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 THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF HINDU NATIONALISM
An Ethnographic Account 1990-94

by

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Shubh Mathur
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December 2003
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Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School
for Social Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy.

Dissertation committee:
Dr. Rayna Rapp
Dr. Adamantia Pollis
Dr. Arvind Rajagopal
Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan

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 She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead....

She looked over his shoulder

For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

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Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
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Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
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She looked over his shoulder

For athletes at their games
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick to music,
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But there on the shining shield

His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field....

The thin-lipped armourer

Hephaestos hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted, man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

- from W.H.Auden The Shield o f Achilles

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 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: The Everyday Life of H indu N ationalism ................................................ 1

Two stories
Culture and violence: In the light of Gujarat
The ordering of difference
Writing an ethnography of fascism
Hindutva as symbolic capital

2 M apping the Enem y............................................................................................................... 48

“The Significant Past”
Culture and difference in the nineteenth century
Conquest and conversion
Tolerance, Hindu and Muslim
“Muslim separatism”

3 Administrative and Discursive H indus.............................................................................84

A brief history of Hindu nationalism

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Street-fighters and patriots
“A well-disciplined counter-revolutionary elite”
“National thrust to ancient customs”
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4 Communities and Power...................................................................................................... 128
The scream of Reich
Bansw ara
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Beaw ar
Seva Bharati: “Giving Culture”,to the urban poor
Mohalla Khatikan
RSS Women
Postscript from Gujarat
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5 Violence as R itual.............................................................................................................. 160

Stories
Suspect community
The judicial inquiry
Invisible violence
The other point of view

Appendix I Election Results................................................................................................. 206

Appendix II Population by religion.......................................................................................209
Appendix III M ap s.................................................................................................................. 211
Appendix IV VHP - RSS m aterials..................................................................................... 215

N o tes .............................................................................................................................. 226

Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 232

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 1

INTRODUCTION: THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF HINDU NATIONALISM

"Without turning power into a 'circle whose center is everywhere and

nowhere', which could be to dissolve it in yet another way, we have to be able

to discover it where it is least visible, where it is most misrecognized....For

symbolic power is that invisible power which can be exercised only with the

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complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or

even that they themselves exercise it." (Bourdieu 1991)

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"To the detriment of all genuine efforts to achieve freedom, fascism was and
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is still conceived as the dictatorship of a small reactionary clique. The tenacity

with which this error persists is to be ascribed to our fear of recognizing the
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true state of affairs: fascism is an international phenomenon, which pervades

all bodies of human society of all nations....As a political movement fascism

differs from other reactionary parties inasmuch as it is borne and championed

by masses o f people." (Reich 1970)

Two Stories

( 1)

In March 1993, the Department of History at the University of Rajasthan in Jaipur organized a

seminar on "Secularism and Tolerance in the History of Rajasthan". This was a few months after

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 the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya1 by Hindu nationalist organizations led by the

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad

(VHP). The destruction of the mosque was followed by violence against the Muslim minority

throughout the country, in which thousands of people were killed. Seminars like this one typically

follow, in regular sequence, after days of violence, police firing, curfew and mass arrests; they are

part of what is called ‘the healing process’. Their purpose is to help ‘normalise’ things, to restore

order and comprehension (Feldman 1994). At this seminar, a typical paper discussed the themes

of non-violence and tolerance in ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ poetry in the medieval period. The speaker

found that ‘Hindu’ poetry characteristically contained injunctions against violence, while

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‘Muslim’ poetry was lacking any emphasis on non-violence and respect for life. The previous

evening, I was reading Jan Breman’s account of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Surat in December
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1992. Breman cites an eyewitness account of the attack on Muslim homes in a middle-class

neighbourhood: “A high-ranking official told me how he had seen furniture coming down over the
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balcony from the opposite multi-storeyed building: mattresses, chairs, and then to his horror small

children as well.” (1993: 737)

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(2)

The first communal riot in Jaipur’s history took place in 19892. It was followed by a larger and

more destructive one in 1990; this time the death toll was 120, where 90-95% of the victims were

