Swapan Dasgupta - Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right

In 1991, The Economist report on Indias general election was curiously entitled The winner came second. The reference was to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which emerged as the main opposition to the Congress after a spirited campaign that centred on the demand to build a temple at the birthplace of Lord Ramthe central figure of the Hindu epic Ramayanaon the site of a sixteenth-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya. It was the Ayodhya campaign that set the terms of a political discourse that has persisted in one form or another till today.

Ostensibly, the demand was for a grand temple to be built on a site where an ancient Hindu temple had apparently once been demolished by invaders. In reality, the temple movement was a metaphor for larger questions on Indian nationhood, questions that had only been partially resolved after Independence in 1947. It is not that these issues hadnt been addressed earlier, during the struggle for freedom from British rule. The Ayodhya movement, invoking the historicity and sacredness of Lord Ram, rekindled some of those debates and, more importantly, gave them a popular connect.

The 1991 general election, preceded by a spectacular mobilization in northern and western India, was Hindu nationalismhitherto considered a relatively marginal phenomenon in Indian politicscoming of age. On 6 December 1992, the disputed Babri Masjid was razed to the ground by a huge gathering that perceived the shrine as a symbol of national humiliation and shame. It was one of the defining moments of post-Independence India.

The emergence of the BJP was much more than an ordinary electoral phenomenon: it forced Indians to choose between two contrasting views of nationhood. On one hand, there were those who saw modern India in terms of secular republicanism, while on the other, those who sought to blend technological modernity with the countrys Hindu inheritance. The BJPs rise, and the debates that accompanied the phenomenon, anticipated many of the concerns that find reflection today in the United States and Europe.

The rise of Hindu nationalism was also a profound intellectual challenge to the loose left-liberal consensus that had prevailed in India since Jawaharlal Nehru became prime minister in 1947. In 2014, after Narendra Modi won for the BJP a majority on its own, the challenge became sharper as large sections of the old establishment lost their pre-eminence and positions of authority. Consequently, there were accusations that the face of India was being changed unrecognizably by an assertive Hindutva movement.

Since the Ayodhya movement began, both the idea of Hindutva and the political character of the BJP have been scrutinized by scholars, usually with scepticism and even outright hostility. Consequently, there has been an inclination to view Indias right-wing politics as either a variant of fascism or merely a collection of sectarian prejudices. The centres of intellectual powernotably academia and the mediahave been particularly hostile to the BJP and those identified with it, an opposition that varies between condescension and shrill disavowal.

The inspiration for the right in India has come from multiple and, often, contradictory sources. The proprietorship of Hindutva does not, for instance, belong to Veer Savarkar, although his contribution is seminal. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) too deserves serious attention, not merely for the influence it exercises on the BJP leadership, but for its approach to the larger question of national regeneration. Equally important is the influence of individuals such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, not to mention the Arya Samaj movement.