Why is the BJP so keen on appropriating icons from outside its Hindutva fold?

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First published on Scroll.

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao was a man of versatile talents. An effective chief minister, he is also known for being the first Indian prime minister who was not a native Hindi-speaker – a somewhat patronising fact to remember him by, given that he was a polyglot who knew 17 languages, including Hindi.

Eleven years after this death, he still has the political classes chattering: the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is building a memorial to Rao in Delhi. So keen is it on achieving this that work was rushed to inaugurate the memorial on Rao’s 94th birth anniversary on Sunday.

The BJP’s move to remember Rao stands in stark contrast to the Congress’s attitude towards his memory. Although a Congressman for life, Rao was dumped rather hastily. His fall from grace was so complete that the Congress even forced his family to perform his last rites in Hyderabad and not in Delhi, lest the attention took away some of the spotlight from the Nehru-Gandhi clan.

Rao isn’t the only estranged Congressman that the BJP wants to commemorate. Last Wednesday, the Narendra Modi government approved plans for a national memorial at the birthplace of Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar. And then of course, there is the continued appropriation of Vallabhbhai Patel and Subhash Chandra Bose.

Searching for icons

Why is the BJP, the largest party in Parliament, and Narendra Modi so keen on appropriating non-BJP icons? The party claims to be feting Rao for instituting liberalisation. But to be consistent with the rationale, will the party also praise Manmohan Singh given that his contribution was also integral to the process? Seems unlikely.

It is also unlikely that Jayaprakash Narayan, the socialist leader the BJP is commemorating, would take too well to celebrations of liberalisation. It is also ironical that Modi is celebrating JP’s fight against over-centralisation of power in the person of the prime minister.

Platitudes aside, the core issue is quite simple. The BJP might be facing a surfeit of electoral riches now but its political legacy is shallow and weak. There is no historical depth in the Bharaiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh combine that now dominates Indian politics. On the one hand, this is a great story of a meteoric rise. But, on the other, lack of a historical narrative can be a serious handicap to building a strong foundation for power.

A long history of nothing

To be sure, the BJP-RSS aren’t new organisations. The RSS was founded in 1925 and will celebrate its 90th anniversary in September. The RSS’ political arm, the BJP, is no spring chicken either. It was founded in 1951, making it a venerable 64 years old.

The issue isn’t age – it’s impact. The BJP as a political formation might have existed for a great many years, but for most of that time, it’s been a marginal player in Indian politics with no influence and, consequently, no legacy.

In 1971, for example, the Jan Sangh only managed to win 7.35% of the votes polled. Added up, the vote share of the two Congress parties (the Congress-O and Indira Gandhi’s Congress) was more than seven times as much.

After that came the Emergency, the 40th anniversary of which is being so exuberantly marked by the BJP. The party today uses the event to claim its historical roots.

Did the Emergency birth the BJP?

This is understandable given that the BJP – or the wider Hindutva family – really has nothing to show for the Freedom Movement. Leaders such as Vinayak Savarkar and BJP founder SP Mookerkee, for example, opposed the Quit India movement and cooperated with the British Raj. This might have made tactical sense at the time and helped the Hindutva movement grow a bit but it really doesn’t make for a good historical narrative.

Thus, all the BJP has left is the Emergency and, for the past month or so, we’ve been treated to narratives about how seminal the BJP-RSS role was in this movement against Indira Gandhi’s despotism (expectedly, even Modi’s personal role in it has been lionised).

These narratives are effective and help the BJP carve out a distinct space for itself in India’s history. Narratives aside, however, the funny thing is that this supposedly heroic role of the BJP-RSS in upholding democracy during the Emergency helped it very little in actually getting any democratic support for itself.

After 1971, the next election the BJP fought alone was in 1984 (it fought the 1977 and ‘80 elections as part of the Janata Party, so there are no numbers to go on). Its vote share in ‘84 ? 7.74%. Sure, the numbers were up from 7.35% before the Emergency (1971 elections). But only by 0.39 or 5%. That’s it.