Muslims. In 1991, the government of the state of Rajasthan set up a Comission of Inquiry to

investigate the October 1990 riot in Jaipur, the state capital. The Comission published an appeal

to the public in the local newspapers, asking for information about the events, and for witnesses to

testify at its hearings. In response, a large number of halafnameh (affidavits or sworn statements)

were submitted. One particular set of statements, which the staff of the Comission came to call

‘the BJP halafnameh, (BJP, or Bharatiya Janata Party, Indian People’s Party, is the political
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 expression of the Hindu right), were authored by individuals supposedly unconnected to each

other, from different neighbourhoods in the city, and representing different caste groups living

there3. They all told an identical tale, supporting the BJP’s version of events. They held the

Muslims responsible for starting the violence, ‘according to their nature’ and for the ensuing

destruction and loss of life. This version was proved to be false by evidence given before the

Comission by numerous eyewitnesses, survivors, police officers, relief workers and journalists

(Mayaram 1993)4. Like most of the statements produced by the Hindu right, however, the

significance of the BJP halafnameh does not lie in their truth or falsity, but in the image of social

reality that they seek to convey. One of these statements, ostensibly made by a Koli5, after

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blaming the violence on the Muslims, goes on to suggest a reason for this: “Our neighbourhood is

surrounded on four sides by Muslim houses. The Muslims have been threatening the Kolis, who
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are poor, and telling them to leave their homes, so they can take over our property and sell it at a

profit. This is the reason for all the destruction they caused.”6 In that neighbourhood, Koliyon ki
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Basti (the Kolis’ neighbourhood) twenty-two of the twenty-five dead were Muslims, while

hundreds of Muslim homes and workshops were burnt in the three days that the riot raged

unchecked by the local police or administration; the local unit of the state paramilitary, the
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Rajasthan Armed Constabulary (RAC), stationed strategically at one end of the main street in the

neighbourhood, played a major part in the violence. The BJP statements could be dismissed as

propaganda, for which the Hindu right has an impressive and well-deserved reputation. However,

two years later, in August 1993, as the political parties were preparing for state assembly

elections, there was another ‘riot’ in Jaipur. This one was a minor affair, limited to just one

neighbourhood where Muslim and Koli houses stood next to each other. Stones were thrown at

the Muslim houses, one person was killed, a few injured, about twenty arrested. A few days after

the incident, along with other members of a Muslim women’s group, I met with the people in the

neighbourhood in an attempt to mediate and resolve the immediate causes of conflict. The women
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 and young men in the Koli houses spoke to us in the words as the BJP halafnameh. Their Muslim

meighbours were “rich and oppressive” they “wanted to take the land our houses are built on”.

The Koli men worked as day labourers, the women sold fruit and vegetables in the market; for

both, their dealings with the Hindu upper castes on a daily basis were a constant reminder of their

low economic and ritual status. Yet it was their Muslim neighbours, themselves a marginalized

and disprivileged group, who were perceived as the enemy, as the cause of all their problems.

They were the threat to ‘Hindu society’ with which the Kolis identified themselves, even though

they belonged at the bottom of its social and economic hierarchy.

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Culture and Violence: In the Light of Gujarat

These two sets of events serve to define the central themes of this dissertation. How does
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the Hindu nationalist view of social reality come to be known and accepted as ‘truth’? What is the
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role of culture in creating the realities of Hindu nationalism? Why are these accepted by marginal

groups - women, dalits7, tribals, the urban poor, industrial workers, whose interests the Hindu

right cannot be said to represent? Why are academic discussions of violence, destruction, arson,
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murder and rape framed in terms of ‘secularism’ and ‘toleration’ (eg Chatteijee 1995; Madan

1987)? What role does the contrast between ‘Hindu tolerance’ and ‘Muslim intolerance’,

enshrined in Indian academic and public discourse, play in explaining anti-Muslim violence

(Mahmood 1993; 2000)? How do anthropological understandings of culture parallel the Hindu

right’s notions of identity and exclusion? This thesis seeks to write an ethnography of the Hindu

right, tracing the work of its activists and its projects and the accompanying anti-minority

violence, in the state of Rajasthan through the 1980s and early 1990s. It seeks to understand the

way RSS and VHP activists see themselves and their work, and the notions of culture they seek to

impart through their ‘social work’ projects. Following the transformation of the everyday world of

