The importance of Gujarat rhetoric

The vision of V D Savarkar is forcefully at play in India today, and it's necessary to go through his writings to understand what is unfolding

The Gujarat elections are important not because they are a thrilling photo finish or a close contest. They matter as the rhetoric and symbols used in Gujarat are the source origin of the model of Hindutva currently in ascendance in India, and they give us clues to what more is to come in the future—in the rest of the country.

Union home minister Amit Shah said at an election rally that "such a lesson was taught in 2002" to those engaging in communal riots that it has led to "akhand shanti" or "eternal peace". If Amit Shah spoke of what has been achieved, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma warned, at a rally in Gujarat, of what could happen "if there were no strong leader in the country, an Aftab Poonawala (arrested for the horrific murder of his live-in partner Shraddha Walker) would be born in every city and we would not be able to protect our society". He was saying in effect that Muslim youth would do "love jihad" and seduce/convert Hindu girls and could then butcher them and cut them into many pieces.

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Let's understand the messaging in both these statements—they range from "we showed them" (Muslims) their place to "they threaten us" and our daughters again if we don't watch out. Such statements are meant to restate Hindu pride and stoke fear. Such utterances by individuals holding important constitutional office reveal emphatically that the heart of the project is an ideological assertion of "pride" that apparently comes from showing minorities "their place" in the Indian sun.

Such feelings are expected to ride over economic discontents, and this has succeeded particularly in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh and is in serious play in states such as Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh (which is desperately seeking to emulate the Uttar Pradesh template) that have elections next year. The pitch failed electorally in West Bengal and Delhi, yet the propaganda and cadre mobilisation does bring about transformations that are hard to quantify immediately. The project, after all, is both political and civilisational.

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The persistent campaign against Muslims in Gujarat is all the more curious as the community is not at all assertive in the public sphere. In this election, too, a community that makes up around 9 per cent of the state population is barely in the contest, and voters are apathetic. The BJP has given no tickets to a Muslim and last did so 24 years ago in the 1998 assembly poll, that is, before Narendra Modi came to the state, and the 2002 Gujarat riots took place. The Congress has been reducing the number of Muslim candidates from 10 in 1995, 5 in 2002 and 6 in the current 2022 election (there are 182 seats in the assembly). The AAP has given tickets to 3 Muslims.

Given the legacy of large-scale destruction of Muslim properties, lives and legacy in Gujarat in 2002, and the utter ghettoisation of the community, it's quite astounding that they are still trotted out as the enemy, and it's a narrative that people buy.

To an extent, this narrative has been deliberately created in the petri-dish of broadcast studios and spread through television
channels, be they in Hindi, English or Gujarati. The compact between media and government is all too clear; the ideological messaging and instruction appears to be to present Muslims as the "permanent enemy". Part of this process also involves claiming a historical narrative of persecution by Muslim rulers of the past and presenting those who speak up for secular values as "Muslim lovers".

It is actually the vision of V D Savarkar that is forcefully at play in India today, and it's necessary to go through his writings to
understand what is unfolding. The presentation of Muslims as aggressors, the apparent need for revenge in a Hindu Rashtra and the need to get national honour, are constant themes in his writings.

In his 1940 address to the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar had said: I want all Hindus to get themselves re-animated and reborn as a martial race. His ideas were the exact opposite of the idea of Ahimsa or non-violence (that Savarkar denounced) preached by M K Gandhi, a Gujarati, whose vision now has no meaning in the land of his birth. Of course, one must not forget that little detail that Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse was a follower of Savarkar.

But the more interesting question is once Muslims have been utterly defeated as they indeed have in parts of India such as Gujarat, where they live as second-class citizens, or in Uttar Pradesh, where a transgression can bring out a bulldozer without due process of law, what then? How long after defeat can you depict one community as the permanent enemy? Article 370 is gone, Kashmiri aspirations are crushed, a Ram temple is coming up at Ayodhya at the site of the most famous public demolition in Indian history; in Assam, there is a constant cycle of detection, internment, hunting for proof to prove citizenship.

So, what's left? Akbar, Shahjahan, Aurangzeb, Tipu Sultan and now Aftab Poonawala?

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.