ramachandra Guha

 

India against Gandhi: Gandhi is now a major hate figure in Modi's India by Ramachandra Guha

 

https://www.ft.com/content/a0b17ed9-092d-4e83-90fe-2a6cea952518

 

Gandhi is the major hate figure (in Modi's India).

 

He is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan; blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights of equal citizenship.

 

BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.

 

YouTube videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of views.

 

Seventy-five years after his assassination, the ‘father of the nation’ is a problem for Narendra Modi — but the country still needs his ideas

 

Born in 1958, a decade after Gandhi’s death, I grew up in an atmosphere of veneration towards the Mahatma.

 

One of my great-uncles helped to edit Gandhi’s Collected Works; another founded a pioneering initiative in community health inspired by Gandhi. These familial influences were consolidated and deepened by the public culture of the time.

 

Gandhi was the father of the nation, the leader of the struggle for freedom against British rule, whose techniques of non-violent resistance had won admirers and imitators across the world. It was largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the religious and linguistic diversity of our land.

 

 In our school assembly we sang a 17th-century hymn that Gandhi was particularly fond of, which he had rewritten to reflect his vision of the India he wished to leave behind. Hindus saw God as Ishwar; Gandhi’s adaptation asked us to see him as Allah too.

 

And it was to these lines that our teachers drew our particular attention. The first criticisms of Gandhi that I remember encountering were in a book I read as a student at Delhi University.

 

This was the autobiography of Verrier Elwin, an Oxford scholar who became a leading ethnographer of the tribes of central India. Elwin knew Gandhi well, and at one time considered himself a disciple.

 

In later years, while he retained his admiration for the Mahatma’s moral courage and religious pluralism, Elwin became sharply critical of Gandhi’s advocacy of prohibition, which he thought damaging to tribal culture (where home-brewed alcohol was both a source of nutrition and an aid to dance and music), and of his exaltation of celibacy, which Elwin thought damaging to everyone

 

. In Amritsar in 2006, members of the Congress party place garlands on a statue of Gandhi to mark the anniversary of his birth © Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images Elwin’s strictures were mild, even timid, when compared with those of the Marxist intellectuals of Kolkata, whom I encountered in the 1980s when beginning my academic career.

 

These scholars identified with the Naxalites, a band of insurgents who were inspired by Mao Zedong and who vandalised and destroyed Gandhi statues wherever they found them.

 

Books were written arguing that Gandhi was an agent simultaneously of the British colonial state and of the Indian capitalist class; non-violence was presented as a cunning device to wean the masses away from the revolutionary path. I had many arguments with my Marxist friends about Gandhi.

 

I sought to persuade them that his adherence to non-violence arose out of a disinclination to take human life. I asked them to give Gandhi at least the qualified praise that Mao himself had bestowed on Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the Chinese republic, as creating a rudimentary national consciousness on which was built a superior socialist consciousness.

 

 On these subjects my interlocutors at least talked back, but our relations came to breaking point when I chose to focus my own research on a forest protection movement led by Gandhians, which the Marxists dismissed as a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle.

 

Those debates with Marxists shaped me profoundly, personally as well as intellectually. Yet recalling them here perhaps conveys a whiff of antiquarianism. For now, in the 2020s, the main attacks on Gandhi in India come from the other end of the ideological spectrum.

 

For the past eight and a half years, the Hindu right has been in power in India, and Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and his commitment to interfaith harmony are anathema to it.

 

 While he is still officially the “father of the nation”, with his birthday a national holiday and his face on the currency notes, the public mood has turned hostile to Gandhi.

 

To understand why Gandhi is increasingly unpopular in his homeland, one must go back to the circumstances of his death 75 years ago.

 

 Gandhi was murdered on January 30 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a member of a secretive paramilitary organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

 

 Founded in 1925, the RSS believed — and still believes — in the construction of a Hindu theocratic state in India. Its leaders and cadres insist that demographic superiority and the Indic origin of their faith makes Hindus natural and permanent rulers of the land.

 

They have a particular suspicion of Muslims and Christians, on account of the fact that their religions originated outside India and their sacred shrines are outside India too.

 

 Mahatma Gandhi c1947 © Mirrorpix ‘It was largely because of him that we were free and proudly independent, and it was largely because of him that — unlike neighbouring Pakistan — we gloried in the religious and linguistic diversity of our land’ Gandhi, on the other hand, held the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.

 

After the subcontinent was partitioned in August 1947, separating Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, he worked strenuously to stop violence against those Muslims who remained in India, going on a fast in Kolkata and later in Delhi. Gandhi’s fast in Delhi was conducted in a home opposite the office of the British High Commission. Having watched events unfold, the deputy high commissioner wrote in a report to London that “day in and day out,

 

Muslims of all classes of society, many of whom had also suffered personal bereavements in the recent disturbances, came to invoke his [Gandhi’s] help.

 

 Normally too fearful even to leave their homes, they came to him because they had learned and believed that he had their interests at heart and was the only real force in the Indian Union capable of preserving them from destruction.” Gandhi’s efforts to maintain religious harmony enraged the head of the RSS, an intense bearded man named MS Golwalkar.

 

A police report of an RSS meeting in Delhi in December 1947 tells us that, “referring to Muslims”, Golwalkar remarked that “no power on earth could keep them in Hindustan.

 

They would have to quit the country. Mahatma Gandhi wanted to keep the Muslims in India so that the Congress may profit by their votes at the time of election. But, by that time, not a single Muslim will be left in India . . .

 

 Mahatma Gandhi could not mislead them any longer. We have the means whereby such men can be immediately silenced, but it is our tradition not to be inimical to Hindus.