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 meanings, it attempts to answer the question: How does one comprehend the selves that are

capable of the extraordinary violence witnessed in India at the turn of the millennium? It should

be said here that in writing this thesis, I did not bring to it an objective academic voice, nor even

an ironic or playful postmodern one. My writing is influenced both by a liberal 1970s (Nehruvian

and secular, words now in disfavour) education and upbringing, and the effort to comprehend

‘communal’ violence, more accurately termed anti-minority violence, I have witnessed at close

hand over two decades. Since three thousand Sikhs were massacred in a 3-day bloodletting in

Delhi following the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister in 1984, popular violence

transformed with barely a pause into anti-Muslim “riots”, occurring in locations as diverse as

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Ahmedabad (Shah) and Delhi (Kumar 2002), as early as 1985 and 1986s. The violence

accelerated through the 1990s, peaking in 1992 and then again in 2002 with the massacres of
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Muslims in Gujarat. It is thus not a purely academic question to ask, what does the light of the

fires of Gujarat illuminate? What does it tell us about ourselves, the actions we are capable of
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carrying out or supporting however indirectly?

When I planned my fieldwork in 1990, it was already clear that Hindu nationalism

represented a highly popular and organized movement. My project was to seek the social bases for
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its popularity, which was evident in electoral results, mass political mobilizations, and escalating

anti-Muslim violence. It was also clear that the BJP, its reputation as an upper-caste party

notwithstanding, was winning the support of disprivileged and subordinated groups whose

interests it could not be said to represent. Why did people vote, act, mobilize and participate in the

violence, against their own interests? The artificiality of the BJP’s Hindutva discourse was

manifest, yet it succeeded in transforming everyday meanings and practices. Why did, and why

does it continue to work? Rajasthan between 1991 and 1994 was the right place to track the Hindu

right’s rise to power. It was during this period that the BJP consolidated its political hold on the

state, building on a decade of ‘social work’ projects across the state. The turning point in the
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 fortunes of the Hindu right both nationally and in Rajasthan can be dated back to 1977, when it

first acquired power at the national level as an ally of the left-centre groups opposing the Congress

and Indira Gandhi, winning the elections that swept away the Emergency. Its progress thereafter

can be tracked through election results and in the increasing communal violence9. David Ludden

writes that “Before 1980, the political impact of communalism remained limited and Hindu

communal parties won few votes. After 1980, however, killing classified as ‘communal’ increased

rapidly and so did the Muslim body count. The death toll in the 1980s quadrupled the 1970s figure

and rose to more than seven thousand.” (1996)10 Electoral results tell the same story. In the Lok

Sabha (National Legislative Assembly) elections in 1984, the BJP won only 2 out of a total 540

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seats. In 1989, it won 85 seats, in 1992, 116 seats, in 1996, 157 seats, and in 1998, 180 out of a

total of 537 seats, enough to form a government with its own allies, without any supportfrom
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troublesome left-centre coalition partners11. Individual RSS lives record the journey of the Hindu

right from the fringes to the center of power. An official of the students organization associated
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with the Hindu right, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP)12, told me about the time

when he had just joined the RSS in high school in the small town of Kotputli:

At that time people used to laugh at us and call us knickerwalas13. But they
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were careful not to get into fights with us because they knew we trained to

use lathis14. I continued to work with the RSS when I went to college in

Kotputli. It was there that I began doing ABVP work, organizing students.

When I was in medical college, I was elected office-bearer at the state level.

The status of the RSS has gone up over the last ten years. Old friends from

school come to visit me sometimes, and I can see that they are now in awe

of me. Sometimes they want me to do things for them, since I have so many

contacts in the government. Things are very different for the RSS now.

People respect us and look up to us.