Its role in the Emergency that the BJP is most proud of today – that it considers its moment of political birth – seems to have had no effect on India’s voters. Post emergency, the BJP was as much of a minor player as it was before.

Ram’s role

So if not the Emergency, what actually gave birth to the party which now has a majority in the Lok Sabha? Let’s look at the numbers again.

In the 1991 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s vote share jumped to 20.11% : a near tripling of its 1984 number. In contrast, the BJP vote share in 2014 only increased by a little more than 50% since 1991. The 1991 inflexion point? The Ram Janmabhoomi agitation. The search for Ram’s birthplace generated a religious frenzy which also birthed the BJP as a serious contender to power.

Unfortunately, effective as they are at the ballot box, religious frenzies don’t make for terribly effective historical narratives. Until reminded by, say, a pesky Vishva Hindu Parishad functionary, the BJP wouldn’t mind forgetting this movement. And of course it seems to have no plans to build a temple as long as it is in a position of political strength.

Apart from that, however, there really isn’t much else of impact in the BJP’s rather uneventful history. So while the party has pushed its Hindutva leaders, given that they were political pygmies in their times, it has not been very effective. People such as SP Mookerjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya and Madan Mohan Malaviya might be committed Hindutva ideologues but they really don’t add any heft to the BJP today.

To compensate, the BJP desperately trawls around for anyone who isn’t a Congress favourite – a fairly easy task, it might be noted, since that includes almost anyone who isn’t a Nehru-Gandhi. Legacies of ex-Congressmen such as Vallabhbhai Patel, PV Narasimha Rao and Jayaprakash Narayan are seized hurriedly and even the square pegs of committed ideological opponents such as Marxist revolutionary Bhagat Singh are sought to be hammered into the round Hindutva holes of the BJP.

Given the BJP’s absolute lack of options, this is hardly a surprise and till now, in fact, the Modi government has done a fairly good job of icon appropriation. After all, if there’s one thing this government is good at, it’s communication. Even so, this complete invention of a historical narrative is no easy task and it remains to be seen, a few decades down the line, how well the BJP has performed at this task.

Interview with Pujari Laldas, priest of the Ram Janmbhoomi Temple

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This is a small excerpt from the interviews with Pujari Laldas, the priest of the Ram Janmbhoomi mandir which existed inside the Babri Masjid before it was demolished in 1992.

I never knew about this man and it came as eye-opener to me when I recently watched Anand Patwardhan's documentary on the movement to demolish the Babri Masjid. Laldas was murdered a few months after the demolition in some rather murky circumstances. He had not changed his views till the time of his assassination.

You can watch Ram ke Naam here [link]. It is invaluable historical resource which tells the story of probably the most important event of India's modern history. It is also, by the way, a really well made film. But of course, Patwardhan hardly needs me to back him up.

It's there on YouTube because there seems to be a de facto ban on screenings: an odd, one-off anachronism in these times of radical freedom of expression, it seems.

Madan Mohan Malaviya: how a four-time Congress president became a BJP icon

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Many of the Right’s pet issues today, from “reconversion” to the cementing of an aggressive Hindu political identity were initially championed by Malaviya in British India

The Bharat Ratna has always been a political award and this year was no different. The Modi government has conferred India’s highest civilian award on Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Madan Mohan Malaviya. Vajpayee was, of course, the first prime minster from the BJP and easily the party’s tallest leader. Born more than 150 years ago, Malaviya’s link with the BJP and its ideology is somewhat less know.

Madan Mohan Malaviya was born in Allahabad in a Brahmin family highly respected for its learning and knowledge of Hindu scriptures. Financial circumstances forced him to take up a job as an English teacher in a local school after graduating from his BA. From these humble beginnings, Malaviya was able to branch out into a somewhat bewildering number of fields and leave his mark on them.