 

If we are compelled, we will have to resort to that course too.” A few weeks later, Gandhi was murdered in Delhi by the RSS’s Godse. The organisation was immediately banned, and Golwalkar himself put in prison. After it agreed to abide by the Indian constitution, the RSS was unbanned.

 

In the decades that followed, it steadily built up its following across India. In deference to the status that Gandhi then enjoyed, its members even occasionally praised him, albeit merely as one patriot among many.

 

The gulf between his ideals and their ideology remained vast. A rally for the Hindu nationalist RSS in the 1970s, with (right) a portrait of MS Golwalkar © Sondeep Shankar/Getty Images Narendra Modi at an RSS event in Ahmedabad in 2006, when he was chief minister of Gujarat © Shailesh Raval/The India Today Group via Getty Images

 

The RSS is the mother organisation of the Bharatiya Janata party, which has been in power in India since May 2014. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, joined the RSS as a young man, as did many of his ministers.

 

 In control of the state, of education and propaganda, and with a very efficient social media machine, the BJP and the RSS have assiduously attempted to rewrite the historical narrative. Past Muslim rulers of India are portrayed as cruel marauders, and Muslims today made to answer for their (mis)deeds.

 

The leadership of Gandhi and his Congress party in the freedom struggle is denied, and those who advocated armed revolution against the British extolled as the true patriots.

 

The formative role of the progressive and secular constitution of 1950 in shaping the democratic republic is ignored. Instead, Indians are told that they have been a Hindu nation from time immemorial. Professional historians derisively refer to these claims as “WhatsApp history”, but the tragic truth is that they are gaining ever wider currency.

 

In this new narrative, Gandhi is the major hate figure.

 

He is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure; blamed for not stopping the creation of Pakistan; blamed for insisting that Muslims who stayed behind in India be given the rights of equal citizenship. BJP members of parliament hail Gandhi’s assassin Godse as a true “deshbhakt” (patriot); praise for him trends on Twitter every January 30; there are periodic plans to erect statues to him and temples in his memory.

 

YouTube videos mocking Gandhi and charging him with betraying Hindus garner millions of views. Gandhi with Nehru in 1942 © Photo12/Universal Images Group ‘In the new narrative, Gandhi is blamed for emasculating Indians by preaching non-violence; blamed for choosing the modernising Jawaharlal Nehru as his political heir instead of a more authentically “Hindu” figure’

 

This decertification of Gandhi has been aided by the hypocrisy and misconduct of the Congress party. In its many decades in power, the Congress invoked Gandhi often, while in practice moving ever further from his ideals.

 

Congress politicians ostentatiously wore homespun cotton while promoting cronyism and corruption. They centralised power in the state and harassed human rights activists. The political rise of the Hindu right has been accompanied by the construction of a colossal personality cult around Modi.

 

While his followers revile Gandhi, Modi himself has adopted a position of strategic ambivalence.

 

 On the one hand, he professes veneration for VD Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist who detested Gandhi and Muslims with equal vehemence, and whom Godse regarded as his ideological mentor. On the other hand, recognising that Gandhi is the best-known Indian globally, Modi has instrumentally used him to advance his own profile by taking visiting presidents and prime ministers on tours of Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. Narendra Modi pays tribute to VD Savarkar at Parliament House in New Delhi in 2014 . . .  © Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images . . . and at a statue of Gandhi in Washington the same year © Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images On October 2 2019, the 150th anniversary of the Mahatma’s birth, the New York Times published an article in praise of Gandhi, written by Modi.

 

The piece was artfully constructed; it began by speaking of the admiration for Gandhi expressed by one great American, Martin Luther King Jr, and ended by speaking of the admiration for him expressed by another great American, Albert Einstein. Modi proclaimed: “In Gandhi, we have the best teacher to guide us.

 

From uniting those who believe in humanity to furthering sustainable development and ensuring economic self-reliance, Gandhi offers solutions to every problem.” What was most striking about the article, however, was what it did not say.

 

There was not a word about the cause for which Gandhi lived his life, indeed for which he gave his life — that of inter-religious harmony. The omission was not accidental.

 

For the idea that India is a land that belongs equally to people of all faiths is not something that Modi shares with Gandhi. Modi sees himself as a Hindu first and foremost; indeed, even as a redeemer sent to avenge the insults and injustices, real and imagined, heaped on his co-religionists down the centuries.

 

Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to leave for Pakistan © ACME/AFP/Getty Images ‘Gandhi held the view that India belonged equally to all its citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation.

 

After the subcontinent was partitioned, Gandhi worked strenuously to stop violence against Muslims’

 

 Such is the broader context for the now widespread animosity towards Gandhi in the land of his birth. It has principally to do with his commitment to religious pluralism.

 

 While Modi stays silent, BJP leaders taunt and intimidate the 200mn-strong community of Indian Muslims, asking them without reason and provocation to prove their “loyalty” to the motherland. (Notably, among the 300 or so BJP members of parliament elected in May 2019, there was not a single Muslim.)

 

While Modi praises Gandhi — selectively — many of those who support and vote for him believe Godse was right in murdering Gandhi; indeed, that he should have murdered him earlier, before the Mahatma’s last fast in support of equal rights for those Muslims who chose to express their own patriotism by staying in our country, which was also theirs.

 

There are other ways in which the India of today bears little resemblance to the India that Gandhi had struggled to build. He would have been appalled, for instance, by the rapacious pillaging of the natural environment encouraged by successive governments since independence.

 

 He had precociously warned against emulating the resource- and energy-intensive model of industrialisation favoured by the west, writing in 1926 that to “make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation”.