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 Besides its changing electoral fortunes, and the increasing anti-minority violence, the rising

popularity of the Hindu right can be traced through membership in its mass organizations. The

Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS, Indian Labourers’ Organization), the labour union affiliated

with the BJP, experienced unprecedented growth between 1977 and 1980, the period of Janata

Party rule. By 1980, according to the annual report of the Ministry of Labour, the BMS ranked as

the second largest trade union in the country (Basu 1996:57) By 1994, it was the largest trade

union in the country. Writing about the Bombay riots of 1992 and 1993, Flavia Agnes points to

the ground lost by left and progressive unions to the Hindu right (also Breman 2002), and the

consequent communalization of the unions:

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During the last decade, the trade union movement in Bombay has become

communalized with the Shiv Sena dominating many important trade unions in
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the city. The Sena-dominated unions in Larsen and Toubro, Oberoi Towers,

Bombay Dyeing and other private companies not only led the riots but also
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demanded that Muslims be removed from the workforce. However, the

hostility towards Muslims was not limited to Sena-dominated unions but was

also widespread among left party-affiliated unions which resulted in many

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stabbing and burning instances within factory premises. This led to large-scale

absenteeism of Muslims. Less than thirty per cent of the Muslim labour force

in the organized sector returned to work even a month after the riots. In an

effort to restore normalcy, establishments like Tatas issued a public statement

inviting the Muslim workers back to work and promising them adequate

protection. But some others sent their Muslim workers on leave on the

grounds that they could not guarantee their safety.. ..The Dalit and other caste-

based movements also had to confront similar issues. The Mandal issue which

had divided the Hindu community along caste lines stood united as a cohesive

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 Hindu force against the Muslims. ...In Dharavi and other bustis15 the

corporators belonging to the Republican Party, a political forum of the dalits,

led the riots against the Muslims. Shanta Dharia, a Republican Party

corporator, was shot down by the police while leading a rioting mob.

(1996:106-107)

In Rajasthan too, the BJP’s rise to power coincides with the beginnings of anti-minority violence.

In 1991, a newspaper report surveying political developments in the state noted that:

The spurt in communal disturbances has been the most marked change in

Rajasthan, and communal violence the major issue since the BJP's advent in

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the 1989 Lok Sabha elections when it captured 13 of the 25 seats in alliance

with the Janata Dal. The explosion began on the very first day of the BJP's

triumph when a victory procession of its Jaipur candidate deviated from the
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permitted route and raised aggressive slogans in a Muslim-dominated area,
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provoking violence in a city that had been peaceful even at the height of the

Partition riots. A similar incident took place in Kota. The BJP won the state

assembly elections three months later and communal violence became a

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recurrent feature: Nagaur, Udiapur, Manoharpur and Udaipur witnessed the

second and far deadlier round (official toll - 48) when the BJP forced a bandh

in protest against Advani’s arrest. Bhilwara provided the latest test case to the

BJP on its attitudes towards the Muslims. Two months ago, members of the

Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal clashed with the police there as

they were stopped from taking a procession through a Muslim-dominated

area. (Mitta 1991)

The RSS was founded in 1925, and has been associated with “communal”16 violence since the

beginning. It is important to note that “communal violence” in Rajasthan and throughout India
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 during the past decade is qualitatively different from the violence of earlier decades and is more

accurately termed anti-minority violence. Not only are the casualty figures higher, but the patterns

of violence, its geographic spread, the demographic profile of the victims, the role of the state,

have changed. The literature on communal violence in India sees riots as spontaneous, episodic

and not having a lasting impact. It views the violence as an aberration, as an overturning of the

social order, as a moment of chaos that will soon be over with a return to” ‘normality”. Further, it

follows what Thomas Blom Hansen calls the formula of “balanced and equally apportioned

guilt.”1; (2000: 47). Thus “communal” violence is to be understood as clashes or conflict between

members of different communities, and the established academic and public discourse seeks to

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explain it in terms of sharing out blame equally between the “two sides”.

Even interpretations which did not assume a justification of ‘Hindu

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retaliation’ as being necessary, constructed a ‘symmetry of guilt’ despite the

asymmetry of numbers, of loss, and of evident planning and orchestration.

