Hindutva & its ramifications

Hindutva is a continuous struggle especially against Muslim minority. It engages the Muslim through acts of belligerence calculated and focused on its object of obliterating or submerging the minority into Hindu fold. The main force behind the Hindutva is the hate ideology of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh also known as RSS. The organization of extremist Hindus did not take part in the struggle for freedom of India. Instead it instructed its cadres to save their energy for mounting a juggernaut against the Muslim after independence in 1947. Gujarat came under the sway of Hindutva thanks to pracharak Narendra Modi when he assumed the office of the chief minister of the state. In the later phase of his stewardship of the state he was accused of ordering the fake encountering of Ishrat Jahan and three others and many more such fake encounters. He was directly linked to the murders because he was the white bearded that had conveyed the order through the black beard. The context makes it simple. A police officer GL Singhal did not want to shoot and kill Ishrat Jahan so the matter was referred to the chief of anti terrorism squad of the state, DG Vanzara. He rung up his superiors and cleared it saying that the order had come from the chief minister who was also the home minister and his assistant minister for home Amit Shah. For seven years the case dragged in courts because Modi had justified the murder and it was his state policy as Vanzara claimed it. The police were carrying it out and Modi was brazenly justifying it at election rallies. In another case more than ten years passed and the Supreme Court on November 5, 2014 rubbished the state government’s appeal for revision of the judgment on Akshardham temple attack of September 2002“Instead of booking the real culprits responsible for taking so many precious lives, the police caught innocent people and got imposed the grievous charges against them.”[ 1] Six innocent Muslims were framed in bogus charges of terrorist acts. Strangely enough they were given options to be framed either in Godhra railway fire accident, Haren Pandya assassination or Akshardham attack. Those falsely blamed for Pandya killing and Akshardham were Muslims. So the real culprits behind crimes could not be Muslims and logical inference is that even the Godhra incident was not a terrorist attack but was made to appear ‘Islamic terrorism’. Modi had used precisely that term in the case of 9/11 in the televised debate two days after 9/11. It was a universal fact that that Muslims turn to terrorism because of their faith and scripture was what he tried to convey steam rolling the interruption of the anchor Rajdeep Sardesai and others. This leads to a strong suspicion that the Hindutva terrorists were very much active even then in their strategy to mount terrorist attacks the blames for which would be laid at the door of the Muslim community and that would lead to their massacre. Given the history of VD Savarkar’s record of complicity in mounting terrorist attacks during the British rule and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi this is not farfetched truth. The continuous struggle against Muslims can throw up very bizarre reasoning which is true of a community but at the cost of the Muslims. When Najma Heptulla was appointed as minister for minorities in May 2014 she remarked that Muslims are so many in numbers that they cannot be called minority and ought not to demand reservation or concessions. She compared them with the Parsis who face existential problems. Within six months her ministry created huge fund to increase the population of Parsis by floating a scheme called Jiyo Parsi: “Our institutions are gifts from our ancestors. They’ve shielded us, nurtured us and been backdrop to our way of life. But if we don’t all marry early and produce plenty of babies these colonies are going to be empty. Till other people move in it. Think about it. Then address the issue. Should you face fertility obstacles Jiyo Parsi is a 100 million rupee initiative to increase the number of the community, by the Ministry of Minorities Affairs in association with Parzor. Keep our Parsi colonies, Parsi. Get IVF assistance up to 5 lakh.” The banner of the ad is even more catchy: “If you don’t get married and have kids, this area will have a new name in your lifetime.”[2] In contrast there has been no such scheme designed to protect the life of Muslims who are frequently killed in riots and violence of all kinds including pogroms and genocide. There is no adequate help for families of the Muslims who have lost their life or lost their houses in riots and pogroms. Modi government refused to pay stipends to Muslims boys and girls for education as recommended by Sachar Commission. All this gives rise to the widespread belief that the life of a Muslim is not equal to that of a Parsis or a Hindu. Modi government allowed the evacuation of a Parsi family consisting of Rupa Mody and her daughter from the besieged house of Ahsan Jafri while the former Member of Parliament’s plea to Modi and Sonia Gandhi to save the life of all who had sought refuge in his house fell on deaf ears. All these evidence show how Hindutva cannot brook the existence of Muslim in the society. They cannot watch the Navratri dance even from the periphery of the crowd let alone participate in it. In this sense of “inheritance of loss” by the Muslim community ‘the 2014 election has really changed India’ for the minority. Hindutva is a political philosophy rather than a theology. In his book Saha Sonary Paney [Six Golden Leaves]Savarkar says that Hindus must shed inhibition and feel proud about being Hindus. Therefore he calls reviling of Hinduism as inimical to Hinduism. The first example of it is from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar whom he calls deranged by hatred against Hindus, and, then quotes him “The Hindus’ has been a life of continuous defeat. It is a mode of survival of which every Hindu will feel ashamed.” To counter this, Savarkar illustrates the bravery of the Hindus saying that for fifty years before Mohammad bin Qasim, Muslim rulers had attacked Sindh. Hindu rulers had repulsed them and in one such attack by the governor of Oman the Hindu king called Chacha had killed the commander Abdul Aziz. [3]So where is shame as it is not continuous defeat of Hindus. It is this kind of exhortation of Savarkar that Hindutva groups in the