The Guardian: How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills. [...]

The 90s were a decade of disillusionment with socialism and communism, and so too in JNU. Mahapatra’s opponents, he said, “were always talking about abstract things – what Mao had said, or what Marx had said”. The ABVP, for its part, mined the same faultlines on campus that the BJP exploited in Indian society. “We talked about Kashmir, about the Ram temple, about the Hindu nation.” These were all crucial items on the RSS wishlist: to take full possession of the disputed region of Kashmir, defeating Pakistan in the process; to build the temple in Ayodhya; to give Hindus primacy in India. Dust-ups and brawls between student parties, Mahapatra said, were common. Once, while speaking on a stage, he was injured by stones hurled at him by his opponents. [...]

At JNU, the ABVP’s influence swelled. Che claimed that faculty and administration positions were filled with people who had RSS or ABVP connections. At one point, he said, the “wardens” – or supervisors – of nearly every residence hall were shunted out and replaced with ABVP sympathisers. Beyond the campus, Hindu nationalists felt so empowered that they formed gangs to lynch Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, on flimsy suspicions that their victims were smuggling cows or in possession of beef. (In Hinduism, the cow is revered as sacred.) Since 2014, at least 44 people have been murdered and 280 injured. The gangs acted with impunity, sometimes filming themselves, as if they’d never be prosecuted – and they were proven correct. In one Uttar Pradesh town, a Muslim man, beaten so badly that he would eventually die, was dragged injured along the ground. A photo showed a policeman clearing a path through the crowd as the mob hauled the body behind him. [...]

The end game isn’t to rinse 180 million Muslims out of India. It can’t be, for practical reasons. Where would they go? Even those speculatively identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants cannot be sent back home unless Bangladesh accepts them. What the BJP is aiming for is what its founders have always wanted: a country that is Hindu before anything else. In the 1940s, both Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Vinayak Savarkar, a leading RSS ideologue, were proponents of a two-nation theory. “The only difference,” says Niraja Jayal, a political scientist who studies Indian democracy, “was that Jinnah wanted the territory of undivided India to be cut into two, with one part for Muslims. Whereas Savarkar wanted Hindus and Muslims in the same land, but with the Muslim living in a subordinate position to the Hindu.” That unequal citizenship was what the RSS considered – and still considers – right and proper, Jayal said. “So you get a graded citizenship, a citizenship with hierarchies. You don’t need genocide, you don’t need ethnic cleansing. This does the job well enough.”

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The Guardian Today in Focus: India, Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism

Narendra Modi has been grappling with continuing domestic unrest since his Hindu nationalist BJP government passed the CAA in December, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major south Asian religion except Muslims. In conjunction with a planned national register of citizens, it is feared the law will make India’s Muslim community aliens in their own country and undermine the secular foundations of the country by making religion the basis of citizenship.

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Caravan Magazine: Intimations of an Ending

Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens, and risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could the lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.

The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India, and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world. The Constitution calls India a secular, socialist republic. We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end. [...]

But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP. Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became one of the richest political parties in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent, making it nearly five times richer than its main rival, the Congress Party, whose income declined by 14 percent. Smaller political parties were virtually bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP the crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh, and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and a few old bicycles. And since elections are increasingly about money—and the accumulation of power and the accumulation of capital seem to be convergent—the chances of a free and fair election in the near future seem remote. So maybe demonetisation was not a blunder after all. [...]

In its latest report, released in October, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder, have been rewarded with public office and honoured by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often. Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, has said that lynching is a western concept imported from the Bible, and that Hindus have no such tradition. He has declared that all the talk of a “lynching epidemic” is a conspiracy to defame India.

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