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The idea of symmetry made it possible to read the events as a sequence of -

justifiable or at least understandable - retaliations between religious

communities. The successful Bollywood film, Bombay, told the story of the
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riots in that symmetrical way, placing a purely fictional Muslim instigator at

the side of the Hindu demagogue.. .(Eckert 2003:120)

Not only academic accounts but also judicial ones, such as the Srikrishna Comission investigating

the Bombay riots of 1992-3 produce a narrative of “balanced guilt”, looking for factors for which

both communities, that is Hindus and Muslims, can be blamed to decide upon responsibility for

the violence. Hansen writes that ‘The interpretation of communal riots in terms of apportioning

and ‘balancing’ collective guilt and responsibility among faceless and abstract communities,

which emerged from the commission hearings, clearly reflected a dominant and widespread public

moral discourse.” (2000:45) The principle of apportioning blame equally between religious
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 communities can only be achieved at the cost of masking a reality in which the violence is

disproportionately visited upon one side, with the active connivance of agencies of the state on the

other. Such a discourse is clearly unable to comprehend, much less challenge, the new violence of

the 1990s18. Until the Ram Janmabhoomi movement launched by the VHP began to gain

momentum around 1985, communal violence did consist of group clashes in public spaces,

between members of different religious communities. Typically such violence occurred in north

India, in urban areas where the population was almost evenly divided between Hindus and

Muslims (Freitag 1990). There was not much damage to property; the victims were mostly the

young men who had participated in the violence. The anti-minority violence of the 1990s is very

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different in nature and outcome and ‘riots’ happen in states like Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and

Karnataka (Deshpande 1996, Fanselow 2000, Wright 2000), which were previously unaffected by
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communal violence; in rural and tribal areas where Muslims make up less than 1-2% of the

population19; 90-95 per cent of the victims are Muslims; the violence has moved out of public
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spaces to target minority homes and businesses; the victims now include the very old and the very

young. All of these changes underline the connections that Hindu communalism has to the

institutions of power - to the state machinery, the media, the judiciaiy and the new economy. The
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established terminology which describes the current violence as “Hindu-Muslim riots” helps to

obscure this imbalance. Such definitions have the the merit of being able to equate “both sides”

regardless of who carries out the violence, which can be done only by ignoring the official attitude

to the Hindu right and its actions:

Muslim Indians are familiar with the partisan attitude, the inherent bias, the

deep-seated prejudice in the official machinery. It swings into action with

admirable self-righteousness if a Muslim Indian happens to cross the line or

dares to react; it is eloquent and ingenious in concocting false stories to justify

official violence against Muslim homes, mohallas and places of worship. And,
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 it sleeps or looks the other way when Hindus are involved, if it does not join

hands with Hindu communalism. The political executive is generally unable

to control the official machinery out of respect for Hindu ‘sentiments’ So even

judicial orders cannot be implemented. (Muslim India October 1983).

Police officers in Jaipur would admitted that Muslim fundamentalist groups were numerically

insignificant and under close surveillance to an extent which made them inoperable. Shail

Mayaram noted that

In Jaipur I have been repeatedly questioned about ‘minority communalism’.

In this context, it is important to state that Muslim fundamentalism as an

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ideological formation is as yet underdeveloped in the city. A the judicial

hearings inquiring into the rioting police officials discounted the presence of
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Muslim organizations such as the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim League. In

terms of the organization of Muslims, kinship and neighbourhood

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organization play a far more significant role. (1993: 2538)

Hindu nationalism has a very different relationship to the institutions of political, social, economic

and symbolic power and this is reflected in the fact that the new violence is very different from the
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old communal violence: it is highly repetitive, ritualistic in its enactment of truths already known;

it does not overturn the social order temporarily but serves to redefine and confirm the various

actors’ places in that order; there is no ‘return to normality’ but a movement to a new stage in the

definition of the social order of Hindutva20.

Another axiom that underlies explanations of violence is the prevalent discursive contrast

between “Hindu tolerance” and “Muslim intolerance”; the creation of a militant, organized Hindu

indentity is described as the ‘Semiticization’or ‘Islamicization’ of Hinduism (Nandy 1998). This

reflects a widespread assumption in Indian academic discourses that monotheistic religions are

predisposed to intolerance while polytheistic ones are not. Peter van der Veer writes that:
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 Tolerance is the prevailing trope in discourse about Hinduism and in that

about the modem Hindu as well - the VHP tells us that Hinduism is a

‘parliament of religions and the very antithesis of violence, terrorism and

intolerance’ (McKean 1992:33) One of India’s leading social scientists,

Rajni Kothari, denies that Hinduism is a religion. India is a ‘country that is

built upon the foundations of a civilization that is fundamentally non­

religious.’(1992:2695). In the aftermath of the December 1992 events in

Ayodhya, he argues that the BJP and VHP want to make pluralistic Hindu

society into a ‘Semitic’ religion, that is, an aggressive, organized,

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hegemonic monotheism like Islam. Kothari ends up by not only criticizing

the ‘Semticization’ of Hinduism, but also by demanding from the Muslims

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that they give up ‘a religious approach to their survival in the present and

prospects in the future.’ In short, Hindus have a pluralistic, tolerant

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‘civilization’ and Muslims have a fanatic ‘religion’and the problem is that

Hindus are becoming like Muslims rather than the other way around.

