Hindutva Conflates Its Ideas Of Religion And Culture: Revived Contestations Over History — From The Gyanvapi Mosque Case To The Renewed Demonisation Of Aurangzeb

By Shashi Tharoor June 27, 2023 The revived contestations over history — from the Gyanvapi mosque case to the renewed demonisation of Aurangzeb — confirm that Hindutva conflates its ideas of religion and culture with those of nation and state. Nationalism and statehood are by definition indivisible, whereas religion and culture take on multiple manifestations. Culture of course contributes to national identity; yet, culture alone cannot mould the nationalism of a country, leave alone that of a plural land such as India. Indeed, an India confident in its own diversity could celebrate multiple expressions of its culture. ‘In the Hindutva-centred view, history is made of religion-based binaries’ | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto ------ A ‘Ground Zero’ Hindutva sees culture differently. As the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s longest-serving chief M.S. Golwalkar wrote, culture “is but a product of our all-comprehensive religion, a part of its body and not distinguishable from it”. For the Hindutvavadis, India’s national culture is Hindu religious culture, and cultural nationalism cloaks plural India in a mantle of Hindu identity. Since Hindutva’s conception of nationalism is rooted in the primacy of culture over politics, the Hindutva effort is to create an idea of the Indian nation in which the Hindu religious identity coincides with the cultural. In this process, Indian history, following the Muslim conquests of north India, has become “ground zero” in the battle of narratives between the Hindutvavadis and the pluralists. When, with the publication of my book, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, I spoke critically of 200 years of foreign rule, the voices of Hindutva, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, condemned 1,200 years of foreign rule. To them, the Muslim rulers of India, whether the Delhi Sultans, the Deccani Sultans or the Mughals (or the hundreds of other Muslims who occupied thrones of greater or lesser importance for several hundred years across the country) were all foreigners. I responded that while the founder of a Muslim dynasty may well have come to India from abroad, he and his descendants stayed and assimilated in this country, married Hindu women, and immersed themselves in the fortunes of this land; each Mughal Emperor after Babar had less and less connection of blood or allegiance to a foreign country. If they looted or exploited India and Indians, they spent the proceeds of their loot in India, and did not send it off to enrich a foreign land as the British did. The Mughals received travellers from the Fergana Valley politely, enquired about the well-being of the people there and perhaps even gave some money for the upkeep of the graves of their Chingizid ancestors, but they stopped seeing their original homeland as home. By the third generation, let alone the fifth or sixth, they were as “Indian” as any Hindu. The Intellectual Terrain This challenge of authenticity, however, cuts across a wide intellectual terrain. It emerges from those Hindus who share V.S. Naipaul’s view of theirs as a “wounded civilisation”, a pristine Hindu land that was subjected to repeated defeats and conquests over the centuries at the hands of rapacious Muslim invaders and was enfeebled and subjugated in the process. To them, Independence is not merely freedom from British rule but an opportunity to restore the glory of Hindu culture and religion, wounded by Muslim conquerors. Historians such as Audrey Truschke, author of a sympathetic biography of Aurangzeb, have argued that this account of Muslims despoiling the Hindu homeland is neither a continuous historical memory nor based on accurate records of the past. But one cannot underestimate the emotional content of the Hindutva view: it is for them a matter of faith that India is a Hindu nation, which Muslim rulers attacked, looted and sought to destroy, and documented historical facts that refute this view are at best an inconvenience, at worst an irrelevance. Indeed, Professor Truschke has remarked on the widespread belief in India that Aurangzeb was a Muslim fanatic who destroyed thousands of Hindu temples, forced millions of Indians to convert to Islam, and enacted a genocide of Hindus. None of these propositions, she demonstrates in her work, was true, least of all the claim (made by many of those who fought successfully to remove his name from a prominent road in Delhi) that his ultimate aim was to eradicate Hindus and Hinduism. Historical evidence suggests that Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of Hindu temples, as is claimed, and that the ones he did destroy were largely for political reasons; that he did little to promote conversions, as evidenced by the relatively modest number of Hindus who adopted Islam during Aurangzeb’s rule; that he gave patronage to Hindu and Jain temples and