 

 Hindu nationalists place garlands on a statue of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, in Meerut in 2020 . . .  © Smita Sharma/New York Times/Redux/eyevine . . . and activists from the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen gather near a Gandhi mural in New Delhi last year © Prakash Singh/AFP via Getty Images Without the access to resources and markets enjoyed by those two nations when they began to industrialise, India has had to rely on the exploitation of its own people and environment.

 

 Under both Congress and BJP regimes, the most brutal assault has been by large mining companies, to whom successive governments have given free licence to destroy forests, displace villagers and foul air, water and soil in search of massive monetary gains.

 

Many of the most polluted cities in the world are in India; our great and supposedly sacred rivers are biologically dead through untreated industrial and domestic waste; our aquifers are rapidly declining.

 

Writing for an international audience, our prime minister might laud Gandhian prescriptions for “sustainable development”, even as these prescriptions are being violated most thoroughly in his — and Gandhi’s — homeland.

 

Even without the threat of climate change, India is an environmental basket case. Consider next the perilous state of press freedom in India, which, as an independent-minded editor himself, Gandhi would surely have found distressing. The British Raj jailed Gandhi (and many other writers) for inciting “disaffection” merely through their words in print.

 

Gandhi hoped that the clause allowing such arbitrary arrest would be repealed when India became free. It remains on the statute book, increasingly used to imprison journalists, student leaders and social activists.

 

Leading 1930’s ‘Salt March’, a nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly © United Archives/Getty Images ‘The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of Indian independence may have been extreme.

 

Yet what we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide’ Gandhi, were he around today, would also have been dismayed by the deceit and dissembling of the political class, saddened by the growing gulf between rich and poor, and distressed by the continuing attacks on low castes and women.

 

His country has turned its back on its greatest modern figure in many respects.

 

The lives and legacies of major historical figures are always subject to reinterpretation, and that is how it should be. Consider thus the revaluation of American icons such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because of their complicity with slavery; or of the pre-eminent British war hero Winston Churchill, because of his imperialism and indifference to the deaths of Indians through famine.

 

 Revisionism and iconoclasm are infinitely preferable to idolatry. The unthinking adulation of Gandhi in the early years of Indian independence may have been extreme.

 

Yet what we now have is not revisionism or iconoclasm but parricide, the outright repudiation of the person who perhaps did more than anyone else to nurture this nation into being. India surely needs Gandhi’s ideas still, to check the slide of the republic into a Hindu Pakistan, to stall the destruction of the environment and the economic and social costs it imposes, to restore a semblance of civility in public discourse, to renew the institutions of civil society currently being crushed by an overbearing state.

 

 Many years ago, when the demonisation of Gandhi was first becoming apparent, I was speaking with my friend Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a diplomat and scholar and also, incidentally, a grandson of the Mahatma.

 

Gopal said that Gandhi’s posthumous fate might increasingly come to resemble that of the Buddha, scorned by the land where he forged his moral and social philosophy, yet with followers and admirers in distant parts of the globe that he had never visited and possibly did not even know about.

 

As that prediction comes starkly true, I find it simultaneously depressing and comforting. We Indians seem to have rejected Gandhi, as we once rejected the Buddha; no matter, humans elsewhere will take up and nobly affirm the ideals of those we have so cruelly and carelessly discarded. Ramachandra Guha’s books include ‘Gandhi:

Godhra, Where the Fall of India's Democracy Began

 

Godhra, Where the Fall of India's Democracy Began

The burning train on February 27, 2002 – and the lies and false narratives built around it – kept Narendra Modi in power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India.

This week is the 20th anniversary of the single most fateful event

in the history of Independent India.

 

Had carriage S-6 of the Sabarmati Express not burnt down outside

Godhra station in the early morning of February 27, 2002, killing

59 persons, the Gujarat riots would not have occurred, and Narendra

Modi would not have been the prime minister of India today.

Had that tragic event not taken place the Bharatiya Janata Party

could easily have lost the assembly election that was originally

scheduled for April 2003 but brought ahead to December 2002

at Modi’s urging to capitalise on the religious polarisation the

violence had caused. The BJP had lost the gram panchayat

elections in 2001 and three assembly by-elections the same

year, and was badly rattled. This was what had led to the

replacement of chief minister Keshubhai Patel, whose health

had allegedly begun to fail, with Modi in October 2001.

 

Modi faced the daunting task of shoring up the BJP’s support

base in Gujarat. Politically, the fire on the Sabarmati Express

came as an answer to the party’s prayers.The train was carrying a

large number of kar sevaks who had forcibly boarded the train at

Ayodhya.

 

When it arrived at Godhra,therefore, it was carrying 2,000 or more passengers against a capacity of 1,100.

 

When coach S-6 caught

fire, it was jam packed with some of these kar sevaks.

 

The presence of the kar sevaks, the fact that some of these had

misbehaved with Muslim vendors on the platform at Godhra both

while on their way to Ayodhya and on their way back, and that

an ugly spat had broken out on the platform minutes before the

train left Godhra on that fateful morning, made just about everyone in Gujarat jump to the conclusion that angry Muslims had chased the

train and set fire to the carriage, as an act of revenge.

 

By the afternoon of February 27, local Gujarati newspapers had

universally ascribed the act to Ghanchi Muslims of a nearby shanty

colony, who had been waiting with stones and rags dipped in

kerosene to seek revenge.

 

According to those news reports, no

 sooner did the train stop did they smash the windows and t

hrow flaming kerosene-soaked rags into the bogey and set them

on fire.

