Why can’t there be just one simple, straightforward voice, one logical, well-understood narrative path with rules for what can and cannot be said, for Hindus in private and public?
In my new book Writing Across a Cracked World: Hindu Representation and the Logic of Narrative, I propose a simple conceptual framework for understanding the seemingly inexorable state of polarization in the discourse about Hindus and India today.
Rather than see it as a conflict between a “secular Left” and a “Hindu Right” as many academic commentators have typically viewed it (often aided unwittingly by many Hindu activists who call themselves “RW”), I propose that we view the field of competing narratives about Hindus, Hinduism, BJP, RSS and India in terms of a struggle between two largely oppositional but not inevitably hostile spaces.
On one side, we can identify a “narrative establishment” which consists mainly of academia and media, but also includes government and non-governmental institutions that produce influential narratives about what is presently happening in India. On the other side, we have an eclectic, growing, but diffuse “movement” consisting of concerned Hindus seeking better representation for themselves and for the realities they face on a global, national and local scale (for the uninitiated, I would define this concern at its most basic level as one of a shared recognition of slow cultural, territorial, political and at times even existential genocide at the hands of deliberate and elaborate programs for cultural and even physical extermination).
Seen in the terms of the establishment and a movement, we can perhaps better evaluate the successes (and failures) so far of the Hindu movement since what is probably its single biggest political expression since Independence (the 2014 mandate for Narendra Modi and the BJP). We can comment on the state of matters in the narrative establishment which at the very least has some duty to its professional ideals of representing truth and reality for its students, readers, viewers, consumers, citizens and so on.
Have journalists, writers, editors, academic experts on South Asia, film-makers, NGOs, activists, and even civil servants occupied with relevant duties represented what has been unfolding in India for many years, and especially since 2014, in terms of the lived realities of 80% of its citizens, with honesty and detachment, or, have they been largely pushing their own desperate theories and prejudices to unsuspecting audiences abroad and in India? On the other side, has the Hindu movement, particularly the part of it that was supposed to represent it politically following the mandate of 2014, been successful in self-representation, either by successfully constructing an alternative narrative establishment, or by pushing its voice (or its many diverse voices) into the already existing global professional narrative establishment?
The brief answer to both sets of questions is, unfortunately, no.
The establishment’s performance (especially academia and media) is quite familiar now to concerned Hindu readers perhaps to require too much elaboration. Prior to the election of 2014, and soon after Narendra Modi and the BJP’s powerful victory, most South Asia experts in South Asia and abroad did not show any adjustment of their long-held preconceived theories and claims about what India’s democratic expression at that time meant. They had long believed that Modi was a steely dictator from the RSS which was a fundamentalist-mythological-fascist organization with Hitlerian attitudes towards Muslims. I should add too here that this phrase is not an exaggeration. Virtually all the scholarly literature produced on South Asia since the 1980s holds this view, rarely permitting even the slightest acknowledgment even that the RSS is exemplified most accurately not by Hitler’s race stuff but simply by an ideal called “Integral Humanism,” a phrase which, as Koenraad Elst has noted, would weaken most of the currently espoused academic “expertise” on the RSS and Hindu revival more broadly).
An honest impulse in the establishment would have perhaps viewed 2014 as an opportunity to re-examine past assumptions and proceed with an open mind towards understanding the present. Since this did not quite seem to exist, a whole new storm-front of normative theories, catastrophic claims and mind-altering memes began to proliferate. Armed with confidence that it could dismiss the 2014 mandate as “70% of India rejecting Modi” and could also ignore the growing presence of OBC and Dalit representation in Sangh politics that defied the old “Brahmin-Bania” charges, it proposed a new theory of Dalit-Muslim-South Indian solidarity against dangerous Hindus (not just “sanghis” which would itself be somewhat inaccurate but the whole lot of Hindus, broadly).
