Has India’s mainstream media decided to pay mere lip service to the Constitution’s fundamental values of secularism and liberalism while ignoring daily attacks on them by the Sangh Parivar, an extremist organisation in which the Bharatiya Janata Party is deeply embedded? Going by the media’s silence on several recent developments, that does seem to be the case.
For instance, no newspaper noticed the irony of a representative of the Sangh Parivar—the very current that inspired the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi—being invited to the unveiling of his statue in London. By all accounts, this event was organised mainly by the Tories, who never had any love lost for the Mahatma, with an eye on the Gujarati vote in the coming British election.
Earlier, in October 2012, Britain’s prosperous Gujarati businessmen lobbied the Cameron government to reach an odious rapprochement with Narendra Modi, who had long faced global isolation because of his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom. The rapprochement happened a year before he emerged as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. It was rationalised on the ground that Gujarat offers “dynamic and thriving” opportunities in “business” (yes), and “education” (really?)!
The Sangh Parivar has long sanitised and appropriated icons of the freedom struggle, in which it never participated itself, having collaborated with the colonial state instead. They include Sardar Patel, the Right-wing conservative who nevertheless banned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; C Rajagopalachari, a pro-business liberal, but strongly secular and pro-peace to the point of accepting self-determination for Kashmir, a position the Sangh loathes; and Bhagat Singh, a self-avowed atheist and a member of the radical-socialist Hindustan Republican Party.
Many commentators went along with the Parivar premise that all Indian Muslims and Christians are converts from Hinduism (not true), and therefore the Vishwa Hindu Parishad has the right to reconvert them (which it doesn’t, thanks to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of conscience). Celebrating Godse isn’t only morally repulsive. It totally vitiates the political climate.
Christian institutions have come under vicious attack especially since RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat accused Mother Teresa a month ago of using charitable work as a cover for religious conversion. In Delhi, five churches have been attacked in nine weeks, and two convents broken into.
A 71-year-old nun was raped in West Bengal and a church was vandalised in Hisar in Haryana. Christians have also been subjected to aggressive reconversion drives in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. Disgusting as it is, this anti-Christian tirade impelled former Punjab police chief Julio Ribeiro to write, “I feel I am on a hit list” and ask why Modi isn’t stopping the attacks when he could do so “in a minute”. Ribeiro’s intervention, which highlights the prevalent insecurity among the minorities, will have a massive impact.
Allowing government employees to join the RSS makes nonsense of the principle of a politically impartial bureaucracy, which is at the heart of a minimally civilised rule-of-law society. The RSS is not a social or cultural organisation. It is a highly political entity. It lays down the BJP’s political line and nominates its key organisational personnel. Gujarat similarly lifted the RSS ban in 2000, but reversed the step under Vajpayee’s orders. Yet the move sent a signal to the bureaucracy and the police, whose dreadful impact became visible in 2002.
Haryana is imposing the Gita, which a nominally secular state must not—even on Hindu pupils. It’s unconstitutional to impart religious instruction in state schools. But the BJP isn’t stopping at these. It’s taking the proselytisation drive even to posh private schools like Ryan International, whose managing director is the BJP Mahila Morcha secretary. Its staff and students are being recruited into the BJP on pain of salary cuts or other punishment. Such a drive cannot be voluntary, by definition.
Take beef. Regardless of whether Hindus in ancient India ate beef, no pious upper-caste Hindu should be forced to eat beef, or even watch cows being killed. But equally, no Muslim, Northeastern tribal, Christian or Dalit should be deprived of the choice of eating what they like. Take the Modi Government’s new appointments to the ICHR. It has broken the long-standing convention of reappointing members who have completed one term (of the maximum of two they can hold), and purged the Council of accomplished secular-minded scholars. The RSS believes that with the BJP in power with a majority, it has a unique opportunity to mainstream itself by capturing social and state institutions—not piecemeal, but comprehensively—and by opening up issues long considered settled, such as Hinduism’s socio-cultural primacy, religious conversion, etc, which will help it redefine India as a Hindu society. It needs the support of state power to do this and grow. So it will back the BJP’s strongly pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies. The BJP, in turn, will give the Parivar a good deal of freedom to push its ultraconservative-sectarian social agenda. That’s why Modi has done nothing to restrain the Parivar, barring issuing a weak, vague statement against inciting religious hatred.
The Parivar is no ‘fringe’; it’s now an almost equal partner of the BJP. The plain truth is, despite the strenuous efforts of some confused, and some very devious, elements to give it an aura of semi-respectability, the BJP remains an extremist party, with a hardline, expansionist, proselytising agenda. Its Hindu-supremacism is a menace to democracy.
