Fundamentalism’s resurgence in India

After providing an ideological basis for the persecution of minorities for around three decades, India’s Hindu nationalist movement is now entering an even more dangerous phase.

The Sangh Parivar, the Hindu nationalist conglomerate, no longer seems to be at the helm of affairs, as sections of its grassroots workforce have begun to form their own, independent, militant outfits, aggrieved that political expediency has rendered it too ‘soft’ to establish a Hindu nation.

Until recently, no one had heard of Abhinav Bharat and Sri Ram Sene, two of the breakaway extremist Hindu Right groups, which have now become notorious for ‘revenge’ terror attacks and violent moral policing respectively.

While leaders of the Abhinav Bharat were arrested in October last year on charges of exploding bombs in Malegaon town in the western states of Maharashtra, supporters of the Sri Ram Sene were held for attacking women at a pub in Mangalore town in the southern state of Karnataka last month. While Abhinav Bharat comprises of ex-members of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council or VHP), Sri Ram Sene’s leader Pramod Muthalik is a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the ideological head of the Sangh Parivar

The goal of Abhinav Bharat is to make India a Hindu nation with the help of Israel, as it believes that the Constitution of India is incapable of dealing with ‘Islamic’ terrorism, according to the organisation’s leader Lt Col Prasad S Purohit.

Purohit, a serving officer of the Indian Army, is the prime accused following the bomb explosions in Muslim-majority areas in Malegaon on September 29, 2008 which left six dead and more than eighty injured.

Purohit was picked up by the Mumbai Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and spilled the beans during interrogations.

On November 21, 2008, around a month after Purohit’s arrest, the Hindustan Times daily reported that members of Abhinav Bharat even plotted to kill senior RSS leaders they thought were not doing enough for Hindu nationalism.

The investigation agency suspects that Sri Ram Sene, whose leader Muthalik is aggressively weaning away radical workers from the Sangh Parivar, was also part of the Malegaon terror attack. On February 9, 2009, India’s Home Minister P Chidambaram told the media that this splinter group was a ‘threat to the country’ and that the government was watching its activities. Yet, the militant group seems to be growing by leaps and bounds; in the north-western state of Rajasthan, the state unit of the Shiv Sena, a Sangh outfit, is expected to merge into Sri Ram Sene

Both groups have, in the past, launched numerous anti-Christian attacks. It is believed that similar militant splinter groups are emerging in various parts of the country, disillusioned with what they perceive as the Sangh Parivar’s lack of commitment to a Hindu nation in which Christians (who comprise just 2.3 percent of the population) and Muslims (13.4 percent) would be seen as subordinate outsiders.

With this development, Hindu nationalism, which began as a fundamentalist movement in the early twentieth century – when the idea of India was being formulated in anticipation of freedom from British rule - is apparently regressing after three decades of democratic politics.

The movement failed to achieve its goal of a Hindu nation, as India chose a secular course after its Constitution came into force in 1950, but it did not die.  In the 1980s, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP or the RSS’s political wing) took up the issue of re-constructing the Rama temple in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh where a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid, had since stood.

The BJP alleged that Mughal ruler Babur had demolished the Hindu temple that originally marked the birthplace of god Rama in order to build the mosque.

This was a desperate attempt by the BJP to become a mainstream party in competition with India’s grand old secularist party, the Indian National Congress.

In December 1992, alleged Sangh Parivar supporters demolished the Babri mosque, which led to communal bloodshed and massive polarisation of voters helping the BJP to power in Delhi in 1998, in a coalition government under the aegis of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

However, since most of its allies in the NDA were not Hindu nationalist, the BJP was unable to institutionalise Hindu nationalism, through the enactment of a national law against conversions and the construction of the temple at the now demolished mosque site in Ayodhya. But, the party was able to promulgate hatred and violent attacks against minorities, mainly Muslims and Christians.

In March 1998, Sonia Gandhi, an Italian-born Roman Catholic and the wife of the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, became the president of the Indian National Congress, which inaugurated a wave of violence against Christians. The BJP intended to undermine her leadership by provoking her into defending the minority community, in order to have her branded as a minority leader in distinction to their own majority leadership.

India witnessed its first large-scale, organised attack on Christians in the Dangs district of the western state of Gujarat in December 1998, leading to mass destruction of property.

In January 1999, an Australian missionary, Graham Staines, and his two sons aged seven and nine were burned alive in the eastern state of Orissa’s Keonjhar district as a symbolic act.

In March 2004, another massive spate of attacks took place in the Jhabua district in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

There were around 200 further ‘sporadic’ attacks on Christians each year from 2000 to 2004, when the BJP-led NDA lost the national election to the Indian National Congress.

After a brief period of decline in the scale of Christian persecution following the defeat of the BJP, anti-Christian violence returned in December 2007, with a series of brutal attacks in the Kandhamal district of Orissa, in which at least four Christians died, and 730 houses and 95 churches were burned.

Massive violence re-erupted in the district in August 2008, killing at least 127 people and destroying 315 villages, 4,640 houses, 252 churches and 13 educational institutions, besides rendering more than 50,000 homeless.

However, these attacks on minorities were part of the BJP’s political strategy, and not the expression of its desire to consolidate a Hindu nation. And this worries sections of the even more extreme cadre who have begun to revolt and split away as a result.

The resurgence of a fundamentalism that sees even the violent Sangh Parivar, which is believed to have been responsible for the killings, rapes and vandalism against minorities, as ‘too soft’, is alarming.