(1996:257-258)
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Writers have differed on how best to define Hindu nationalism: is it a political movement or a

religious movement that spills over into politics? Is it an elite conspiracy or a mass movement?

(Basu 1996) Does it represent the resentment of the masses against the liberal state and the

minorities it favours (eg Nandy 1995, Chatteijee 1995)? Does it tend toward ideological purity or

political pragmatism, as it takes power at the national level? How does it reconcile the conflicting

interests of its diverse constituents, which include trade unions and industrialists, landowners and

labourers, the urban middle class and the urban poor, the Hindu upper castes and the middle and

“backward” castes? (Hansen 1996; Jaffrelot 1996) I have attempted to understand Hindu

nationalism through the lives of its actors and victims, as a movement that is first created in the
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 realm of culture before it can begin to operate in the political domain. The logic of Hindu

nationalism is not to be found in the sphere of economics or politics, but of culture. I argue that it

is necessary to take seriously the claims of RSS activists that theirs is a cultural organization, and

that its main task is “character-building”. They clearly identify the crucial role that culture plays in

creating the actors of Hindu nationalism, and in producing the alliances that can bridge the gaps of

class, caste, gender and region. Shifts in economic policy and electoral politics - which can be

briefly described as liberalisation in the first case, and fragmentation or regionalism in the second

- of the post-Nehruvian era have prepared the ground for its arrival (also Hansen 2001; Rajagopal

2001); nevertheless, it is in and through culture that boundaries are created, belonging and

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exclusion are defined and the nation and its enemies are constructed. Further, it is these images of

the nation and its enemies, created through a mixture of intellectual discipline and street fighting,
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that the Hindu right brings to the center of political power in India, as it forms a succession of

national governments since 1996, with a variety of coalition partners which include regional and
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caste-based parties, including dalit parties. It is these images that dictate foreign policy and

militarization, as the RSS moves its activities from urban middle-class neighbourhoods to the

world stage (Vanaik 1998). Its central projects, the surveillance and ‘containment’ of minorities
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and the re-writing of history, have now become pillars of national security. A recent editorial in an

Indian magazine wrote that:

Anti Muslim pogroms and attacks on rights of secular people and groups in

India are being deliberately linked by the BJP government with ‘national

security’ through the ‘either with us or against us’ rhetoric, imitative of

Bush, and minorities are being pushed to the wall to prove their patriotism.

In Gujarat, Bajrang Dal, the fascist storm troopers of the Sangh Parivar, are

asked to ‘keep an eye’ on the minorities in their localities. The Education

Minister of the country describes the work of secular historians as

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 ‘intellectual terrorism’ and has withdrawn and made unilateral deletions

from history school texts and schools have been directed that issues raised in

the concerned portions must not even be discussed in classrooms. (Akhbar

2001)

The writers’ predictions for Gujarat came true in March and April of 2002 when thousands of

Muslims were massacred (unofficial figures put the death toll as high as three thousand) and

nearly a million left homeless in a month of violence carried out by the organisations of the Hindu

right. In Rajasthan, the state government then led by the Congress(I)21 (which came to power in

1998, defeating the BJP with support cobbled together from the minorities and middle castes),

