Achin Vanaik - The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities

It was in 1997 that I first undertook a book-length study of what I then called the communal phoenix that was rising to cast its shadow over Indias body politic. If, between 1947 and 1990, the advance of political Hindutva (roughly Hinduness) had been relatively slow, although accelerating from the mid 1980s, it was in the 1990s following the Ram Janmabhoomi, or Ram Temple movement (the single greatest mass mobilization since the era of the independence struggle), culminating in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in the town of Ayodhya in December 1992 that the transformative power of Hindu communal forces in India really became apparent. This event focused the minds of many Indian intellectuals and activists committed to the preservation and promotion of secularism, and I noted with approval in The Furies of Indian Communalism (henceforward; Furies) that, as a result, the work of many Indian intellectuals had helped raise the quality of the general debate on secularism above existing theoretical and political levels, even worldwide.

Some two-and-a-half decades later, what do we find? Between 1998 to 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the electoralpolitical wing of the collective cohort of Hindu nationalist forces called the Sangh Parivar (Family) became the hub of the coalition governments that ruled in Delhi. The BJP had become a normalized and respectable political force governing either on its own or in alliances within several Indian states. While the trajectory of the Congress has moved from single-party dominance at the centre to requiring alliances to form the national government, finally reaching its nadir so far in the 2014 general elections, the trajectory of the BJP has been the reverse from alliance partnerships to single-party majority rule and it has replaced the Congress as the biggest national-level political force. This electoral rise both in the provinces and at the centre is part of a wider culturalideological advance, and of a deeper implantation in the countrys structures and institutions.

This political journey of the Sangh Parivar must cause a retrospective reassessment of the secular claims that have often been made for India, in relation to the nature of both the state and society. In Furies, I wrote that

even among those concerned to defend secularism, secularization and the secular, the focus of attention has been mostly on the character, practice and ideal of the secular state, on its laws and its affirming ideology. Much less has been written about the secularization of Indian civil society its advances and retreats, its possibilities and obstacles, its desirability or undesirability. That there is a secularization process going on in the background is generally conceded, but it is the secularity of the state and the ideology of secularism that have been foregrounded in most intellectual discussion. It is generally here that theoretical advances and new insights have been provided.