Beyond Binaries | BJP Foundation Day: Why our academia failed to read enduring success of BJP

But the obsession with neat, foundational, texts to understand Hindutva wasn’t given up. Hindutva was sought to be understood as a monolith; as an imitation of Semitic religions and the colonial state, and as an imitation of Nazism and fascism on bases that were too thin to be considered credible.

Savarkar and Golwalkar were ideologues of Hindutva’s infancy. In their days, the Congress was the party of Hindus and only small urban sections among Hindus took the Hindu Mahasabha or RSS or Jana Sangh seriously. There was no need for these ideologues to devise strategies to broaden their base. To see ideas that were constructed in the infancy of an ideological current as representative of its worldview when it has become hegemonic is to not know how to read politics.

Much scholarship was dedicated to condemnation rather than exploration of this ideological current. It was said that the RSS never took part in the freedom struggle while the Congress did. This was like saying that oranges are eaten but tennis balls aren’t. The fallacy: the stated purposes of the two organisations were different. The RSS was aimed at organising Hindus through shakhas while the Congress was aimed at being a platform for articulation and praxis of anti-colonial politics.

The RSS has to be compared to other social organisations like the Brahmo Samaj, the Ram Krishna Mission or the Arya Samaj. Would it make any sense to ask what the Ram Krishna Mission as an organisation contributed to the freedom struggle? Or which organisation founded by Dr. BR Ambedkar had how many martyrs of the freedom struggle to its name? The Congress can be compared to the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and not to the RSS, when it comes to the freedom struggle.

In these cases, those individuals who believed in the freedom struggle took part in it independently of the organisation. KB Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, was part of both the Anushilan Samiti and the Congress. As the scholar John Zavos has noted, the RSS uniform was first used when Hedgewar as a Congressman got volunteers organising the Nagpur session of the Congress to wear it in 1920. Hedgewar also took part in both the Non-Cooperation Movement as a Congressman and in the Civil Disobedience Movement in his individual capacity.

This is just like Lala Lajpat Rai, an Arya Samajist, took part in the freedom struggle not from the platform of the Arya Samaj but from the platform of the Congress. And he acted as a representative of Hindu opinion from the platform of the Hindu Mahasabha. He did all these simultaneously from appropriate platforms. This apart, it is duplicitous to point fingers on only one organization when it comes to the freedom struggle, even as many of our national icons like Jyotiba Phule, Dr Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore were themselves not known as freedom fighters. In short, it was not necessary for everyone to be a freedom fighter; one could contribute to society even without that.

Another fallacy was to see Hinduism and Hindutva as two different things, each sharply defined. One was supposed to be open-ended and the other narrow and exclusionary. The fact is that being a religion that wasn’t organised the way Semitic religions are, Hinduism spoke in multiple languages. Hindutva is one of these. There is no Hindutva-Hinduism binary. If there were to be one, where would the binary theorists place the likes of Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lajpat Rai, PD Tandon, Seth Govind Das, Sampoornanand or DP Mishra? Were they into Hinduism or Hindutva? The binary theorists can’t answer this, as they straddled both.

Alongside these misreadings came yet another. This one was basically smart pamphleteering. Hindutva is Brahmanical, it was said. While the term Brahmanical, with no equivalent in any ancient text, is itself nebulous, what was sought to be argued was that Hindutva is the ideology of a small Hindu elite that wants to exclude Dalits, tribals and backward classes, and that all subaltern politics must thus be anti-Hindutva to be legitimate.

The BJP’s rise has shattered this belief. In the heyday of the Congress, the Jana Sangh was indeed a small party with a north Indian, upper caste, urban, base. However, it was not the favourite party of even the so-called upper castes. Yet, it was part of the process of the deepening of Indian democracy in more ways than one. Its alliances with the socialists and, after 1969, with Chaudhary Charan Singh’s Lok Dal, actually created electoral alliances of sections of upper castes and the agrarian castes, which are now in the OBC list. Since the Congress had ignored the OBCs in north India, these alliances ensured increased electoral heft of the OBCs since 1967, when unstable Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal governments were formed in many states, thus denting the primacy of the Congress.

The Janata Party, a merger of opposition parties, deepened this process. The increased electoral heft of the OBCs ensured that the Mandal Commission was set up by the Morarji Desai government. Its report, submitted to Indira Gandhi, was shelved for more than a decade till VP Singh, whose government was supported by the BJP and the left from outside, announced its implementation to beat dissent by deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal. If one were to track the rise of the OBCs since the 1967, one would find that the Jana Sangh was part of the electoral arrangements that brought about this tectonic shift in Indian politics from primacy of caste elites to a larger share for the masses. Even among the upper castes, the Jana Sangh made it possible for humbler individuals from these castes to occupy positions of power.

The Ram temple movement put temporary brakes on this process, as Yadavs, a numerically powerful caste in UP and Bihar, made common cause with Muslims to create a Muslim-Yadav combination. But the BJP began social engineering by enlisting non-Yadav OBC castes in its fold. Yet, the gains were not immediate and the party acquired the image of a Bania-Brahmin party, which synced with the academic misreading of Hindutva as Brahmanical.

The year 2014 changed this all. With the rise of Narendra Modi, the top leadership of the party at the Centre got de-Brahmanised, as it were. This followed a phase when OBC leaders like Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Sushil Modi were the faces of the party in Gujarat, MP and Bihar, respectively. Modi’s BJP began to increase representation of non-Yadav OBCs in north Indian states like UP. The BJP was the only party that could do so without disturbing the representation of the upper castes, as not fielding Muslims always gave it a surplus of seats as compared to other parties.

The result: over the last seven years, OBCs and even Dalits have flocked to the party in large numbers. The party has consciously tried to accommodate them, making Ramnath Kovind President of India and ensuring more than 50-percent representation of SCs, STs and OBCs in its last expansion of the Union Council of Ministers and in the recent Uttar Pradesh Council of Ministers.

The process was missed by most scholars, though Sajjan Kumar, who coined the term Subaltern Hindutva, and Badri Narayan did document the process.

Yet, the high and mighty of the Indian academia in India and abroad kept misreading and adversely judging the BJP without sincerely trying to explore the processes that made it India’s largest political party.

It is true that cultural battles over hijab, halal and jhatka meat and non-vegetarian food during Navratras are dominating headlines. However, one needs to remember that apart from a rising Hindutva, the insistence of liberals at siding with conservative definitions of how an ‘authentic’ Muslim should act rather than attempting to secularise society, including Muslims, is a key reason for the polarisation.

The BJP’s 42th foundation day hasn’t made us any richer in terms of understanding the party and its enduring appeal. It has, rather, made us increasingly ignorant about the shifts in our polity, thanks to an academia that has doggedly refused to explore politics with an open mind.