He started his political career in 1886 with a widely appreciated address to the Indian National Congress session in Calcutta. Malaviya would go on to become one of the most powerful political leaders of his time, managing to be chosen Congress President on four occasions. Impressed by Malaviya’s 1886 address, an Awadh taluqadar, Raja Rampal Singh, offered the editorship of his Hindi newspaper, Hindustani to Malaviya. Later on, Malaviya would go on to rescue the Hindustan Times from financial ruin and launch its Hindi edition. He would serve as the Hindustan Times’ chairman for more than 20 years, building it up to be the foremost nationalist newspaper of its time.

Linguistic Politics

In spite of his achievements in politics and journalism, maybe Malaviya’s greatest impact lies in the sphere of language. The late 1800s saw mobilisation around the issue of Hindi and Urdu—till then, the courts and bureaucracy of the Raj used Urdu written in the Persian script as the official language. Malaviya submitted his famous Memorandum (“Court Character and Primary Education in North-Western Provinces and Oudh”) to the Lt Governor of what is now Uttar Pradesh. The Memorandum was masterfully framed and was one of the principal arguments which convinced the British Raj to pass an order in 1900 which permitted the use of Nagari characters alongside Persian in the courts of the North-Western Provinces.

While his overall achievements are obviously a factor, the primary reason this BJP government feels the need to honour Malaviya is of course his contribution to the Hindu nationalist cause. Malaviya was a staunch conservative both socially and politically. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur (Independent India’s first woman cabinet minister) writes that Malaviya “would never take food or drink from the hands of anybody other than a Brahmin of his own caste”. He set up a Hindu university in Banaras which along with “Aligarh Moslem University” would produce men “true to their God, their King and their country”. As the reference to the King shows, politically, Malaviya believed in constitutionalism and was one of the few major Congress leaders to oppose Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Carrying on with this strand of thought, the party Malaviya founded, the Hindu Mahasabha did not participate in the Quit India movement of 1942.

Malaviya’s position on the integration of Dalits in order to prevent their conversion to other religions, formed the basis of how the Hindu Right saw this issue and is played out till today in instances like the Shivpuri conversions and the fact that the Indian state takes away “scheduled caste” status from any person who converts away from Hinduism. Malaviya also played an important role in introducing the concept of “reconversion” to Hinduism, an issue which seems to be on the top of the Sangh Parivar’s agenda today. A fear of reduced Hindu numbers—a pet peeve of today’s Hindu Right—drove his thinking on “reconversion”.  Presiding over a Hindu Mahasabha convention in 1932, Malaviya argued: “When now we are so badly treated with a numerical strength of 22 crores, what would be our condition in future with a much reduced Hindu population, if we allow this rate of conversion from Hinduism and do not allow reconversion into Hinduism?”

Muscular Hinduism

Malaviya also championed a muscular Hindu identity which often jostled violently for space with urban India’s Muslim minority. In Allahabad, the annual Ram Lila procession was organised by the Malaviya family. In the fractious politics of North India, this procession would often trigger off communal violence, the immediate catalyst being music being played outside mosques. When the British demanded that the procession stop playing music whenever it passed outside a mosque, Malaviya refused, arguing that this would make it a “mourning procession, not a Ram Dal”. As a result, the British banned the Ram Lila procession in Allahabad and it was only resurrected in 1937 when a Congress government came to power in UP under the 1935 Government of India Act.

Organisationally, Malaviya also had a seminal role to play in the Hindu nationalist movement. He set up the Hindu Samaj in 1880 in reaction to what he thought were Christian missionary attempts to stop the annual Magh Mela. But of course, his biggest contribution was the setting up of the Hindu Mahasabha along with Lala Lajpat Rai in 1915. The Mahasabha was the largest Hindu nationalist party in British India. Mahasabha leaders such as Savarkar played a key role in crystallising Hindu nationalist thought and one of the party’s tallest leaders, Syama Prasad Mookerjee would go on to found the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the ruling BJP today.

Given how Malaviya contributed, both ideologically and organisationally, to the Hindu nationalist cause, it is not surprising that the BJP now seeks to honour him with a Bharat Ratna.

