A-Infos (en) India's New Rulers Enter with a Whiff of Fascism

[Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>]

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       INDIA'S NEW RULERS ENTER WITH A WHIFF OF FASCISM
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     THE INDEPENDENT
     SUNDAY, 22 MARCH 1998
     http://www.independent.co.uk/sindy/stories/B2203806.html
 
     The BJP nationalists' victory has made little stir, writes
     Peter Popham. But the world may soon have reason to take
     notice 
 
     INDIA'S new government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), was sworn in at the presidential palace in Delhi last
Thursday. The world received the news calmly.
 
     True, the BJP was untested in government - its only previous
stint, in 1996, had lasted less than a fortnight; and 14 years
ago, when it had only two seats in parliament, it was considered
an extreme nationalist body. But diplomats assured their
governments that there was little to fear. A bit of stable,
purposeful government might do India a power of good. Tony Blair
was among the first to offer the new Prime Minister, Atal Behari
Vajpayee, his congratulations.
 
     But imagine you are reading this a week from now, and the
Indian Cabinet has invoked article 352 of the constitution,
declaring a state of emergency. Freedom of expression and of
travel have been suspended. Articles 22 and 23, protecting
citizens against arrest and forced labour, have been put in
abeyance; freedom of religion and protection of minorities have
been removed. Using article 353, the government has begun making
laws by decree. The world awakes to find, 50 years after India's
independence, that the world's biggest democracy is turning into
a dictatorship.
 
     This scenario was advanced recently by Abheek Barman, a
columnist in Delhi's Economic Times. The Nazis' rise to power in
Germany had been just as rapid as the BJP's in India, he pointed
out, and in the election of March 1933, after which Hitler
scrapped the constitution and assumed dictatorial powers, the
National Socialists had gained less than 44 per cent of the vote.
A fragile minority government with an extremist programme had
converted itself into a position of strength and permanence by
the simplest, most brutal means. What was to stop India from
going down the same road?
 
     No one in Delhi believes this is going to happen. The
government, propped up by 21 partners, is probably far too weak
to attempt anything so drastic. In any case, people say, that's
not the way India does things: Indira Gandhi's Emergency in the
mid-1970s was a nasty flash in the pan. Besides, India is not
engulfed by the sort of crisis that swallowed the Weimar
Republic. India's situation is, as usual, in the old formulation,
"disastrous but not serious".
 
     But reassuring words like this should not blind one to the
fact that, with the arrival of a nationalist government, India is
entering uncharted, ominous waters.
 
     The BJP is not a party like other parties. It is the
political wing of a paramilitary organisation founded 73 years
ago called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Association of
National Volunteers) or RSS, which on its website (www.rss.org)
describes itself as "the Fountainhead of National Renaissance."
 
     The RSS is temptingly easy to dismiss as a joke. This is
mainly because, kitted out in long baggy khaki shorts and
wielding bamboo swagger sticks, they look less like Nazis than
overgrown boy scouts. More precisely they look like colonial
policemen, an effect enhanced by the balding, silvery pates and
neat moustaches of senior RSS figures such as LK Advani, Minister
of Home Affairs in the new government.
 
     But the RSS takes itself very seriously. Its growth during
the last decades of British rule was an attempt to do for the
Hindus what Mussolini and Hitler were doing for Italy and
Germany: evoke a vanished golden age of national strength and
purity; create solidarity by identifying and stigmatising
national enemies; and lay the basis for a takeover of the state
by creating a corps of dedicated, paramilitary zealots.
 
     "There was a time when our country was free and prosperous
and had attained commanding heights in every walk of life," the
RSS's website declares. "And yet it found itself defeated and
disgraced at the hands of a handful of foreign invaders. The
lesson was clear as daylight. Several grave defects had crept
into our national being, and corroded our internal strength."
 
     The abiding obsession has been "the Muslim Problem": what to
do about the 11 per cent of India's population who owed
allegiance not to Lord Rama but to Mecca. Madhav Gowalkar, the
early RSS leader still known simply as "guru", took Hitler's
attitude to his own "semitic" problem as his inspiration. "To
keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked
the world by the purging of its semitic race, the Jews," he wrote
in We, or Our Nationhood Defined. 
 
     "National pride at its highest has been manifested there.
Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races
and cultures having differences going to the root to be
assimilated. The non-Hindu people in Hindustan [India] must learn
to revere the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the
glorification of the Hindu nation. They must cease to be
foreigners or may stay in the country only subordinated to the
Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving nothing."
 
     We, or Our Nationhood Defined, became an embarrassment after
the Nazis' defeat, and has long been out of print. The core
beliefs of the RSS, however, have been consistent down the years.
Muslims and other minorities are still the obsession. The most
resonant item in the BJP's programme, dropped from the National
Agenda on the insistence of its allies, remains the building of a
grandiose Hindu temple in Ayodhya, the imagined birthplace of
Lord Rama, on the site of the mosque destroyed by Hindu fanatics
in December 1992. If the BJP-led government does nothing to
advance the project, the ranks will become mutinous.
 
     More worrying are the sort of activities that have already
started happening on the periphery. The RSS website speaks of
"the catastrophic implications of [religious] conversion and the
resultant swelling of the non-Hindu population"; activists have
intimidated Christian missionaries and converts, seeking to bully
converted tribespeople into renouncing their faith. Earlier this
month, a four-day prayer meeting in Gujarat had to be abandoned
on the first day after Hindu activists set a car alight and
pelted worshippers with stones.
 
     Bullying of this sort will become more common now the BJP is
ensconced at the centre. Courts will wink at "patriotic"
infringements. An increasingly BJP-friendly media will hold its
nose and look the other way. And India, rightly renowned for its
diversity and tolerance, will become a little meaner, a little
crueller. And that's the best we can expect.
 
     Copyright 1998 Newspaper Publishing PLC
 
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