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Religion and Politics
The Militant Hindu Movement
Lise McKean, Ph.D.
I am honored to have been invited to participate in this Symposium on South Asia. I am here today as a scholar, a concerned citizen, and a friend of India. On December sixth, 1992, Hindu militants
attacked and destroyed the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. In the days that followed, Hindu militants attacked and murdered several thousand Indian citizens in the premeditated aftermath. Eyewitnesses and later inquiries
reported that police and state authorities failed to protect the mosque and the Muslim communities from attack. And in the decade since Ayodhya, the militant Hindu movement continued to wage a campaign of terror,
plunder, and murder.
Its most recent onslaught was earlier this year in Gujarat when trained Hindu militants again launched a massive attack against Indian citizens. Numerous investigations have determined
that the Hindu militants had planned their attack and that police and state authorities failed to stop the militants—and in some instances encouraged and joined in with them. By granting Hindu terrorists impunity to
rape and murder, to destroy homes and businesses, police and government authorities violate the oath they took to uphold the laws and Constitution.
We ask ourselves, how can this horrendous political
violence be happening in India? For over half a century Independent India has been celebrated throughout the world for its free elections, for its democratic institutions, for its Constitutional protections of
religious freedom and human rights. What are the forces at large today in India that are undermining the rule of law and terrorizing and killing innocent men, women, and children?
Like other political giants
of his era, Pandit Nehru, the first Prime Minster of India, lived and breathed politics. Like his mentor Mahatma Gandhi, he believed that the vast majority of Indian people wanted to build their new nation on
democratic principles that protected religious freedom and the rights of minorities. Yet he also knew that Indian democracy and secularism faced determined domestic adversaries and he warned staff of the Foreign
Office: “The danger to India, mark you, is not communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism.”[1]
Militant Hindus espoused anti-secular, anti-democratic beliefs before and after Independence. For example,
eight years before Independence, a leader of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevek Sangh), India’s premier militant Hindu organization declared: “The foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and
language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture […] or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu
nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less than any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.”[2]
The danger foreseen by Prime Minister Nehru is today embodied in the RSS and its
affiliates, including its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP. This party leads the Parliamentary coalition forming the government of India. And at the helm of this government is Prime Minister
Vajpayee, a man who attended his first RSS officer’s training camp in 1940. Or in the words of his comrade, BJP Home Minister L.K. Advani, “Shri Vajpayee’s commitment to the RSS and its ideology of cultural
nationalism has always been unswerving.”[3]
Over the past one hundred years, militant Hindus have formed many organizations. These organizations have never been more numerous on the ground, more centralized
in their command, or more aggressive and successful in propagating their ends than they are today under the leadership of the RSS. Throughout its history, the militant Hindu movement has and continues to be a
minority movement that falsely claims to represent the interests of a majority of like-minded Hindus.
The RSS was established in 1925 and is today the vital organ of indoctrination and the iron backbone of
the militant Hindu movement. Eight years after its founding, a British intelligence report stated: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to assert that the RSS hopes to be in future India what the ‘Fascists’ are to Italy
and the ‘Nazis’ to Germany.”[4]
During the past forty years, the RSS has established organizations to mobilize groups as varied as rural landlords and farmers, industrial workers, women, students, and
teachers. The RSS formed the VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council) to mobilize Hindu religious leaders as well as their patrons and followers. The RSS indoctrinates children and youth in its many
thousands of branches and affiliate schools. The RSS places its trained and indoctrinated personnel at all levels of government service and the judiciary, the media, police, and military. The RSS pursues its goal of
attaining state power using parliamentary means by placing RSS personnel in the Bharatiya Janata Party and using the movement to support BJP candidates in elections. And the RSS conducts its campaigns of
intimidation and violence through its affiliated militia organizations. Indeed, this steady proliferation of organizations makes it difficult to keep up with the euphemisms and acronyms for RSS affiliates and fronts.