Why both Jinnah and the BJP Agree on the Congress’ “Pseudo-Secularism”

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One of the BJP’s most powerful political messages over the past 3 decades has been its critique of the Congress’ model of secularism, criticism that was, incidentally, first bought up more than 6 decades ago by Jinnah

Over the past 3 decades or so, the BJP has emerged as the Congress’ most formidable opponent, one that, if the “pundits” are to be believed, is going to reduce the Congress to tatters in the coming election.

As the Congress’ opposing party, however, the BJP’s differentiation on economic matters has been rather thin, even confusing. In practise both parties are mostly crony-capitalistic and even the BJP often indulges in the odd bit of protectionist rhetoric (such as its opposition to retail FDI) when it suits its electoral compulsions, much as the Congress does. A much sharper difference is perceived, though, on matters of culture, religion and identity. In fact, right from its establishment as a party of any relevance in the second half of the 80s, the BJP has consistently attacked the Congress’ brand of secularism best captured using Advani’s memorable coinage, “pseudo-secularism”.

Congress secularism, invented by Gandhi and secured in independent India by Nehru, is rather different from the European concept on which it is supposedly based. In the West, secularism means a separation of the Church and the State, a model which is redundant in India given that neither of India’s two major religions have anything like a centralised church in the first place. In India, the term has, therefore, come to mean a political ideology or party to which people of multiple religions subscribe. A good synonymous, if clunky, phrase would be, “multi-religious big tent”. So the Congress, which has supporters from all of India’s religions is “secular”. The SP, BSP, TMC, Left, supported by both Hindus and Muslims are all largely “secular”. The BJP, Akali Dal or Shiv Sena are, on the other hand, not “secular” given that their support base is mono-religious—which may explain why the 3 parties have steadfastly stuck together as part of the NDA since 1998, even as other “secular” parties have come and gone. This definition also explains why, uniquely in Indian English, the word “communal” (an otherwise harmless adjectival form of the word “community”) is used as an antonym for “secular”.

Taking up from where Advani left off, Modi has, throughout his 2014 campaign, kept up the heat on the Congress with respect to its practise of “secularism”, which it characterises as nothing but a charade. For example, when asked why he refused to wear headgear commonly associated with Muslims, Modi retorted saying, “I cannot fool people by posing for photographs wearing a cap” clearly taking a dig at the Congress (ironically, party president Rajnath Singh has been photographed in a dargah in full-blown “Muslim” attire, as he battles it out in Lucknow, showing that Congress Secularism is, maybe, hardier than Modi might think).

What is most interesting is that this is not the first time the Congress has been attacked for supposedly fooling people using secularism and utilising it for its narrow political purposes. The original critic of Congress Secularism, one whose denunciation significantly mirrors the BJP's own was, like the BJP PM candidate, also a Gujarati, but from Bombay: Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

While till the 30s, Jinnah had tried to work with the Congress, most of his overtures had been rebuffed. In the 40s, therefore, Jinnah built himself up as a Muslim politician, emphasising his position as a leader of the community and offering to work out a political compromise with the Congress on the basis of communal identity. Consequently, the Congress were now, in a mirror to his Muslim politics, painted as a “Hindu party”. In January, 1940, just two months before the Lahore Resolution, Jinnah wrote an article criticising the wholesale import of western political institutions into India (mirrored in many ways by the BJP's protestations at the import of secularism from Europe) and remarked that “two nations who both must share the governance of their common motherland” so that “India may take its place amongst the great nations of the world”. The implication, of course, being that he led one community or nation, the Muslims, and the Congress represented the other, the Hindus, rather than, as it claimed, all of India.

This position was, more or less, to define Jinnah’s politics for the next decade. And like Modi does now, it was now crucial to portray the Congress’ secularism as an attempt to “fool” people and try and repudiate the party’s claim to represent Muslims, since the League now sought to be the sole spokesman of the Indian Muslim.