 

These reports formed the basis of the first police chargesheet

 in the case, with manufactured eyewitnesses, all from the

Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who presented identical statements

about kerosene being thrown into the coach from outside.

 

The pogrom that followed is now history. But, in another of history’s fateful ironies, this initial claim by the police about the train fire was completely unfounded and had to eventually be abandoned in favour of a supposedly more plausible but equally unbelievable theory. Having declared from day one that the fire had been a deeply planned (Muslim) conspiracy, all the facts had to be tailor made to sustain this claim.

 

 

The lengths to which the Modi-led state government went to reinforce and sustain a falsehood in the face of the anomalies that it could not explain, was not accidental. On the contrary, it was sanctioned and sustained by Modi himself, with the express purpose of creating a wave of Islamophobia that would  sweep the BJP back to power in Gujarat.

 

In 2005, the railway minister in the then UPA government, Lalu Prasad Yadav, appointed a retired Calcutta high court judge, U.C. Banerjee, to head an inquiry into its cause.

 

The Bannerjee commission appointed a five-man team of experts to re-examine the evidence. After a three-year lapse, the expert committee was left with only one way to do this: look at other carriages that had caught fire and compare the burn and smoke patterns in them to the one in S-6.

 

There were five burnt carriages preserved in the railway yards after earlier forensic examinations. In one of these, the burn and smoke pattern was almost identical to that found in S-6. The cause of that fire was known and not in doubt: it had begun in the centre of the carriage, possibly when someone knocked over a lighted cooking stove on which food was being warmed or tea made.

The flames had remained restricted to that area but the smoke the fire created had spread to the rest of the carriage, through the gaps

between the upper and lower berths, and along the underside of

the ceiling.

 

As in S-6, the majority of deaths had resulted from

asphyxiation.

 

This explanation gained credibility because the railways

were not using flame-retardant materials in second-class compartments then. So even a lighted match could start a fire and create large

volumes of toxic smoke.

 

What is more, cooking or warming one’s

own food on long train journeys was, and may still be, a common

practice among orthodox Hindus.

 

The BJP vociferously rejected the Banerjee commission’s report.

 

The party’s then spokesman, Arun Jaitley, raised procedural objections, saying that the railway ministry, even while belonging to the Union government, had no right to conduct such an inquiry.

 

“If it was an accident, what prevented passengers from jumping out?”

he asked, rhetorically.

 

Following a strategy with which we have now become familiar, the state government got one of the Hindus who had been injured in the fracas

on the Godhra platform in 2002 to challenge Justice Banerjee’s report

in the Gujarat high court.

 

The presiding judge then declared the

formation of the Banerjee Committee “unconstitutional, illegal and

null and void”, and called it a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”.

 

He went on to berate the railway ministry for daring

to set up the committee when the state government had already

appointed the Shah commission, later joined by retired Supreme

Court justice G.T. Nanavati, on March 8, immediately after the riots.

 

He also dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level

committee to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property,

in order to make sure that it did not happen again.

This judgment was extraordinary, to say the least, but one does not have to rely on the Banerjee commission’s report alone to question the official account of how the fire started.The report prepared by teams of experts from the Gujarat government’s own Forensic Science Laboratory in Ahmedabad after a site visit on May 3, 2002, formally debunked the police’s earlier explanation and concluded that the fire was consistent with what might happened if  “60 litres of flammable liquid had been poured using an unusually wide-mouthed container like a bucket” on to the floor of the coach and set alight.

Why did the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) so comprehensively

debunk the claims made in the police’s chargesheet?

 

The answer could be that  Modi had learned through the intelligence department that the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal (CCT), headed

by former Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, was planning to visit Godhra

in the beginning of May.

 

The Ghanchi Muslim revenge plot

explanation was therefore about to come apart.

This is what the CCT concluded after its own visit:

 

“On 7-5-2002, we inspected the coach and the site where it was burnt. The site where the train stopped is an elevated bund. From the ground level, the height of the bund could be about 12-15 feet and it is a slope. At the top, there is hardly enough space for 2,000 persons to assemble on either side of the track. Assuming that so many had gathered at that spot, the crowd would be spread over a much larger area than the stretch of coach S-6. This is only to indicate that if the government version is true, the other coaches would have been as easy a target as Coach S-6.

Again, if one takes into account the height of the bund and the height of the train, and if fire-balls were to be thrown at the train, the outside of the coach should have shown signs of being charred. But we found that there were no such marks below the windows; the charred marks were to be seen only around the windows and above that height. This is a clear indication that the fire started inside the coach and the flames leaping out of the windows singed the outside of the compartment, above window level (emphasis added). Therefore, even to the naked eye, it was clear that the fire was from within and not from outside.”

 

But if the fire started within, who could have possibly lit it? The Gujarat government needed an answer that would justify the collective punishment that the Hindu community had inflicted upon the Muslims in the days that followed. Building on the FSL’s ‘scientific’ analysis, the police came up with a new explanation. Investigating officers claimed that some Muslims had boarded the train when it stopped opposite Signal Falia, cut the vestibule connecting S-6 and S-7, forcibly entered S-6 and poured 60 litres of petrol down the corridor and set a match to it.

 

The absurdities in this theory have been pointed out many times in the last two decades. First, since buckets would have had to be carried by hand, and very few buckets have a capacity of more than 20 litres, a minimum of  three buckets would have had to be carried on to the train. Would a train jam-packed with hyped-up kar sewaks spoiling for a fight have allowed three persons carrying buckets of a fluid whose smell is easily recognisable to board the train at a place where a large crowd of hostile Muslims had already collected? Clearly not, which is why the police could not find a single passenger to corroborate this absurd claim.