The militant Hindu movement does not limit its tactics and tone to strident militancy or political violence. It is well versed in the strategies and statements favored by the world community of nations. Its
representatives are skillful in invoking the watchwords of democracy, human rights, and secularism. They are also shrewd in capitalizing on grave international issues such as Islamic terrorism and nuclear warfare.
And the RSS and its affiliates and front organizations operate and raise money outside of India.
The RSS stringently guards its position as the movement’s commanding organization. Like tentacles stretching
out from the head of an octopus, the RSS establishes subsidiaries to propagate its mission and message throughout Indian society. These organizations often operate as fronts for the RSS, with their links neither
publicized nor readily discernable. Frequently these links as well as the organizations’ activities and decision-making are shrouded in secrecy. Secretive tactics have long been a hallmark of RSS operations. Shortly
after Independence, a government report advised that the “RSS practices secret and violent methods which promote ‘fascism.’ No regard is paid to truthful means and constitutional methods.”[5]
The RSS calls
its movement and ideology Hindutva. It calls its family of organizations the Sangh Parivar. Scholars and other observers debate the terms that most accurately describe the movement in its historical and current
contexts. These terms include nationalist, militant, chauvinist, fascist, totalitarian, militarist, extremist, and fundamentalist.
Now that we have a basic idea of the form of the movement, I shall outline
the beliefs it propagates. The movement espouses Hindu supremacy. It inculcates hatred for Muslims and Christians whose presence in India is said to represent past conquest by foreign powers. It propagates belief in
the destiny of Hindus to control the Indian state and to make it Hindu. By achieving their manly and martial destiny, Hindus would finally avenge past foreign conquests by purging their holyland of non-Hindus. All
non-Hindus who remain in India would either have to become Hindu or live as inferiors with non-citizen status.
In 1922 the militant Hindu leader V.D. Savarkar outlined the principles that inspire the militant
Hindu movement in a book called Essentials of Hindutva. He stated that hatred of a common foe was the best way to foster national solidarity—and struggle against this enemy the necessary condition for cementing the
bonds of nationhood. Savarkar declared that the only legitimate sons of India are Hindu, for only they revere India as the land of their ancestors and as their sacred, holyland. By portraying Muslims and Christians
as foreigners to India and as descendents of past conquerors, he cast them as innately incapable of true patriotism. He called on Hindus to finally assert their manhood and avenge themselves against Muslims.
Savarkar’s tenets of Hindu supremacy and hatred for Muslims and other non-Hindu Indians were adopted by RSS leaders and are propagated by the Sangh Parivar today.
Savarkar likened Indian Muslims to Jews in
Nazi Germany, an image that is still favored by Sangh Parivar leaders. In a speech in 1938 he commended Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy, saying, “A Nation is formed by a majority living therein. What did the Jews do in
Germany? They being in the minority were driven out from Germany.”[6] In a public statement made in May 2002, the leader of the VHP evoked this image. He alluded to the Sangh Parivar’s recent campaign of terror that
killed more than one thousand Muslims and left another one-hundred thousand homeless in Gujarat, a state ruled by a BJP government with an RSS stalwart as its Chief Minister. The VHP leader said that the events in
Gujarat were “‘a matter of pride’” and that “‘Gujarat has shown us the way and our journey will begin and end on the same path.’”[7]
Militant Hindu leaders have long known that prosecution of their cause
requires organization and militarization. Savakar repeatedly roused audiences with the command, “Hinduise all politics and militarize all Hindudom.” For seventy-five years the RSS has remained resolute in pursuit
its goals. And it does not plan to stop at the borders of India: the Sangh Parivar frequently asserts that the destiny of Hindu India is to bring the entire South Asian subcontinent under its control and
domination.[8]
However, it would be unwise to regard the movement as undisciplined or adventurist. It carefully calculates the timing for its attacks and its retreats. The Ayodhya and Gujarat attacks were
undertaken when the Sangh Parivar was confident that its allies in the government and police would permit them and that the organizers and perpetrators of the crimes would not be brought to justice.