Jinnah, thus, repeatedly cast the Congress as a “Hindu body” and Gandhi as a “Hindu leader”. The crux of this strategy can be seen in the trying year of 1946, as the Congress and League manoeuvred to form an interim government as per the June 16 statement of the Cabinet Mission. Of the many conditions Jinnah put for the League to join the government, none was more important to him that the League, as the “sole spokesman” of India’s Muslims, get to nominate all the Muslim members of the cabinet, a claim that the Congress, as a “secular party”, rejected. (In the end the Congress did not give in and the League was forced to join the government without any of its demands being met)

However, it must be asked, what makes this rather amazing coincidence work? Two parties, ostensibly at opposite ends of the spectrum, separated by 6 decades agreeing so closely on the issue of Congress secularism (or lack of it)—an unlikely concurrence if there ever was one.

The most obvious answer is that both the League and the BJP agree because the criticism is, to a large extent, valid. Pre-independence, while the Congress claimed to be “secular” and to, therefore, speak for Muslims, it did not really have any actual Muslim support after the Non-Cooperation/Khilafat movement of 1920. By the time the Congress decided to launch the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930), it had few Muslims backers and the action was seen as a “a movement in which the Muslims were not likely to figure prominently” (Prelude to Partition, David Page). Given this lack of cross-communal participation, both the Civil Disobedience Movement and, later on, the Quit India movement often triggered off widespread rioting, further alienating Muslims from the Congress.  As a result of this, the Congress rarely won seats reserved for Muslims; in fact its prospects were so poor that it mostly didn’t even bother to contest. For example, in the 1937 provincial elections in UP, the Congress only contested 9 out of 66 Muslim seats and lost all. In Bombay state it contested only 2 out of 30 and, again, lost both. This, remember, was without even any “Pakistan” issue in the fray. In 1946, its results were even poorer: for the central legislature, the Congress failed to win a single Muslim seat and attracted a mere 1.3% of the Muslim vote. To quote former BJP leader, Jaswant Singh from his book “Jinnah”:

“This was really spurious reasoning, simply because the party called itself secular, therefore it was national and because of this self-adopted nomenclature of national, it was automatically representative of all Indians, regardless of what the election results demonstrated does not carry any conviction. The idea of ‘secularism’, just the idea not the fact, thereafter became more important than any empirical reality.”

It is using this exact same handle that the BJP now attacks the Congress: of using “just the idea not the fact” of secularism. In 1995, therefore, Advani argued that "secularism is only a euphemism for vote-bank politics. They are not concerned with the welfare of the so-called minorities. Their only interest is: the minority vote", a point that is difficult to disagree with.

However, while both Jinnah and the BJP might have identified legitimate flaws in the Congress model, both failed in proposing valid alternatives as well. The League's “poisonous Two-Nation Theory” (an uncharacteristically strong phrase used by Noorani) was a signal disaster both for Hindu-Muslim relations (pre and post 1947) as well as Jinnah's own political plans of using it as a ”bargaining counter" in order to get a greater share of power. In the end, the Congress rejected attempts such as the Cabinet Mission statement of 16 May 1946 which would share power within a united India and Jinnah was forced to accept Partition based on a plan drawn up by the Congress.

The BJP, on the other hand, in order to counter the Congress’ secularism went entirely in the opposite direction and looked directly to theology as a political stepping stone. Its rise to prominence was driven by the somewhat otherworldly question of the exact birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram. In its stronghold, Gujarat, the growth of the BJP has been especially disastrous for the minorities. Given the 2002 Pogrom as well as totalitarian laws such as the Disturbed Areas Act (enacted in its current form by the Modi government in 2009 making religious segregation official government policy) and the Freedom of Religion Act (makes the personal act of religious conversion contingent on permission from the government) it seems, even in the case of the BJP, the cure is worse than the disease.

The one difference between the two, though, is that the Muslim League opposed the Congress from a position of weakness and, as mentioned earlier, in the end had to accept a Congress-British settlement in which it has little say. The BJP, the way things are going, actually looks to now become more powerful than the Congress and seems in no mood for any compromise. The Grand Old Party had successfully fought off the challenge to its model of secularism in 1947. Chances of an encore, though, do look rather slim.

First published on NewsYaps