 

Curiously, the FSL’s ‘experts’ based their 60 litres calculation upon how far the liquid would travel in an empty carriage, not one that was jampacked with people whose shoes, and luggage, would have come in the way. For, as the tally of the dead and injured showed, there were at least 108 persons in the carriage when the fire broke out, not counting those who escaped before the rush of panic-stricken passengers to the doorways began. It is inconceivable that forensic experts could have made such an elementary mistake. So the only explanation is that they were commanded to find another explanation that would continue to point the finger of blame at the Muslim community. And they obliged.

 

In Ahmedabad, on February 27, 2002, VHP cadres roamed the streets announcing that a large number of kar sevaks returning from their holy mission in Ayodhya had been burnt alive by Muslims in Godhra. On February 28, they took processions through the city, holding the charred (and unrecognisable) corpses high to build up the mountainous wave of hate that broke upon the city the next morning. However reprehensible their actions were considered, no one doubted them, and almost no one doubts even today that these were indeed the corpses of kar sevaks. But a close analysis of the identities of the passengers in the ill-fated S-6 carriage shows that most of those who died were ordinary passengers who had boarded the train at Lucknow and intermediate stops, before it was swamped by kar sewaks in Ayodhya.

 

The railway booking chart for the carriage at Lucknow shows that 43 of the 72 berths in carriage S-6 had confirmed bookings. Of these 19 were for adult males, 19 were for adult females and five were for minors. More than half of the booked passengers were families travelling together. Another 23 passengers had boarded the train at intermediate stations. Since they all had berths, few if any would have been near the vestibules at the two ends of the carriage, and therefore in a position to escape when the fire started.

 

The first to die would have been the weakest among them, the women and the children. The forensic examination of the dead, carried out three days later, confirmed this for it showed that whereas 20 of the dead were men, 26 were women, and 12 were children. In all, 38 of the 58 dead were of the wrong sex and age to have been kar sevaks. Even among the male casualties, a large number, probably the majority, would have died because they stayed with their families, trying to get out till the smoke overwhelmed them.

 

The number of kar sevaks killed may have been even smaller for, as the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer pointed out, all but a fraction of these were physically fit young men who, having muscled their way on to the train, were more likely to be at the ends of the carriage than the middle, and would have been able to muscle their way out of the burning carriage with relative ease. That many did indeed do so is suggested by the fact that of the 43 persons who are known to have managed to escape from the carriage, only five needed to be hospitalised. Taking all this into account, it is unlikely that even a dozen of those killed were kar sevaks.

 

Looking back at the events of  February 27, 2002, it is difficult not to conclude that it was the day when India’s voyage to modern nationhood began to fail. For Godhra brought Narendra Modi to power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India. Modi consolidated his party’s power in Gujarat by sowing fear and suspicion between communities. He is now doing the same in India. And there is no one to stop him.

 

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former editor. He is the author of Dawn of the Solar Age: an End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage 2017) and is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Environment Studies, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

On Understanding RSS Neo-Fascism

 

On Understanding RSS Neo-Fascism as India’s Biggest Threat and the Immediate Task of Building up the Anti-Fascist Movement 

in India — by P J James — 14/01/2023

 Approaching RSS Fascism

BJP with 180 million-membership (as claimed by it in 2019) and wielding India’s state power today is the political tool of RSS, the longest-running and biggest fascist organization in the world.

The RSS with Manusmriti as its ideological basis was founded in 1925 with Hedgewar as the first Sarsanghchalka almost at the same time when ‘classical’ fascism appeared in Europe.

 In the case of India, the decade of the 1920s when RSS originated was a turbulent one that challenged not only the colonial rule but also the feudal order and Brahminical caste system. Inspired by Mahatma Phule and then led by Dr Ambedkar, the ‘untouchable’ Dalits, had started entering into the political mainstream from inaccessible social peripheries.

Including this, it was the challenges to the upper caste elite domination that prompted the Brahmin leadership to reassert its hegemony through the formation of RSS.

Before the formation of RSS in 1925, Savarkar had laid down Hindutva, or ‘political Hinduism’ (which is different from Hinduism) as its ideological background. In his manuscript, ‘Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?’, Savarkar had argued that ‘Hindus were a nation unto themselves’, excluding Muslims, Christians and all other minorities in India.

After Hedgewar’s death in 1940, Golwalkar who became the second Sarsanghchalka of RSS expanded it as a militant Hindutva organisation with its Manuvad approach to the untouchables together with its commitment towards stigmatization and elimination of Muslims as nation’s principal enemies.

From the very beginning, RSS had its close association with European fascism (classical fascism) that originated in Italy and Germany during the biggest political-economic crisis during the interwar period, and the RSS leadership of that time had established direct contact with fascist Mussolini along with its adulation of Nazi Hitler. 

For instance,  Moonje, the mentor and political guru of Hedgewar, who had visited the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini in 1931 and inspired by the Fascist Academy of Physical Education that trained paramilitary “storm troopers” and goons like Black Shirts, started the Bhonsala  Military School in Nasik in 1937 for imparting military training to RSS cadres and Hindutva goons under the management of Central Hindu Military Education Society.

Bhonsala School’s links with terrorist actions by Hindutva extremist groups including the 2008 Malegaon blasts are a much discussed topic.

Golwalkar who had high regard for Hitler, upheld the latter’s doctrine of racial purity.

 He praised the Nazi method of purging the Semitic races, the Jews by Hitler, and even suggested the same as a good lesson for India to resolve the Muslim question.