first decade of 21st century took up the slogan Garve sai kaho hum hindun hain “Say with pride that we are Hindus.” In the pogroms of Muslims by Hindutva a good deal of the enthusing by Savarkar went in the raping and killing of Muslim women and girls. As Babu Bajrangi proudly claims that he and his horde felt like Rana Pratap when they were perpetrating manslaughter. He claims in the sting operation tapes with Tehelka that even those eating rice and pulse [Hindus] could do that, namely rape and kill Muslim women and girls. [4]Modi took a cue from this when he praised the Chharra community in the late evening of February 28, 2002 that their mothers had given birth to brave males. The chief minister even went further and instructed them not to slacken their murder and mayhem on the following two more days given them to finish the genocide After twelve years of investigation Justice Nanavati saw no such abysmal level of barbarity in what is ascribed to Narendra Modi. By the by, it was Justice Akshay Mehta (the other member of the inquiry commission) who had sanctioned bail to Babu Bajrangi. Later Bajrangi was re-arrested and tried and sentenced to long imprisonment. This proves that Modi not only played an active role but also the chain of command principle implies his complicity in the genocide. The above statement of Ambedkar is in a context of simmering anger and persistent conflict between the Brahamanical order and the suppression and oppression of Dalits. It has always been there since time immemorial. Lord Ram had cut the hands of a Dalit youth and then beheaded him. Shambuk’s sin was that he had learned the art of playing flute and practiced it in open defiance of this being forbidden to the down trodden is an instance of it.[5] If the fine art of singing which does not involving physical contact with other human beings, is not allowed what about love! In The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy presented Velutha a lower caste Christian Dalit who has been giving small pleasure to high caste Christian Ammu. But he went further and consummated his love for which he was brutally killed. The outrage resulted in far reaching consequences. His father had been given an artificial eye by the patrician family of Ammu. On hearing about the escapade he plucked the eye out and returned it to the landlord and offered to hunt and kill his own son. Such is the oppression of the lower caste and how they are resigned to their fate. The shame and defeat that stung so much to Savarkar would pale into insignificance if the atrocities on Muslims and Dalits in recent times are put in contrast. There was ‘god of small things’ who lived and loved his beloved until he was lynched along with his parents in Ahmadnagar district. The saga of suffering wiped out the two generation without any one to mourn for them as Sanjay Jadhav (42), his wife Jayashree (38) and their teenage son Sunil (19) were murdered after midnight on October 21, 2014 in the village of Javkhede Khalasa-Kasarwadi in Pathardi Taluk in Ahmadnagar district of Maharashtra. The Jadhavadi is a scattered hamlet of the downtrodden. The mutilated torso of the youth recovered from the well nearby shows how the killers must have tortured him by mutilating the sex parts. His affair with an upper caste married woman caused the tragedy though the adultery of the woman went unnoticed. The hushed up affair made the woman anonymous and even the family name did not appear in the reports. But the fate of the boy and his parents is highlighted because they crossed the forbidden line that divides the families. So the honour killing that triggered the pogroms in Muzaffarnagar finally resurfaced in Maharashtra. There was another anti Dalit killing in January 2013 when in a village called Sonai three members of the community were killed and their bodies throw in a septic tank. They were sweepers. Then there was also the case of people beating a Dalit youth to death in the same area.[6] Whose pride and shame is this? It is history that pogroms 2002 in Gujarat started not with the burning of the Sabarmati Express; it was merely the pretext that Hindutva groups invented. The real flash point was that the Hindu karsevaks had molested a Muslim girl Sophia at the platform. They attempted to abduct her when they carried her towards their compartment. In the meantime, Muslims who saw it tried to intervene to save her, not for their honour but for decency. The resultant stoning of the compartment may be just on that account. That the extremist Hindus also manhandled Muslim vendors was precursor. Even the language the people used in the tussle was common, Gujarati. It was made into a flashpoint much later. The hallmark of the conflagration was Hindutva. The overall effect of the continuous struggle was and is to establish a Hindu rashtra or nation. In this they wanted to coopt the Dalits so that they could kill two birds with a single stone. The nation they envisage is one where there is no minority and the lower castes would be assigned to do what they have been forced to do down the ages of history. Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar put it this way: “The ultimate vision of our work … is a perfectly organised state of society wherein each individual has been moulded into a model of ideal Hindu manhood and made into a living limb of the corporate personality of society.”(We) This is nation building in official RSS language. It acquired a new strategy in the last decade and half. First the Dalits were pitted against the Muslims during 2002 pogroms and then came the reward of BJP winning strength in Gujarat election. Ashok Singhal of VHP preened on the successful result. He said that it would be replicated all over the country. It was. Muzaffarnagar, Assam and Trilokpuri followed in succession. Bal Thackeray claimed that it was he and his cadres who had shown the way to Modi drawing on the memory of early eighties and nineties of the previous century. Such was the triumvirate of Hindutva. [1] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/akshardham-attack-supreme-court-junks-gujarat-review-plea/] [2] www.jiyoparsi.org.parzor.com [3]VD Savarkar. Bharti Itihasateel saha sunery paney Kolhapur: Riyas Publication (2012) p 126, para 321 [4]Tehelka, November 3, 2007. [5] See Ambedkar’s book Riddles of Hinduism.[ [6] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/triple-murder-of-dalit-family-rocks-maharashtra/article6527697.ece