NOTHING since Lal Krishna Advani's rath yatra of 1990 has boosted the
hubris and the gross arrogance of the Sangh Parivar as strongly as
the Gujarat Assembly results. The Bharatiya Janata Party now
triumphantly says that the "roadmap for the future is clear": it is
poised to wrest back each State held by its opponents and also emerge
victorious in the next Lok Sabha elections.

The BJP National Executive meeting on December 23-24 declared the
Gujarat election verdict "a mandate" for and an endorsement of its
core "ideological positions" and expressed confidence that it "will
prove to be a turning point in India's history" and that "cultural
nationalism... will find wide scale (sic) acceptability all over the
country". This followed the crowning of Narendra Modi not just as
Chief Minister of Gujarat - in a spectacular ceremony in an Ahmedabad
stadium - but as the mascot of a new, virulent Hindutva. The Vishwa
Hindu Parishad (VHP) expectedly exults over the Gujarat results. Its
most rabid elements like Praveen Togadia stridently declare that
India will become a Hindu rashtra in two years' time.

Even Atal Behari Vajpayee has joined the chorus. He told Dainik
Bhaskar that the Gujarat elections "will help the nation understand
secularism in the proper perspective"; Gujarat has released "new
energies", which must be skilfully used to "help us preserve the
values of our [presumably Hindu] life". The scales should now fall
off many Vajpayee-supporters' eyes.

The BJP has cited all sorts of reasons for its victory, including
"good governance", and the popularity of "cultural nationalism" and
its "commitment to eliminate terrorism". It portrays the results as a
punishment to secularists for their "Hindu bashing". In reality, the
BJP's victory is not as pervasive and comprehensive as it seems.

A look at the detailed election results shows that the party won just
under 50 per cent of the vote (to be precise, 49.79 per cent). Given
the 62 per cent poll turnout, this means 31 per cent of the
population supported it, giving it a total of 10.13 million votes.
However, the votes of the secular parties (the Congress(I), the
Nationalist Congress Party, the Samajwadi Party, the Janata Dal(U),
the CPI(M) and CPI) together add up to 8.62 million. In addition,
"Independents" won 1.17 million votes. It is estimated that perhaps
70 per cent of these were bagged by rebel Congress candidates. If
these votes are added, the total secular vote goes up to 9.44
million, only marginally (7 per cent) lower than the BJP's.

The BJP thus gained considerably from Opposition disunity. In
addition to the 53 seats bagged by the Congress(I) and Jatanta DalU),
the secular parties lost by narrow margins in as many as 40
constituencies, where the combined vote of the Number 2 and 3
candidates exceeds the BJP's. Absent vote division, the BJP would
have lost all 40.

What is special about Gujarat is not a Hindutva wave so much as the
BJP's ability to raise its vote-share by six percentage points,
despite having organised India's worst pogrom of a minority in 55
years. The success is all the more telling, given its appalling
record of governance, which saw index after social index plummet, and
growth slow down from 10 per cent-plus in the mid- and late- 1990s to
only 1 per cent now, leaving a wasteland of closed factories.
Disgracefully, the BJP's vote was especially high precisely in the
two regions - northern and central Gujarat - where the post-Godhra
violence was most acute.

One of the main reasons for this dark victory is the electorate's
polarisation along religious lines which the BJP effected. However,
it would be wrong to attribute its success to polarisation alone.
Also significant was the Congress(I)'s "soft Hindutva" line and
failure to confront the BJP on communalism and nationalism. The
Congress(I) concentrated exclusively on "development". More
generally, two sets of factors seem to have been at work. The first
is in many ways Gujarat-specific, and the second more generic,
present in many other States.

The first set of factors has to do with some conservative right-wing
peculiarities of Gujarati society, politics and culture. Gujarat has
seen not a loosening of hierarchies, but a hardening of caste
divisions over two centuries amidst a general absence of social
reform - just when some other parts of India were being reshaped by
reform movements. Perhaps no other State matches Gujarat in throwing
up a substantial class of proprietary farmers (the patidar Patels)
which so dominates its economic, social and religious life. The
Patels' ascendancy coincided with the rise of conservative cults such
as the Swaminarayan sect, in contrast to the cultural "renaissance"
and modernisation processes that were gathering momentum in some
other regions in the 19th century.

The Patels, the Banias and the Brahmins of Gujarat retain a tight
hold over state power, the economy and social institutions. They have
steadfastly refused to share power with other groups. Indeed, they
have beaten down challenges from below with violent street-level
agitations - for instance the anti-Dalit, anti-Muslim mobilisation in
1980-82, and the campaign against OBC reservations in 1985-86.

Gujarat is thus an oddity or paradox: one of India's most urbanised
and industrialised States, but socially, one of the most conservative
and backward. Gujarat has a Muslim minority that is culturally highly
integrated and assimilated - its 130 Muslim communities speak no
other language than Gujarati - but is reviled and ghettoised. Gujarat
is, relatively, highly prosperous, but it has among India's lowest
wage levels, and highest rates of exploitation. Surat's diamond
industry and Alang's shipbreaking yard are revolting instances of
this.

Nowhere else has economic neoliberalism been as deeply and widely
implemented as in Gujarat. And nowhere else has the same kind of
rapid deindustrialisation occurred, wiping out the country's second
largest textile-mill economy in the 1980s, and more recently, a range
of modern industries, especially chemicals. These processes, along
with the advanced commercialisation of all social relations, have
produced enormous stresses and dislocations - for instance, growing
destitution among now-unemployed mill workers, crime, intensification
of caste prejudices, and new rivalries between Dalits and Muslims in
collapsing city centres.

