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Hindutva is Elst-where
http://www.dailypioneer.com/secon2.asp?cat=\opd1&d=Oped
According
to a body of opinion, the handling of the KN Govindacharya affair by the RSS
last week was symptomatic of a malaise that afflicts the Sangh parivar. True, a
cadre-based political formulation demands that an individual be subservient to
the organisation, but when this "cardinal principle" becomes
overbearing to the extent that any voice of dissent is treated as rebellion, it
must give rise to the larger questions: For instance, is there something
fundamentally wrong with the ideology which claims to be the
"inheritor" of this 5000-year-old civilisational ethos? Is
"accountability" a non-issue for the political party which discovers
its ideological moorings only on the eve of an election?
This
"conflict of interests" (party versus government) has been captured by
Koenraad Elst in his various works, beginning with his first book on the Ayodhya
debate (Ram Janmabhoomi vs Babri Masjid, Voice of India, 1990). Elst, a Ph D
from the University of Leuven in Belgium, recently came out with his "Decolonising
the Hindu Mind". Predictably, with Elst's passionate advocacy of the Mandir
cause, the RSS tried to portray him as "one of us". For Elst, however,
disillusionment soon set in, and he blasted the RSS-BJP for abandoning the
"cause" (read, the Mandir plank) in a three-part article in the now
defunct The Observer of Business and Politics. In this interview, he tells Suman
K Jha that the RSS is caught in a time warp: "While Hindu mobilisation is
going on everywhere, the RSS cannot see beyond its shakhas".
Q: It's
frequently heard that the debate-dialogue-dissent culture has been the biggest
victim with the advent of the BJP as the pre-eminent political force in the
country. It's more pronounced in the post-September 11 phase. Do you agree? And,
is the situation here any different from the one prevailing in the West?
A: In India, as in the West, confusion reigns in the form of superficial
relativism, that is the assumption that contradictory truth claims can be
equally valid. In India, they call it secularism; in the West, it goes by the
name of multiculturalism, but either way it amounts to crass superficialism and
a refusal to evaluate competing ideologies and religions in accordance with
facts and logic. Hence, for example, the sour reactions
by Indian secularists to VS Naipaul's dismissal of Islam as an imposition which
estranges nations from their own heritage. Hence also the shrill condemnation of
Silvio Berlusconi's claim that European civilisation is superior to Islam.
That view is shared by over 90 per cent of the Europeans but not by the
chattering classes. I readily concede that a lot is wrong with European
civilisation, as also with Hinduism, but in comparative perspective, I think
Islam comes out even worse. Just look how many Muslims settle in Europe and
prefer to practice their Islam in the fairly free atmosphere of modern
democracies rather than under dictatorships in their homelands.
Q: My question however remains whether you agree with the view that the space
for dissent has only decreased ever since the BJP came to power. The BJP-led
Government's handling of the recent History textbooks controversy, for instance,
amply proves this, according to its critics...
A: I don't have the impression that the BJP's coming to power has made much of a
difference. Earlier, you had schoolbooks denying historical facts that Tipu
Sultan forcibly converted thousands of Hindus. Now, you may get textbooks
denying that the Vedic Rishis ate beef. Apart from that, not much has changed.
In the media, and academia, Hindutva is still in the opposition. True, under the
market system, dissent is marginalised, ridiculed, suffocated financially, or
rendered ineffective in other subtle ways, but I prefer all that to being
murdered or imprisoned in a Gulag camp. And if you want to know whether Hindutva
poses a threat to freedom comparable to Communism, I don't think so.
Q: Let's put it this way. Going by your own thesis, why has this "Hindu
civilisation" failed to produce scholars/intellectuals who respect the
tradition of dialogue and accommodation? There is an impression that the RSS
volunteers, the self-proclaimed "torch-bearers of this civilisation",
are mostly inward-looking and even their "baudhik pramukhs" are found
wanting as far as intellectual rigour is concerned. No wonder, we fail to
produce an Edward Said, a Noam Chomsky or even a Huntington!
A: The Indians need not be so modest. Allow me, as an
outsider, to have a higher opinion of India's intellectual performance.
Huntington's notion of a "Clash of Civilisations" was already used by
Girilal Jain, who died the year before Huntington gained fame. Have you ever
cared to read the works of the late Ram Swarup? He was soft-spoken and avoided
hurtful language, yet his observations on the deeper issues underlying the
communal problems in India were razor-sharp. The RSS reduces everything to the
typical nationalist discourse of "the Motherland vs the anti-national
forces". But there is more to Hindu revivalism than that.
And I would trade Edward Said's books any time for those of your own Arun
Shourie. Said's "Orientalism" wrongly
dismisses criticism of Islam as a colonial ploy. In Belgium alone, there are
plenty of Christian refugees from Turkey and Lebanon, and they know who chased
them out. Said, however, has become the leading apologist for Islam in the West.
It is, however, true that the RSS has failed to produce great minds. But then
that may not be the job of a mass organisation. On the other hand, it is indeed
a glaring failure of the RSS that it never produced a serious analysis of the
very problems which led to its creation, apart from some sweeping nationalist
slogans about "anti-national forces". This has to do with a choice
made by KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar against intellectual activity and in favour
of mindless activism. But this mistaken party-line of the RSS matters less and
less, because there is more and more Hindu self-organisation outside the Sangh
Parivar framework. The "shakha" gatherings are becoming obsolete as a
form of mobilisation. Hindu civilisation has always functioned in a
decentralised manner, and now the "Hindu awakening" (announced so
often at RSS fora) is taking place through informal networks, for example, the
internet. The movement is reverting to decentralised forms of mobilisation,
after the RSS interregnum of boy scout-type uniformity and centralism.
Q: Lastly, if you noticed last month, the reception to someone like Noam Chomsky
here is to be seen to be believed. How do you explain this? It was only the
BJP's youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, which saw in him a
"threat" and tried to disrupt his public engagements...
A: I don't think Indian society is indifferent to debate. But while I have great
sympathy for Chomsky, I don't think the warm reception he usually gets in India
is the result of India's "debate-mindedness". Rather, his positions
only reinforce the opinions of his hosts. Today, for instance, most Indians are
very critical of the crude and mindless manner in which the Americans are
conducting their so-called campaign against terrorism, and they are happy to
recognise in Chomsky an American who thinks likewise. My impression is that he
tends to see the world through the glasses which his hosts have selected for
him, for example, by adopting the Indian Communist view of Hindu revivalism
without getting to know it first-hand. We cannot study everything first-hand, so
often we rely on the authority of contact persons whom we trust. That is
perfectly understandable in the case of a non-specialist like Chomsky, who
earned his laurels in other fields. More problematic is that the same reliance
on biased Indian sources is found in the works of people who pass as experts on
Hindu revivalism. Most of them don't really know what they are talking about.
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