The new campaign to restore a reality-damaged paradigm in the establishment began with the protests about “intolerance” rising in India in 2015. It went on to a shrill campaign of demonizing poor farmers as “cow terrorists” and has now hit a state of peak-alienation “new normal” at the present where, for example, the press describes anti-Khalistani counter-protestors in London not as simply “Indian protestors” but as “Modi supporters,” Krishna devotees celebrating Janmashtami as “Right Wingers,” Hindu deities as innately violent and misogynistic and so on. This far-out move has been sustained ideologically of course only at the cost of extreme ingenuity bordering on professional shamelessness such as silencing out news of competing realities to their claims such as the ghastly mutilation-murder of Hindu sadhus in a Uttar Pradesh temple recently by animal-abusers for simply complaining to authorities about their crimes (and speaking of shamelessness, who can forget the dozens of knavish headlines and illustrations we have seen these last few years evoking Hindu “sadhus” and “tantrics” in crime reports where the perpetrators were not even Hindu?)
The only slight concession to reality perhaps in the establishment’s discourse on India since 2014, and this is where things get tricky in terms of the movement’s (or at least its elected government’s) narrative game, is the alternate proposal occasionally floated by members of what is usually called the “Economic Right” in the establishment. This proposal holds that Modiji is actually a clean secular-governance exception to all the ghastly cultural fascist stuff the establishment has worried about since 1992 without a break, and that the 2014 campaign in the name of “Vikas” shows that the people of India voted for the “Vikas Modi” and not the “Hindutva Modi.”
On the face of it, it might be true that the BJP’s rhetoric has consistently been focused on “development” rather than anything remotely considered organic to its Hindu roots, and the Modi government has acted and spoken entirely within this framework these last four years. Even the RSS has largely spoken along what might be considered lines of “inclusiveness,” proposing to recast “Hindu” as a national rather than a cultural or religious category. (It remains to be seen if the “Muslims are also Hindus” notion will actually be accepted by Muslims. Given my training and sensibilities, I would be hesitant to impose such an idea on anyone, quite frankly).
Again, on the face of it, it would seem that a new harmony has been attained, where a new, inclusive narrative has been proposed by the ruling party and its associates, and this narrative has been validated by numerous election victories, and (they hope), will also be validated by a repeat victory for the BJP in 2019.
The concern though is whether this new narrative is sustainable given the way things have been set up by interests that wish to deny Hindu self-representation. I will not presume to predict an election, but as far as narratives, a topic in which I have some expertise goes, the Hindu movement cannot assume that political victories automatically imply narrative victories. Here are two reasons for my understanding that the BJP government, despite many other accomplishments no doubt, has been played into a corner as far as setting the narrative agenda for itself and the nation goes.
First, the establishment’s seemingly accepting economic Right has not shown any sign that it disagrees with its much wider and deeper institutional consensus on the evilness of not just Hindutva and Sangh but Hinduism and Hindus themselves. For the most part, think-tank platitudes (the West says “pundits” but I can’t demean our own cherished word thus) of the sort courted by the aspirational secular-right have rarely conceded to reality, preferring to sustain the illusion of Hindu complicity in crime and violence while occasionally complimenting the BJP on governance and economic issues perhaps. This occasional positive performance review from global observers about India being good for business still does not mean anything has really changed in the establishment’s story. This pro-business narrative has been running in these circles quite smoothly since 1991, and it does not mean the Hindu movement has been represented in it at all. In fact, it is my belief that even a sympathetic, non-Hinduphobic section of the establishment, spread across successive governments, has fallen into a trap on this account: they view the “business-friendly” image of the GoI as so important they retreat from contesting the toxic anti-Hindu propaganda being churned out by foreign fake news mills regularly lest the legendary foreign investors change their mind about how liberal India is becoming since the old “foreign hand” and “India-bashing” days; well, if these fake news mills continue, all your investment-seeking and consulate brochure displays abroad will mean nothing at all soon!
Second, the BJP, I believe, has failed to recognize that it represents a movement for Hindu survival and well-being first and last and that this mandate does not at all have to be viewed as a zero-sum game of favouring Hindus over others. This is a problem of imagination and narrative competency deficit, rather than intent entirely perhaps, but needs to be called out. I address this problem briefly in my new book too, and call it the challenge of the “split narrative,” where Hindus (and not just the BJP) are presently forced to navigate between one private narrative of Hindu pain that they have with friends and social media and a clumsy “secular” public narrative for mainstream, establishment contexts (which includes schools, offices, media, government, virtually everywhere outside).
As a result, Hindu grievances remain alive in the informal spaces of the movement but inevitably fail to find expression in the formal discourses of the establishment, even when a supposedly representative party is in power. The self-erasure in politics seems even more pronounced, confining the voice to occasional slips by junior politicians which then get trumpeted and distorted by hostile establishment media.