liberally donated land to Brahmins; and that millions of Hindus thrived unmolested in his empire. Like many rulers of his time, whether Muslim or Hindu, Aurangzeb attacked Hindus and Muslims alike. But such nuanced accounts of Aurangzeb enjoy little traction amongst those who prefer their history in unambiguous shades of black and white. Aurangzeb is controversial not because of what he did in the historical past but rather because he serves a useful purpose in the present as an emblem of Muslim oppression. In the Hindutva-centred view, history is made of religion-based binaries, in which all Muslim rulers are evil and all Hindus are valiant resisters, embodiments of incipient Hindu nationalism. The Hindutvavadis seem unaware of the Muslim generals who fought on the side of Hindu rajas and vice-versa. Indeed, few who extol Maharana Pratap as the “victor” in the Battle of Haldighati against Akbar’s Mughal army realise that Akbar’s forces were in fact commanded by a Hindu, Raja Man Singh of Amber, and that Rana Pratap’s resistance was led principally by a Muslim, Hakim Khan Sur. Similarly, liberal and tolerant rulers such as Ashoka, Akbar, Jai Singh and Wajid Ali Shah do not figure in Hindutva’s list of national heroes. Indeed, where many nationalist historians extolled Akbar as the liberal, tolerant counterpart to the Islamist Aurangzeb, Hindutvavadis have begun to attack him too, principally because he was Muslim, and like most medieval monarchs, killed princes who stood in his way, many of whom happened to be Hindu. The Recent Past Is Not Spared Too Communal history colours even the more recent past. Among those Indians who revolted against the British, Bahadur Shah, Zeenat Mahal, Maulavi Ahmadullah and General Bakht Khan, all Muslims, are conspicuous by their absence from Hindutva histories. And syncretic traditions such as the Bhakti movement, and universalist religious reformers such as Rammohan Roy and Keshub Chandra Sen, do not receive much attention from the Hindutva orthodoxy. What does is the uncritical veneration of “Hindu heroes” such as Maharana Pratap and of course Chhatrapati Shivaji, the intrepid Maratha warrior whose battles against the Mughals have now replaced accounts of Mughal kings in Maharashtra’s textbooks. As the recent National Council of Educational Research and Training controversy has again reminded us, the educational system is the chosen battlefield for the Hindutva warriors, and curriculum revision their preferred weapon. History has often been contested terrain in India, but its revival in the context of 21st century politics is a sobering sign that the past continues to have a hold over the Hindutva movement in the present. While the Mughals will be demonised as a way of delegitimising Indian Muslims (who are stigmatised as “Aurangzeb ke aulad”, the sons of Aurangzeb), the appropriation of Sardar Patel, Madan Mohan Malaviya and other nationalists by Hindutva confirm that the heroes of the freedom struggle will be hijacked to the ruling party’s attempts to appropriate a halo of nationalism that none of its forebears has done anything to earn. ----- Shashi Tharoor is third-term Lok Sabha Member of Parliament (Congress) from Thiruvananthapuram, is the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author of ‘An Era of Darkness’ and of ‘The Battle of Belonging’. His most recent book is ‘Ambedkar: A Life’ Source: The Main Chapter Of How Hindutva Sees The Past ------- What’s Behind The Communal Tinge To Maharashtra Politics? Jun 27, 2023 A gutted bike in Akola ----- Mumbai The class IX student at a Kolhapur school is a huge fan of Narendra Bhagana, the subaltern Haryanavi singing sensation with testosterone-heavy lyrics: Bhai tera gunda, villain rhn de, bandook chalegi... (your brother is a thug, forget the villain, guns will go off...). You get the drift. Earlier this month, this 16-year-old, along with four other minors, was arrested for disturbing peace in the city and sent to a juvenile home for 14 days His WhatsApp display photograph showed a picture of Tipu Sultan with accompanying text that read: “The king who fought like a soldier. India never seen (a warrior) like him, his soul departed from his body but his sword remained in his hand.” Bhagana’s hit song Baap toh baap rahega played when one clicked on Tipu’s photo. Four other school boys arrested along with him had similar WhatsApp status updates-- in some cases, glorifying Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. These images so incensed members of the recently-minted Sakal Hindu Samaj (SHS) that on June 7, they gheraoed the local police station, demanding stern action against glorifiers of Tipu and Aurangzeb, and the bandh called by them escalated to stone pelting and destruction of shops. As the controversy snowballed, Maharashtra deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis blamed “Aurangzeb’s aulaads (offsprings)” for the rising communal temperature in the state, and on his 55th birthday on June 14, Raj Thackeray cut a cake with Aurangzeb’s photo by plunging the knife into the