According to the core ideology of RSS or doctrine of Hindurashtra, “Hindus and Hindus alone, constitute the Indian Nation”, whereas for Golwalkar, casteism was synonymous with ‘Hindu Nation’, though India has been historically multi-religious, multilingual, multi-ethnic, multicultural and comp

However, as a fascist organisation, RSS from its very inception has been Islamophobic, anti-Christian, anti-communist, anti-woman and anti-Dalit, and has been in the habit of using violence to achieve its objectives.

Under colonial oppression, nationalism and patriotism for the oppressed countries were invariably anti-colonial in essence. But the ‘cultural nationalism’ of RSS was a camouflage for its betrayal of the anti-imperialist struggle.

Along with its genocidal hatred towards Muslims, extreme servility to British imperialism has been inherent in RSS from the very beginning.

 On account of this, it totally dissociated itself from the independence movement during the British period.

Top RSS leadership even advised its cadres not to waste their energy fighting the British but save it for fighting ‘internal enemies’ such as Muslims, Christians and Communists.

As such, the organization continued to remain on the periphery of Indian politics.

When Constituent Assembly was drafting the Indian Constitution, RSS came  forward vehemently opposing the adoption of that Constitution and suggested ‘Manusmriti’ (the sacred book of chaturvarnya or varna system that identified women and Dalits as subhuman) in its place on the ground that a Republican Constitution would give equality to all castes against the interest of the elite castes.

In fact, much before its objection to the Constitution that was drafted under the leadership of Ambedkar, the RSS’ mouthpiece, Organiser in August 1947 had opposed the tricolour National Flag also.

Of course, following the assassination of Father of the Nation in 1948, the RSS was banned for a few months, and one of the conditions that Sardar Patel put forward for lifting the ban on RSS on July 11 1949 was “loyalty to the Constitution of India and the National Flag”.

 However, it took more than  half-a-century for the RSS to hoist the National Flag during the time of the Vajpayee government which also unveiled Savarkar’s portrait in the central hall of Parliament in 2003.

Obviously, as in the case of European fascism during the interwar period, it is the sharpening of the inherent contradictions and crisis of the ruling system that create the opportune moment for the ascendance of fascists who are the most reactionary sections of corporate capital.

In other words, when the crisis cannot be resolved through normal methods of loot and exploitation and when people’s struggles become uncontrollable, the political-economic situation and social tension become favourable for the fascist forces to capture power. 

As far as India is concerned, it was the crisis of the 1970s and declaration of Emergency by the Indira Gandhi regime that enabled RSS which till then remained outside the mainstream to come to the political limelight.

As is obvious, it was the absence of a progressive-democratic alternative that enabled RSS to effectively utilise the situation to come to the forefront of the anti-Emergency movement.

Within no time, replacing the Jan Sangh, RSS constituted BJP as its political tool and the rest is part of contemporary history.

Leading hundreds of open, secret and militant organisations and outfits, and widening and deepening its clout across space and time and with its far-right economic philosophy and unwavering allegiance to the US-led imperialist camp, today RSS still claiming itself as a cultural organisation, has grown into the biggest fascist organisation in the world with innumerable overseas saffron extensions and affiliates backed by immense corporate funding.

The sudden shot up of RSS during the recent period spanning half-a-century is to be seen in the broader context of the emergence of global neoliberalism.

For, following the advent of the first major postwar crisis called ‘stagflation’, and taking advantage of the ideological-political setbacks of the international Left, the bourgeois state abandoned its welfare mask and resorted to a change in the capital accumulation process through what is called neoliberalism.

As noted above, the political-economic crisis that confronted India in the 1970s leading to the proclamation of Emergency by Indira regime in 1975 was integrally linked up with this international context.

Though Emergency was lifted in 1977, the post-Emergency period saw Indian state’s abject surrender to neoliberal diktats and intensified neocolonial plunder by imperialist-corporate capital.

It has been in the context of this extremely crisis-ridden period of India resulting in its further integration with global corporate capital and consequent abandoning of the Nehruvian ‘state-led model of development’ and consequent embrace of neoliberal policies that RSS designed its well-thought-out strategy of eventually transforming India into a Hindurashtra, i.e., a Hindutva fascist state by floating BJP as its political party.

And, effectively taking advantage of the facilitating role of the soft-Hindutva pursued by the Congress and with immense corporate-backing, it has been easy for RSS to transform BJP as India’s biggest ruling class party within a relatively short span of time, leading to fascist usurpation of state power with its multidimensional repercussions at micro and macro levels integrally linked up with the ascendance of neofascism at the global level.

It is not intended here to draw out the whole trajectory of the process that facilitated RSS to establish its fascist tentacles in the entire political, economic and cultural spheres.

 Unlike Mussolini-Hitler fascism that suddenly shot up from the political-economic crisis of the 1920s, Indian fascism led by RSS is rooted in a systematic, steady and long drawn out process spanning almost a century with deep-rooted and multi-dimensional penetration into the entire civilian and military apparatuses of the Indian state.

And unlike classical fascism which had sharp contradictions with other imperialist forces, Hindutva fascism from the very beginning has been subservient to international finance capital during the colonial and postwar neocolonial period.

However, in the neoliberal period, this process has started with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement since the 1980s, demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 in the context of Rao government’s abandoning of Nehruvian model and embrace of far-right neoliberal policies, the ‘second generation of globalisation’ under Vajpayee government in the late 1990s and early 21st century, Gujarat Pogrom in 2002, the ascendancy Modi regime in 2014 and its reiteration as Modi.2 in 2019, which are some of the important milestones towards this neo-fascist transformation.

