Inevitable right turn

New India

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his victory speech at the national headquarters of the BJP on May 23 said in his now all-too familiar strident tone that in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, no political party had dared to wear the cloak of secularism to mislead people. This perhaps implied that political parties like the Congress and the Communists had used secularism to “appease minorities” and box in the majority and that they could not do so anymore because the BJP’s majoritarian politics has outflanked the Nehruvian notion of secularism. The BJP of Modi has nothing but contempt for everything Nehruvian.

The word secularism is not only the most misused but also the misinterpreted word in Indian political debates. The word was used by Congress leaders in the 1930s and the 1940s to counter the Muslim League argument for separate electorates, which culminated in the demand for a separate state for Muslims. After Independence, secularism was used to counter the Hindu right-wing’s conception of Hindu Rashtra, a counterpart of the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan.

The question is whether the BJP is working towards a Hindu Rashtra under the cloak of nationalism, as secularism is a red rag to Hindutva proponents. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, making a case in 1996 for forming a BJP government, assured the nation that his party will not alter the secular character of the Constitution and that he agreed with the definition of secularism offered by Sardar Swaran Singh during the debate on the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution, when the words ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ were inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution in 1976, towards the end of the Indira Gandhi-imposed Emergency. There was a compulsion on the part of Vajpayee to have made that conciliatory overture in 1996. In 2019, Modi does not feel the need to show any kind of deference to the idea of secularism.

Emboldened by the decisive electoral victory, Modi made it clear that this election marks the end of secularism. He did not elaborate because he has no patience with casuistry. He now believes that secularism has been politically buried. The logic of majoritarian politics would be to declare Hinduism as the State religion, but there are plenty of problems that way because Hinduism is a thousand-armed, thousand-faced deity. The BJP knows that it would lead to chaos.

The BJP’s mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), argues for a Hindu Rashtra, that is a Hindu State, sans Hinduism, where nationalism takes the place of religion and the State becomes the high priest of nationalism. It is most likely that in the Indian right-wing lexicon, nationalism would replace religion, and nationalism is deceptively secular. Right-wing nationalists frown upon religions because religions preach universalism and transcendence while nationalism demands tribal loyalty to the demarcated territory.

Modi would not want to be caught in intellectual brambles. As a nationalist politician, he would prefer a simpler framework. And it is not easy to find a simple framework in a complex country like India. That is why, he would want to stay with the Constitution as it is because it provides the necessary framework to wield State powers to impose the secular religion of nationalism over people and society.

There is nothing anomalous about the idea of religion of nationalism. The other word for it is ‘civic religion’, where the deity is the nation-state. The hotheads in the BJP may want to push the nationalism into a Taliban-like frenzy, but Modi would want to use it in a calibrated manner to win elections and outflank critics. Modi would not be the first person to use the nationalism card and describe critics as anti-national. Indira Gandhi set a fine example of it between 1971 and 1977.

It may not be fair or rational for the critics to press the panic button and argue from every single incident of fury and bias that it is a journey towards totalitarianism. The evidence falls short of critical mass. But the dangers remain and all that can be done in the circumstances is to condemn the single event as the BJP’s new Member of Parliament from New Delhi, former India cricketer Gautam Gambhir did by condemning in unequivocal terms the attack on a Muslim in Gurugram on May 25.

The Hindutva stormtroopers who may or may not be associated with the BJP or the RSS or any of its affiliates are likely to indulge in acts of violence. But it will not be possible to characterise the Modi government as being in cahoots with the arsonists.

What is needed is a critique of nationalism, where its extreme forms are condemned without any qualification. Forcing people to chant ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ or ‘Jai Shri Ram’ cannot be turned into tokens of nationalism. Modi is unlikely to condemn it, either strongly or mildly, because he cannot afford to scorn his own support base. As the BJP and its intellectual apologists cannot distinguish between Talibalinised nationalism and a commonsensical pride in the country, it is left to the critics of Modi to sound the tocsin as and when the need arises.

Nationalism will remain a valid rallying point and it will be futile to condemn those who take pride in nationalism as retrogressive. One of the major blunders of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 was to underestimate the power, both positive and negative, of nationalism and its sentimental hold on people at large. They read the history of Europe wrong.

Capitalism and globalisation did not leave nationalism behind. Europe learned the evils of nationalist fanaticism after the savage killings of the World Wars. It will take India a longer time to understand the toxic effects of unbridled nationalism of the kind propagated by Modi and the BJP.

(The writer is a senior journalist based in New Delhi)