emperor’s mouth like a stake. Why has Maharashtra’s politics acquired such a communal colour all of a sudden? Communal eruptions across Akola, Kolhapur, Aurangabad, Ahmednagar, Beed, Mumbai, Amravati and Nashik in the last eight months, and the killings of two cattle traders by alleged cow vigilantes in a the last three weeks at Nashik, have raised concern that the state may be headed for a bigger sectarian flashpoint. These instances of violence have come on the back of over 50 Jan Aakrosh (public anger) rallies that have ratchet up anti-Muslim rhetoric. Tracking Roots To RSS The Nagpur-based Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) leader is a tall and gnarly man in his early 70s, the national chief of one of the organisation’s key units . He speaks off the record, but with a candour that comes from certitude, as he explains the genesis of SHS. “There are many Hindus and Hindu-oriented organisations that don’t necessarily attend shakhas, but they share the same philosophy and they needed to be brought under one umbrella. That is how SHS was created.” SHS shares its credo with an old RSS campaign, ‘Ek kuan, mandir, aur shamshan, Hinduon ki yahi pehchan (Those who share one well, one temple and the crematorium are all Hindu brethren). Organisations such as the Durga Vahini, Gayatri Parivar, Sanatan Sanstha, Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali, the Sakal Jain Samaj, and even some Sikh and Buddhist organisations are all part of SHS, this leader claimed. It enjoys the intellectual support of the Sangh and the logistical heft of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he added. SHS owes its name to something Savarkar once wrote, “Tumhi amhi sakal Hindu, Bandhu bandhu (You and I are all Hindus, and brothers). However, the idea to keep the outfit overtly leaderless is borrowed from the 2015 Maratha reservation campaign. This means SHS works as an umbrella grouping of discrete outfits, with no specific leader. “We want laws at the national and state level to stop love jihad, illegal conversions and cow slaughter,” said Sunil Ghanwat, spokesperson for Hindu Janjagruti Samiti for Maharashtra, which is one of the units of SHS. ”It’s not about the BJP or Congress or any other party. We have been demanding action against love- ihad and religious conversions for many years. It’s just that these issues are more in focus today because of massive marches taken out by Hindus,” he added. “It’s a spontaneous movement in the interest of the Hindu Samaj where every Hindu organisation is a participant,” said another senior RSS leader, Atul Moghe. RSS swayamsevaks participate in SHS rallies and support its initiatives, he added. BJP Maharashtra spokesperson Shivaray Kulkarni also said that BJP workers and leaders participated in SHS rallies, including ministers and lawmakers. “However, neither rank-and-file nor the leaders initiate such rallies. These are spontaneous uprisings of the Hindu fraternity.” Spontaneous is a word that comes up again and again to stress that the Jan Aakrosh rallies are natural eruptions, rather than organised events. Yet, facts on the ground differ. Last December, after Shraddha Walkar’s murder in Delhi, SHS launched a massive campaign against so-called love jihad – a popular right-wing conspiracy theory about interfaith relationships – claiming there were 100,000 instances of it in the state. The Shinde-Fadnavis government set up a committee to look into instances of coercive inter-faith marriages, but it has yet to receive a single complaint. On June 3, while steering clear of the term love jihad, Fadnavis said, “Instances of innocent girls being lured into inter-religious marriages and (subsequent) exploitation are coming to light. We are concerned, and will crack the whip.” When HT spoke to the police stations in Pune, Kolhapur, Solapur, Akola and Nashik, officers said they had no data to support these political claims and not a single FIR of coercive Hindu-Muslim marriage was registered so far in 2023. “We do not have compilation of such data with regards to any love jihad or religious conversions,” said Pune joint commissioner of police (law and order) Sandeep Karnik. What is happening instead is that crimes of rape, molestation or sexual assault under Protection of Children against Sexual Offences Act, where the accused may be a Muslim and the victim a Hindu, are being tarred with the brush of love jihad. Sample this – on May 20, BJP member of legislative council Gopichand Padalkar told a press conference that a Hindu girl from Manchar in Pune district was tortured by a Muslim young man as part of forcible conversion under love jihad. Pune Police arrested the man under various sections of the Indian Penal Code but maintained there was no overt sectarian angle. Campaign Pivots To History With love jihad conspiracy theories finding little grassroots traction in the state, the campaign to polarise pivoted to historical figures such as Aurangzeb — an easy enough enemy, given Chhatrapati Shivaji’s stirring resistance — and Tipu Sultan, who was