Liberals beware: Modi govt is Sangh’s stepping stone to social, cultural domination

The RSS has never had it so good since its inception in 1925.

It has a government that is dominated by the BJP at the Centre. At least half of the council of ministers in the Modi regime have either emerged from the Sangh or are its supporters. And unlike another Sangh originate and former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee—considered a moderate among hardliners–Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seen as an unadulterated embodiment of all that the Sangh stands for.

Could the Sangh ask for more?

Yes it can—and it does. And there are at least three reasons why it feels it should.

The first, of course, was identified by VHP leader Ashok Singhal when he told the World Hindu Congress recently that the Narendra Modi government was the first Hindu government leading the country in 800 years. “Eight hundred years after it (power in Delhi) went away from Prithviraj Chauhan, it did not come back into the hands of a proud Hindu. It has happened after 800 years,” Singhal said.

Having achieved what many considered to be an impossible feat even until a few months back, there is no way the RSS will sit back and watch from the sidelines. Indeed, unlike previous occasions when after installing a BJP/BJP-led government, the Sangh would return to its cloistered existence, the RSS for the first time, is expected to go the whole hog to back the Modi-fied government and BJP in every election hereafter.

And this is where the second factor kicks in.

Come 2015 and the RSS will enter the nervous 90s. Formed by HD Hedgewar in 1925, the Sangh will celebrate its 100th birthday a decade hence. And the RSS will go all out to ensure that the BJP remains at the helm till then. Clearly, it does not want the Congress to be the only organisation to celebrate its century while holding power at the Centre. The Congress celebrated its 100th year anniversary in 1985.

Effectively, this means, that unlike previous occasions, the RSS is likely to throw its entire weight behind the BJP in the 2019 and 2024 general elections as well as in the assembly polls, including the upcoming ones in Bihar (2015), West Bengal and Tamil Nadu (2016) and UP (2017).

Recall Bhagwat’s threat to the ruling JD-U and the Trinamool Congress in Bihar and West Bengal when, in another first, his Vijayadashmi speech was aired live on national television. By flagging the issue of infiltration in these two states and of jihadi terror in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Bhagwat signaled the RSS’s intent to take this up aggressively in the coming days. Indeed, he is set to address a public rally in Kolkata in December.

Presently, with 282 MPs of its own the BJP is effectively in power at the Centre. And although technically in a coalition, the party rules in more than half a dozen states including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, is in partnership in states like Punjab, hopes to do well in the ongoing J&K and Jharkhand polls, and also has high hopes for West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in 2016 and Bihar and UP in 2015 and 2017.

The party and the Sangh intend to establish and consolidate their pan-India presence by reaching out to areas and populations hitherto out of its reach.

Here lies the third significant driving force: once the BJP holds political power, it will become easier for the Sangh and its innumerable affiliates to increase and tighten their hold on the cultural and social spaces and replace the left-liberal narrative that has dominated post-Independent India with one that is in line with its own ideology, thinking and vision for the country.

Already, there is evidence of what the installation of the Modi government means vis a vis the impact of Sangh ideology on the socio-politico-cultural aspects of the country, especially where it comes into conflict with the left-liberal view with regard to India’s rich and multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and plural identity.

This face-off is set to intensify as the Modi government entrenches itself and the RSS increases its visibility, seeks to change mindsets and dictate the form and content of public discourse.

The RSS would be doubly impressed with Modi because unlike BJP leaders who see Hindutva as a distinct and separate driving force, Modi seeks to dovetail it to good governance, inclusive growth and development and establish a synonymity between the two.

He blends his image of being a hardliner and a poster boy of Hindutva with that of a tech savvy, modern, development-oriented icon of a changing India to give the RSS and the BJP a big boost so that the middle class and even a section of the intelligentsia which once found it fashionable to be Left or left of centre now pride itself in pushing a rightist philosophy. The fact that he has made a mark for himself and the country on the world stage has only enhanced his appeal with them—and thereby of the organizations he comes from.

“The new government is not even six months old but there are positive signs from time to time which gives us hope about emergence of Bharat on the international horizon…,’’applauded Bhagwat.

There is little doubt that the BJP’s rise to power at the Centre is beginning to alter the composition and character of institutions. If the Congress appointed its own leaders, supporters and sympathizers in key posts in various government bodies, the BJP is following suit.

It has installed its own leaders in the Raj Bhavans, chosen its own envoys when required and put in its own supporters in political, administrative and cultural institutes that impact political, social and cultural policies.

Perhaps the single most important constitutional post that the BJP-RSS is now eyeing is that of the President of India for which a vacancy will come up when incumbent Pranab Mukherjee completes his five year term in 2017.

All this is taken as given and accepted when there is a change of guard.

But unlike previous regime changes, this time there is also a shift in ideology that had brought the Sanghis, as they are referred to, in confrontation with the liberals and leftists.

This faceoff centres around two ideological issues:

one, the exclusivist-inclusivist agenda and the we-they syndrome in which the liberals accuse the Hindutva forces of treating the muslims and Christians in particular as outside the Indian identity; and two, the liberals’ accusation that the Hindutva forces don’t see India as a plural society, but as a single Hindu entity with its own traditions, institutions and world view in which anything foreign, alien or western smacks of blasphemy.

Given the chasm between the two ideologies, many liberals have begun to think that they—and not the minorities—are now the prime targets of the saffron forces and its multiple clones who have begun to display an increasing intolerance towards those who had dismissed them with disdain.

One manifestation of this battle is the growing attempt at moral and cultural policing by the mushrooming brigade of disparate Hindutva forces which brand anything that smacks of westernization or even scientific temper as corrosive.

The rise of the BJP has seen right wing Hindu fundamentalists brand a Hindu-Muslim marriage as ‘love jihad’, launch an attack against wearing bikinis on the beach, denounce the celebration of Valentine’s Day, Christmas or New Year’s Day, criticize celebrating of birthdays with cakes and candles, attack girls visiting pubs, call for identity cards to screen out muslims from navratra celebrations and slam the use of English.

Instead, zealots seek to promote the `Hindu’ agenda both in daily lives as well as in education and other spheres.

Much like what happened when Murli Manohar Joshi was the HRD minister in the Vajpayee government, education has become a battleground of the saffron forces and the liberals. The rise of octogenarian Dinanath Batra, a retired schoolteacher who campaigned for a ban on a book on Hinduism by US Indologist Wendy Doniger, is not a one-off incident.

The former general secretary of RSS run Vidya Bharati schools and founder of educational activist organizations like Shiksha Bachao Andolan has often created a furore for filing PILs that seek a revision/removal of content, including AK Ramanujam’s essay from Delhi University’s history syllabus.

He has now begun to play a critical role in ‘Indianising’ the education system in BJP-ruled states like Haryana and Gujarat (where six of his books, trashed by experts and historians like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, are part of the curriculum).

Similarly, the appointment of Professor Y Sudershan Rao as the head of the Indian Council of Historical Research was slammed by critics who did not consider him a professional historian but as someone who focuses on the ‘historicity’ of Indian epics.

HRD Minister Smriti Irani herself has been caught in the controversy over German vs Sanskrit language teaching in schools which have turned into a diplomatic tangle as well.

In keeping with the Sangh tradition of speaking in multiple voices, MoS in the PMO Jitendra Singh began his ministerial innings by talking about abrogating Article 370 which grants special status to J&K. There are also intermittent demands for the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya, the BJP’s core issue which polarizes society along religious lines.

And this is just the beginning. With another five years to go, these voices are likely to get louder and increasingly raucous as they try to edge out those who have held sway until now and strive to channel all discourse in a unilinear direction.