As is obvious, under Modi.2, in the background of all round privatisation-corporatisation of the economy and saffronisation of both civilian–including constitutional and administrative and institutional spheres and military structures (ranging from RSS initiative to start Military Schools to the Agnipath scheme), RSS is now moving towards its ultimate goal of establishing the Hindurashtra, which is an intolerant theocratic state unequivocally defined by Golwalkar in 1939 in his magnum opus, ‘We, Our Nationhood Defined’ and in conformity with the principles of Manusmriti.

All specificities of Hindutva such as anti-Muslimness as manifested in the multi-dimensional discrimination towards Muslim migrants through CAA, Uniform Civil Code, etc., (culminating in, for instance, depicting the Rohingyas whom the UN characterised as “the most persecuted” minority on earth today as “infiltrators”), pan-Indian homogenizing drive of deconstruction and subjugation of the oppressed caste organisations aimed at integrating them into Hindutva, rejection of all values of modernity such as rational-scientific thinking, fostering the cult of tradition and obscurantism, treating dissent and disagreement as treason, worship of heroism and elitism, anti-communism together with uncompromising integration with corporate finance capital are manifestations RSS neofascism.

Neofascism or Fascism Under Neoliberalism

At this critical juncture, concrete understanding of neofascism – i.e., fascism under neoliberalism where old terms and practices connected with fascism have become irrelevant — is indispensable for building up the anti-fascist movement and defeating fascism. No doubt, fascism’s inseparable integration with the hegemony of most reactionary corporate-finance capital is its universal character.

 However, ascribing a static form or pattern to the emergence of fascism for all situations is erroneous, and it will impede the building up of anti-fascist struggles too. For instance, in the context of building up the wide 

Anti-Fascist People’s Front, the 7th Congress of Comintern (1935) that defined fascism in relation to its firm foundations in finance capital, had also underlined different course of development of fascism in colonial and semi-colonial countries where “there can be no question of the kind of fascism that we are accustomed to see in Germany, Italy and other capitalist countries”.

That is, depending on the specific political, economic and historical conditions of countries, fascism may assume different forms.

There is a macro dimension to this crucial question today. No doubt, fascism is the government of the most reactionary and terrorist elements of corporate-finance capital directed against the entire progressive-democratic sections, working class, peasantry, oppressed peoples and intelligentsia of the country. 

 However, when ‘classical fascism’  emerged during the interwar years of the 20th century, finance capital or imperialism was in its colonial phase.

On the other hand, today in the postwar neocolonial phase, and especially in the neoliberal period today, wealth accumulation is taking place through  globalisation or internationalisation of capital as manifested in the limitless and uncontrollable cross-border movement of corporate capital.

 With the aggravation in the crisis of accumulation since the dawn of the 21st century, and especially since the 2008 “sub-crime crisis’, using the advancements in frontier technologies such as digitisation, global capital is engaged in further shifting of its burden to the shoulders of world people.

In this context neofascism is intensified to enforce the tyranny of corporate capital at a global level effectively utilising reactionary, racial, chauvinistic, revivalist, religious fundamentalist, xenophobic and obscurantist ideologies as its political basis, according to the concrete conditions of countries.

Thus, neoliberal fascism or neofascism needs to be analysed with respect to the logic of corporate accumulation today. Of course,  globalisation has resulted in a restructure of the erstwhile ‘nation-centred production’ by superimposing a new international division of labour and unleash a worldwide super-exploitation of the working people, thereby temporarily overcoming its crisis of accumulation.

On the other, taking advantage of the ideological setbacks of the Left and by utilising the heterogeneity and diversity among working and oppressed people of different countries and through the effective use of a whole set of postmodern ideologies such as “identity politics”, “multiculturalism”, etc., finance capital has also succeeded in creating division among working class and oppressed by diverting attention from corporate plunder thereby disorganising and fragmenting resistance to capital.

Thus, given the internationalisation of capital along with its terribly destructive reactionary essence and decadence, fascism has become transnational in character today. 

To be specific, unlike ‘classical fascism’ which was specific to capitalist-imperialist countries, neofascism, i.e., fascism under neoliberalism has become global in character cutting across national borders.

For instance, a concrete evaluation of the international situation today amply makes it clear that majoritarian religion everywhere is amenable to be used by finance capital as the ideological basis of neofascism (for instance, Evangelism in the Americas, Political Islam in West Asia, Hindutva in India, Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar).

Another example is the manner in which the financial oligarchs of Europe have initiated a pan-European neofascist alliance against workers, migrants and refugees.

Today, neofascists everywhere are working overtime to take advantage of the mass  psychology of social and economic insecurity created by the loss of livelihood, employment, habitat and environment arising from corporate plunder as well as people’s loss of faith in mainstream traditional parties including ‘social democrats’ who have no alternative to neoliberal policies. Making use of the specificities of countries, neofascists in general pursue an exclusivist and majoritarian line by propping up the so called ‘homogeneous’ part of the population pitting it against the ‘heterogeneous’ sections often composed of religious, ethnic/racial and linguistic minorities, migrants, refugees, dalits, tribals and other marginalized and oppressed sections of society.

 Using them an all round depoliticising and social engineering is resorted to prepare a fertile ground for the flourishing of neofascism. In this context, with its own specificities, the BJP regime in India is a typical example of neofascism (corporate-saffron fascism) today. Basing itself in unbridled neoliberal-corporatisation, the Indian regime today is engaged in establishing a Hindu theocratic state or Hindurashtra in accordance with the RSS ideology of aggressive ‘Hindu nationalism’ or Hindutva.

On Building Up the Anti-Fascist Movement

Viewed in this perspective,  the antifascist offensive is to be initiated based on the lessons from past experiences but also on the basis of a concrete evaluation of 21st century laws of motion of finance capital in relation to country specificities.