similarly vilified in Karnataka. Between June 1 and 10, police across the state registered at least 20 first information reports (FIRs) over social media updates and display photos that featured Aurangzeb or Tipu Sultan. This crackdown was made easier by the fact that in February this year, social media company Meta – which runs WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook – rolled out a new feature update syncing WhatsApp updates on other Meta platforms for wider reach and visibility. This, explained cyber experts, also increased the chances of incendiary content reaching a wider audience. “Previously, we could only check the status of a person if their number was saved in our contact list but now due to integration of platforms, anybody from anywhere can check status updates and these things go viral within minutes,” said Sanjay Shintre, incharge of Maharashtra cyber cell. Senior Congress leader Husain Dalwai said the trend of valorising the two kings is a direct outcome of aggressive communal politics. “Muslims should stop reacting to communal politics. I too oppose using Aurangzeb’s picture as WhatsApp status, but what is wrong with Tipu Sultan who fought against the British until his last breath?” Advocate Salman Maldar, who secured bail for the young Narendra Bhagana fan and three other juveniles in Kolhapur, said section 295A of IPC, usually applied for deliberate and malicious acts intended to hurt religious feelings and disturb peace, should not have been used against his minor clients. “They did not insult any god or goddess. Also, both Aurangzeb and Tipu Sultan were rulers at different times and are not banned in this country by any law.” Aurangabad member of Parliament (MP) Imtiyaz Jaleel said Tipu Sultan’s picture is part of the original copy of the Constitution drafted by BR Ambedkar and is preserved in the Parliament House library while Aurangzeb’s grave is an Archaeological Survey of India-protected monument. “I have challenged Devendra Fadnavis to present any one case in which a person was booked for showing a picture of Aurangzeb in the last 75 years,” he added, questioning the lack of police action against Telangana lawmaker T Raja Singh who openly called for violence against Muslims at a Jan Aakrosh rally in Mumbai earlier this year. Last year, Singh was pulled up by the Telangana high court for exhorting people to boycott all Muslim shops and businesses. Political Designs “History has shown that the BJP benefited from the Ram Mandir movement but various Hindu organisations began working for it from 1985 onward,” said a former BJP leader who was a core strategist for the party in Maharashtra until his recent defection. “It is trying to replicate the same strategy across the country to ensure a big win in 2024. The tension in Maharashtra is just part of that design, especially since the party dropped seats in the 2019 assembly elections, and lost power.” “Maharashtra Mission 45” is a key part of the BJP’s strategy to win in 2024; 17 of the 45 Lok Sabha constituencies on their radar are with other parties at present. These are Baramati, Satara, Aurangabad, Chandrapur, Buldhana, Kalyan, Palghar, Shirur, Raigad, South Mumbai, South Central Mumbai, North West Mumbai, Shirdi, Kolhapur, Hatkanangale, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Madhe and Osmanabad. Except for Chandrapur, SHS has held one or multiple Jan Aakrosh rallies in each of these constituencies; in some cases, instances of communal violence and retaliation have ensued. SHS held 12 rallies in western Maharashtra in the last six months, each of them with attendance upwards of 100,000. This sugar belt from Sangli to Kolhapur has a strong network of cooperative bodies that forms the backbone of the region’s rural economy. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have dominated the cooperative sector for decades. Polarisation on religious lines could significantly alter the politics in western Maharashtra’s 11 Lok Sabha and 75 assembly seats. But the region that may worry the BJP the most is Vidarbha, where it suffered its biggest electoral setback in 2019, losing 15 assembly seats it held earlier. Once again, SHS has campaigned extensively here, particularly in Akola, Amravati, Yavatmal and Fadnavis’s bastion Nagpur, where the party lost a crucial legislative council election this year. In Marathwada, which sends eight MPs to Lok Sabha, SHS has focused on the already-polarised district of Aurangabad, now represented by All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The violence during Ram Navmi here was the worst reported this year. Likewise, Parbhani, where the campaign against love jihad was launched after Walkar’s death, is a Shiv Sena (UBT) stronghold. The oft-heard phrase during elections here is, ‘Khan payije ka baan’ (Would you prefer a Khan or the bow and arrow?). With the Shiv Sena splintered in two, crucial seats in the region appear up for grabs. ----- Source: What’s Behind The Communal Tinge To Maharashtra Politics? 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