In June
2002, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom held a hearing in Washington on the events in Gujarat. The Hearing Chair stated the Commission’s concern about “reports which suggest that the
government of Gujarat and some members of the police force may have been implicated in the violence” and “that the communal violence was carefully planned.” She also referred to the Commission’s report of May 2001
that “expressed the need for India’s government to do more to protect religious minorities and to bring persons responsible for violent incidents to account.” And she pointed out that “the 2001 report states [the
Commission’s] serious concern about the association of increased violence against religious minorities and the rise in power of Hindu nationalist groups in India.”[9]
In considering the consequences of the
growing power of the militant Hindu movement, it is sobering, to say the least, not only to consider the nuclear weapons capability of India and Pakistan but also to consider the size and characteristics of India’s
population. There are now over 1 billion people in India.[10] More than one-third of Indians are too poor to afford an adequate diet. This one-third equals the total population of the United States plus 58 million
more people. Hundreds of millions of other Indians also live in conditions of daily hardship and absence of opportunity. It is in conditions such as these that the preachers of anger, blame, and hatred recruit
converts with promises of conquest and power. The movement also presents a benign face, offering social services such as food, health care, disaster and riot relief. And it rewards supporters with coveted
opportunities for education and employment.
The majority of India’s enormous population are not Sangh Parivar converts or supporters. This majority rejects the beliefs and violence of the militant Hindu
movement. A multitude of Indian organizations and individuals publicly condemn the lethal and anti-democratic agenda of the Sangh Parivar. This majority of Indians lack the centralized and well-funded structure of
the militant movement. It also faces a hostile climate in which national, state, and local officials deliberately defy their Constitutional duty to protect Indian citizens and uphold the rule of law. In formulating
foreign policy, we must ask what these conditions portend not only for India’s one-hundred and twenty-three million Muslims, twenty-three
million Christians, and forty million other non-Hindus.[11] We must also ask what they augur for the future of all Indians, for Indian democracy, for the South Asian subcontinent, and indeed, for the entire world community.
[1] Cited in M.J. Akbar, Nehru ( London: Viking, 1988), p. 580.
[2] M.S. Golwalkar, We, Or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939, p. 32. Cited in Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian
Politics (London: Hurst & Company, 1996), p. 56.
[3] L.K. Advani, “Atal Bihari Is Today’s Syama Prasad, Bharatiya Janata Party website, www.bjp.org/leader/manindia.html.
[4] Mariza Casolari,
“Hindutva’s Foreign Tie-up in the 1930s: Archival Evidence,” Economic and Political Weekly, January 22, 2000, p. 221.
[5] Casolari, p. 218.
[6] Casolari, p. 223.
[7] Statement by
International Acting President of the VHP, Ashok Singhal. Reported in Sukumar Muralidharan, “Contortions in Delhi,” Frontline, May 25-June 7, 2002. http://www.flonnet.com/fl1911/19111180.htm
[8] Aijaz
Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London: Verso, 2000), p. 174.
[9] Felice D. Gaer, “ Welcome and Introductory Remarks,” United States Commission on
International Religious Freedom Hearing: Recent Communal Violence in Gujarat, India, and the U.S. Response, June 10, 2002. www.uscif.gov/hearings/10Jun02/gaer_OpenRmks.php3.
[10]
All population figures are based on information in The World Factbook 2001, www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Lise McKean is Deputy Director at the Center for
Impact Research. Ms. McKean received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Sydney, M.A. from the University of Hawaii, and B.A. from the University of Chicago. Her book, Divine Enterprise: Gurus
and the Hindu Nationalist Movement is based on her research in India and published by the University of Chicago Press.
She has traveled to India many times to meet the Hindu extremist leaders. She has spent a lot of time with the Hindu religious leaders in Hindu pilgrimage centers. She also speaks fluent Hindi among other languages.
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