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administration and police took steps to prevent the violence from spreading across the state

border. Rajasthan’s BJP government held power from 1989 to 1998; a mixture of factors were
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responsible for the BJP’s electoral defeat in 1998. Among these were: the abysmal failure of its

government, economic misery exacerbated by drought, the revival of the centrist electoral
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alliances based on support from middle castes and minorities, and misgivings about the nuclear

tests conducted by the BJP government in 1998 in Pokhran in Rajasthan. Despite the euphoria

expressed around the country after the tests, people in Rajasthan were concerned about fallout,
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and about the escalating military conflict with Pakistan, sharing as it does a long land border to the

west. But a change in electoral fortunes does not mean a change on the ground, and since 1998

there have been over three hundred anti-Muslim riots in different parts of the state, focussed

mostly in the tribal districts of Rajasamand, Bhilwara and Udaipur. Parts of rural Rajasthan are

witnessing a repeat of the events of 2002 in Gujarat; in September 2003 in the village of Aklera in

Kota District, Bajrang Dal activists burnt the houses of the 25 Muslim families living there and

tore down the mosque; Muslim refugees have left the villages, saying that they will never be able

to return to their homes. A bright saffron sign now proclaims the village “Ideal Hindu village”

(Nagaraj 2003). In the thirteen years that have passed since the massacre at Rishi Ghalav Nagar in
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 Jaipur in October 1990, not a single person has been charged or prosecuted for the killings, nor is

there any will to do so, even among progressive and secularist groups in the state.

While exact figures are hard to come by, the death toll in the violence of the 1990s runs to

tens of thousands. Accompanying the violence are the “preventive arrests” of tens of thousands of

minority men under “anti-terrorism laws”, the deportation of Bangla-speaking Muslims from

Indian cities, and periodic economic boycotts of Muslims in small communities. Violence and

human rights abuses on this scale match the numbers of Argentina’s or Guatemala’s “Dirty Wars”

but repression of selected groups and communities in other places is most typically carried out by

military governments or dictatorships. When it is carried out or supported by democractically

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elected governments, and the violence represents a merging of popular and state terror, one has to

seek causal factors beyond the concentration of armed force and military power. This is why the
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domain of culture becomes crucial to the analysis of Hindu nationalism and its violence. Violence

against minorities, whether it takes the form of “riots” or of counter-insurgency operations by the
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state, is carried out with public consent. Over the past two decades different minority groups have

been targeted by successive Indian governments in counter-insurgency operations using national

security laws aimed at “protecting” the nation from its enemies. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood
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writes that despite having very different origins and goals, the secessionist movements in Punjab

and Kashmir

.. .are linked by a program of state terror emanating from New Delhi.. ..In the

name of national security India passed counter terrorism legislation that

severely curtailed democratic rights and freedoms as well as turning a blind

eye to the pervasive abuses noted year after year by the international human

rights community. (Now there is a national Human Rights Comission but its

powers are severly limited). Perhaps as important is the national mood of

intolerance for dissent, which has transformed India’s intellectual life over the
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 past decade and a half. Most Indians, willfully ignorant of the horrors taking

place in their name, continue to chant the “mantra of democracy”. . .there is an

Alice-in-Wonderland quality to this national image of pacific mysticism and

tranquil coexistence. At one point in the counterinsurgency in Punjab so many

bodies of “disappeared” Sikhs were being dumped in the state’s waterways

that the governor of neighbouring Rajasthan had to issue a complaint that

dead bodies were clogging up his canals. In Muzaffarabad, on the Pakistani or

“free” side of Kashmir, a blackboard by the banks of the Jhelum River keeps

count as Kashmiri bodies float down from across the borders. (When I visited

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in January 1997, the grim chalk tally then was at 476). Given the deep mythic

significance of India’s rivers in the Hindu tradition, this defilement is

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especially telling. “The largest democracy in the world” has polluted its sacred

waters with the bodies of its tortured citizens.” (2000: 71-72)

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These grim metaphors evoke, as does Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’, images of fascism

in a classical land. Daniel (1996) writes of returning to Sri Lanka to collect folk songs sung by

Tamil women working on tea estates to discover another reality:

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Based on a sample, which I had collected on previous visits, of lamentations,

work songs, nuptial songs, devotional songs, and especially lullabies, I

hypothesized that in the lyrics of such songs one could discover an

ethnohistory very different from the “master narratives” found in the official

histories of tea plantations and of plantation workers....Little did I expect to

find another alternative narrative, one that defied my expectations and plans. I

had no idea that by the time I reached Sri Lanka the following year, I would

arrive on the heels of the worst anti-Tamil riots known in that island paradise

to find that none of my singers were in a mood to sing, and to find my best
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