Why can’t there be just one simple, straightforward voice, one logical, well-understood narrative path with rules for what can and cannot be said, for Hindus in private and public?
We live in an age of universal acceptability for a discourse of human rights, especially for formerly-colonized, indigenous, people of colour – which are all labels that describe Hindus. As I write in my book, we should not be feeling embarrassed or hesitant to speak of our pain and our claims to justice, even as we have much to be proud of in our past and present, still.
The 2014 mandate was the moment for Hindus to say we have spoken; we believe in vikas for all, sure, but also in the story of our own pain and exclusion for virtually the whole of independent India’s life too, from temple control to textbook propaganda against us, and we insist that this story be told now. Yet, this has been somehow avoided as if it were an uncomfortable secret with no answers so it is best swept under the rug with a generic hope that generic Vikas will magically both win elections and save Hinduism.
I should share here that in May 2014 I wrote a piece on The Huffington Post titled “India vs Hinduphobia: What Narendra Modi’s Election Is Really About”, which was shared and liked more than 20,000 times. My premise was simple – that the “Vikas OR Hindu” split was false. Unfortunately, this line of thinking, although expressed by many writers and bloggers in the movement too, never really caught on in the party or the government.
Instead, it seems like they have quietly accepted the establishment’s junior narrative plank (that they are secular developmentalists no more). Moreover, some members of the BJP have gone on to take on a bit of a “civilizing mission” role with Hindus too, telling them not to celebrate their festivals, not immerse ashes in rivers, and so on.
From the narrative point of view, all of this does not augur well for the future of the BJP, Hindus, or India. The way the narrative field is set up now, even if the BJP does win for the next two decades, the programmatic extermination of Hindu life, thought, and sensibility that began with deliberate and diabolical elaboration between 2004-2014 will continue. There’s only so much that one can tighten donation laws and such and expect a deep-rooted cultural-intellectual belief system to change. The narrative itself has to be confronted and defeated, in every school, college, newsroom and studio.
What might the solution for all this be? My interest and expertise lie in words, meanings, and narratives, and I will, therefore, focus not on politics but only these. The problem at the moment, if we return to the “establishment-movement” framework I proposed, is that the Establishment has presently occupied a place of commanding advantage inside the “leadership arm” of the Movement, and perhaps even in the eyes of the many undecided “middle Hindus” who are genuinely confused by the vast media disinformation campaign they have been swamped with these last few years (and frequently get turned off by the Movement’s rhetoric when it gets too harsh and clumsy and loaded with self-defeating labels like “RW”).
The ideal situation needs to be the other way around, with the movement seizing a slice of ground in terms of credibility inside the narrative establishment. This ought to have happened in a big way since 2014, but we have had, quite frankly, a glaring lack of leadership in this regard.
For now, I have laid out in my book several suggestions for the movement, especially its many grassroots writers, activists, and researchers, on writing in a disciplined manner so as to occupy the narrow and quickly diminishing shared common space of intelligibility between the movement and the establishment, a space that is also where the large group of “middle Hindus,” who probably voted for BJP in 2014 but are confused by “intolerance” and “cow terrorism” now, are located.
But there is only so much that volunteers can do, especially when they are faced with the challenge not only of institutional hostility from a well-funded establishment but also with the burden of carrying on their shoulders a seemingly obdurate ruling elite that mistakes the repeated assembling of the bodies of the already converted in platitudinous gatherings for actually “changing the narrative.” This world, of the “saving Hinduism cottage industry,” is so inward-looking that after every attack on it from the rabid Hinduphobes of the establishment, it chooses not to counter them but retreat into an ever-tighter huddle of self-praise. And to think it is doing this even after an incredible and majestic democratic victory that shook the world’s expectations in 2014 is one of India’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
What Hindus have lost with their leadership’s narrative retreat since 2014 though is alarming but not yet catastrophic. However, a sharp and strong course correction is now absolutely necessary. Unless the movement’s leaders and political representatives turn away from their innately inward-looking communication habits and learn to face and to speak boldly to the establishment, we are heading for a most horrible and avoidable spell of rapid and ruthless cultural loss in the years ahead. That would be catastrophic.
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