Obviously, as already noted, neofascism is the regime of the most reactionary sections of corporate-finance capital under neoliberalism.

 Therefore, though ruling class/bourgeois parties are basically neoliberal in orientation, all of them are not fascistic and, of course, there are sections who stand for rule of law, bourgeois-democratic rights, freedom of expression and press, free and fair election, etc.

However, their class character with roots in neoliberalism and links with corporate capital along with electoral politics as the only sphere of action, make these parties incapable to take initiative in the struggle against fascists who have usurped the entire micro and macro spaces of social life.

Hence, an electoral victory alone is not sufficient as the threat of fascist come-back  ( as is evident for the recent neofascist coup attempt in Brazil) will be there until and unless fascist tentacles are wiped out from their already occupied strategic positions.

This is so because, along with the control over the organs of the state, the saffron fascists through their vast and unparalleled organisational structure also have established spectacular control over ‘street power’ through lumpen and paramilitary goons.

Even when electoral option of challenging fascists through the parliamentary route is theoretically there today, free and fair elections are also becoming increasingly difficult too.

 Hence mere preoccupation with parliamentary work, devoid of a nation-wide and  broad-based anti-fascist people’s movement, cannot confront the fascists, an aspect that the non-fascist ruling class parties often ignore.

Coming to the case of the broad ‘left spectrum’, it ranges from the ‘social democrats’ (e.g., CPI and CPM ) to adventurists (e.g., Maoists).

The latter section that does not make a distinction between pro-fascist and non-fascist sections of the ruling classes (fascism for them is a mere change of regime among the ruling classes) fails to put forward an ideological-political position towards the most reactionary and terrorist class essence of neofascism.

For the CPM, on the other hand, fascism is yet to come to India, and according to its ideologues, Modi regime is “on the verge of turning fascist” and only “symptoms of fascism” are there. Here it is to be stated that this evaluation arises from a stereotyped approach to fascism, a way of looking at fascism as a textbook copy of the ‘classical fascism’ of the interwar period.

This mechanical approach to neofascism is contrary to the scientific analysis that any social phenomenon when transforms and develops further in a new historical context and in a different social formation will inevitably adapt itself to the particularities and specificities of that concrete situation.

 Even under the veil of parliamentary democracy, fascism today has become capable to use terrorist methods of ethnic and racial cleansing, oppression and extermination of minorities, immigrants, refugees, and women, elimination of hard-earned democratic rights, super-exploitation of the workers through new technologies, plunder of nature leading to climate catastrophe and all round militarisation. 

No doubt, the mechanical approach to fascism by ‘social democrats’ is related to their own position as implementer of  far-right neoliberal policies wherever and whenever they are in power.

These varying perceptions on fascism, however, should not be a justification for refraining from the immediate and indispensable task of building up the broad anti-fascist movement for resisting and defeating RSS neofascism.

No doubt, an ideologically equipped, politically and organisationally strong Left movement is the need of the hour.

At the same time, we cannot wait till such an all India movement is ready, since it will be suicidal.

Hence taking care to avoid both sectarian and opportunist deviations, efforts are needed on the part of  left-democratic forces to ally with non-fascist sections of the ruling classes in fighting the most reactionary corporate crony capital and the neofascist state propped up by them.

However, in doing so, the genuine left, progressive and democratic  forces must be aware of the overlapping, interpenetrating and complex neoliberal inter-linkages and interests among different sections of ruling class parties today.

That’s while joining with nonfascist ruling class parties and even with social democratic parties untiring ideological struggle should be carried forward upholding the long-term and strategic interests of the working and toiling people and all oppressed. 

Any laxity on the part of progressive democratic forces in this issue will lead to surrender of the interests of the working and oppressed people in  the interests of “anti-fascist unity”. 

To avoid such a possible mistake, it is high time to build up a coordination of the country-wide people’s struggles against corporate-saffron fascism and its manifestations.

Many peoples movements have been there  that combine struggles against both Hindutva fascism and far-right neoliberal policies.

The Anti-CAA Movement or the people’s movement against denying citizenship to Muslim migrants, and the historic Farmers’ Movement against the corporatisation of agriculture were two examples in this regard. 

Along with them, many struggles of  workers, especially the vast unorganised sections, peasantry, oppressed peoples including women, Dalits, adivasis, minorities, especially the persecuted Muslims, youth and students are emerging throughout the length and breadth of the country against corporate onslaughts, displacement from habitat, environmental destruction, caste atrocities, communal oppression, violation of democratic rights and so on.

While engaging in these struggles through appropriate organisational forms, progressive and democratic forces have to take conscious efforts to initiate debates and discussions on a political alternative against neoliberal policies and RSS neofascism.

Such initiatives at the level of states can lead to a national coordination based on a common minimum program against corporate-saffron fascism.

 If proper interventions are made, this move can be extended to tactical alliance with non-fascist fascist parties in the coming elections for isolating and defeating  the most reactionary  neofascists, also utilising the contradictions among ruling class parties in the process.

Here a specific note is also required on the particular relevance in building up effective resistance against Manuvad and growing inhuman Brahmanical caste practices against Dalits.

Hence appropriate ideological, political and cultural interventions joining with all progressive intellectuals and like-minded people against Manuvadi-Hindutva, the ideological basis of Indian fascism.

 This is essential since,  it is based on the the Hindutva ideology that RSS is engaged in the maddening pace towards transforming India into a full-fledged theocratic state with the material backing of corporate capital.

P J James is general secretary of CPI ML (Red Star)