In this situation, Hindutva functions as a cohering force and a
source of ideological legitimisation for the rule of the globalising
neo-liberal upper-caste elite. It is buttressed on the ground by new
evangelical Hindu movements which proselytise among the tribals and
play upon the "Sanskritisation" aspirations of other plebeian layers.

Gujarat is unique for the sheer spread and power of the VHP, with
branches in 55 per cent of the 18,000 villages. Along with religious
cults and gurus, the VHP has drummed up an aggressive form of Hindu
identity assertion. Its penetration of schools and textbooks is
extensive. Given the weakness of Gujarat's Left and of its liberal
intelligentsia - infinitesimal in relation to commercial
entrepreneurs - there has been little resistance to the Sangh
Parivar's growth. A decade of BJP rule has consolidated Hindutva's
hold. No other State matches Gujarat in its ideological stranglehold
over civil society and state institutions, including the police.

THE generic factors in the Gujarat verdict are extremely important
too. They will come into play immediately in Himachal Pradesh and the
other States going to the polls soon. Broadly, they include the BJP's
appeal to bellicose nationalism; second, its claim that it is
uniquely committed to defending "national security" against
"terrorism", on which the secular parties are "compromised"; and,
third, its xenophobic portrayal of Islam and Muslims as "outsiders",
with "extra-territorial" loyalties, who cannot be trusted at this
"critical juncture" when India's security is gravely threatened, like
the United States', by jehadi terrorism.

It should be clear that even in the short run, no sustained
ideological-political challenge can be mobilised against the Sangh
Parivar unless these claims are exposed as misleading, exaggerated,
or downright hollow. Yet, it is undeniable that they appeal to many
people, especially urban, upper-caste, high-income strata. Just as
bellicose nationalism has struck root over the past two decades,
elite opinion in India has shifted rightwards under the impact of
neo-liberal economics, Social-Darwinism, imitation of role-models of
"success" and "competition" defined in misanthropic terms, and
increasing fascination with force as the main means of resolving
differences and disputes.

These ideas, like Mera-Bharat-Mahan nationalism, have gone largely
unchallenged by the Centre-Left at the level of social discourse. At
the level of parliamentary or strategic debate, there is often a
competition among centrist parties to appear more loyal than the
king. Thus, certain groups that criticised the government's handling
of the Kargil crisis (for instance, intelligence failure) ended up
railing at it for not taking the war to its logical culmination!

Since September 11, terrorism - strictly of the non-state, and
preferably Islamic, variety - has become a powerful shibboleth which
it is not easy (or popular) to attack. Given today's Islamophobic
climate, particularly in the United States, many Indians who would
have preferred to be fence-sitters on the issue of religion and
politics, now sympathise with the view that there is an "organic"
link between Islam and terrorism, and that Indian Muslims are partial
to jehad.

All these propositions are utterly, completely misconceived. The
Sangh Parivar's claim to nationalism finds no validation in the
freedom movement's history. It did not participate in it. Sections of
it collaborated with the colonial state, preferring to regard Muslims
as the greater evil. Parivar nationalism is hate-filled and negative.
It severs the nation from the people.

The BJP must be roundly condemned for saying, in reply to the VHP's
Hindu rashtra demand, that India has been a "Hindu Nation" for
thousands of years and will never become a "theocratic state". This
"theocracy" business is a red herring. The core of communalism is not
about the rule of priesthood, but about the primacy of one group by
virtue of religion. This primacy has no place in democracy -
especially in a richly plural, composite culture such as India's.

India was never a "Hindu Nation" in any real sense. For about 2,000
years, non-Hindus have been integral to what is called India -
Buddhists, animists, Jains, atheists, Christians, agnostics, Muslims,
ancestor- or nature-worshippers. It makes no historical or
sociological-political sense to term ancient or medieval India a
"nation". This is a quintessentially modern phenomenon. Nor will it
do to talk about one continuous Indian "civilisation". Civilisations
arise, grow, decline and die.

For a thousand years or more, Muslims have been inseparable from
India's material life: languages, arts, crafts, economic practices,
literatures, music, administrative systems, forms of social
intercourse, and politics, as we have known all these. Muslims'
integration in Independent India and their commitment to it is one of
the greatest stories of cultural-political assimilation anywhere.
This has withstood the worst stresses produced by the rise of
"identity politics" over the past two decades, in particular both
political Islam and political Hinduism.

It is truly remarkable that not a single Indian Muslim has recently
joined a violent Islamic movement anywhere in the world: whether in
Afghanistan, Kashmir, North Africa or Pakistan. To underrate this
community's prodigious restraint and good sense is to indulge in
communal stereotyping.

The BJP must be thoroughly contested on the issue of terrorism too.
Its leadership has no comprehension of terrorism - not just its
origins, but of how to fight it. Legislating draconian laws, setting
up special "fast-track" courts, and staging fake "encounters" do not
solve the problem of terrorism. That is amply demonstrated by the
discontent and suffering in Kashmir, the sorry experience with TADA
(Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act), and the
latest verdict in the first trial under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism
Act).

If the BJP is to be electorally defeated, it must be challenged at
the ideological level. But that is not enough. It has to be pursued
into civil society and into the institutions it has infiltrated:
tribal villages, primary schools, Dalit settlements, cultural
organisations, youth groups, professional associations. This cannot
be done by parties which are mere election machines.

There has to be a movement, through society and in politics, based on
cooperation between progressive parties, civil society organisations
and the intelligentsia. This will be a long haul. Communalism is a
historic menace. It seeks to destroy the legacy of the Enlightenment
and of modernity itself. It can only be fought comprehensively,
without short-cuts.

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