The rise of the populist right – Part 3. March of the right brigade in India

Ashraf Engineer

January 18, 2025

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the final episode of this All Indians Matter special. I am Ashraf Engineer.

In Episode 1 of this series, we looked at the reasons for the rise of the populist right and in Episode 2 its revisionist approach to history. In this episode, I want to chart its journey in India.

It was in the 1970s that India first saw the saffron right wing make a mark. Various political groupings, from mainstream to left of centre, joined hands with it to defeat Indira Gandhi. In the elections held after the Emergency, she was defeated with much of the mobilisation for the Opposition provided by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. It followed that many of the winning candidates had RSS sympathies and were aligned to its agenda.

Indira Gandhi bounced back but 1984, after her assassination, was the last time the Congress won a parliamentary majority on its own. The Congress attempted to channelise communal tendencies by targeting Sikhs and then opening the locks of the Babri Masjid. By the late 1980s, however, the Congress was facing a crisis as the political landscape fragmented. One result of this was that regional parties grew from strength to strength.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, meanwhile, sought to present itself as more moderate than its earlier avatar, the Jana Sangh. However, it won only two seats in 1984 and decided to ditch the new philosophy for a muscular Hindutva.

VP Singh, who ditched the Congress and stitched together a coalition to become prime minister, positioned himself as a messiah of the Other Backward Classes, better known as OBCs, by implementing the Mandal Commission recommendations on reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. This blew a hole through the BJP’s attempt to consolidate the Hindu vote. It had supported VP Singh in the 1989 elections but pivoted after identifying the Babri Masjid as a target to mobilise Hindu support. It seized on the claim that the mosque had been built on the site of the birth of Lord Ram and launched a campaign to build a temple there.

This, it said, was not just a question of Hindu pride, it was a question of national pride. The mosque, it said, was a symbol of the oppression of Muslim conquerors and must therefore make way for a symbol of the majority that was a victim.

This, then, brings us back to what I had mentioned at the end of the first episode: the question is one of nationalism, what the nation is and who it belongs to. This false fear of becoming a victim to the minority, this anger at so-called historical wrongs provided just the springboard the populist right needed.

SIGNATURE TUNE

Nationalism is a construct and so is a nation. And you can argue that it has cultural and political dimensions. The dispute is over what is greater, the political dimension or the cultural one.

The cultural perspective sees nationalism as a concept descended from history, which leaves it open to disputes over who the nation actually belongs to. It could be those that speak a particular language, for instance. In the case of India, the right wing argues that it’s religion that constitutes true belonging.

The political perspective views nationhood as constantly evolving, flowing from the past to the present and into the future. So, it allows for multiculturalism and a nation that belongs to everyone who is part of it.

The cultural perspective then tells us that there is only one real definition of being Indian – your religion. Those who follow other religions are interlopers, false Indians and a danger – not just a burden – on the nation. They must be shown their place, stripped of their citizenship, deprived of political rights and humiliated for taking up space and resources that belong to the majority.

This manifests itself in the form of lynchings and then cases lodged against the victims, a systematic targeting of Muslims through political and legal means, the jailing of dissenters for years without bail hearings or proper trials, and so on.

And this is why many believe that the saffron right wing poses the greatest threat to stability.

Let’s go back in time now to trace the evolutionary arc of the BJP. Both, the BJP and the Jana Sangh, were political branches of the RSS. The RSS was founded in 1925 to project and entrench Brahmin supremacy. It had no problems with fascism and was in touch with Mussolini and Hitler. In fact, it has in the past expressed support for Nazis. The RSS claims to be nationalist but it refused to participate in the Freedom Struggle, remaining loyal to the British.

It sees itself as the creator of an India that is hardline, militarily menacing and one in which Muslims have no right to live.

When Mahatma Gandhi was shot by Nathuram Godse, the RSS was banned. It promised to stay away from politics, but circumvented that promise by creating arms like the Jana Sangh. A whole range of allied organisations and institutions followed, spanning schools to so-called cultural outfits that pushed Hindutva, its literature and philosophy. In its crosshairs were not just Muslims but also lower castes.

It questioned the Indianness of non-Hindus, especially Muslims, just as the Nazis did of non-Aryans and Margaret Thatcher did of Asian immigrants. Similarly, today we see many MAGA, or Make America Great Again, adherents questioning the Americanness of coloured people and Mexican immigrants.

The RSS philosophy believes Hindus have been blundering along in a sort of semi-comatose state, unaware of their own rights and power. And that they were bludgeoned into this state by a series of Muslim rulers, the last being the Mughals. What they need is something to shake them out of their stupor to reclaim what is rightfully theirs. That something is aggressive Hindu nationalism led by the RSS and targeted at Muslims who it paints as responsible for that stupor.

So, ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Pakistan’ have become powerful buzzwords.

While it can’t go beyond a point in aggression towards Pakistan, Kashmir has paid for the Narendra Modi government’s worst tendencies.

Thousands died in Kashmir in the decades before Modi but there is a clear rise in the graph after he came to power. To justify placing security ahead of freedoms, Kashmir was first painted as the source of most of India’s security problems. This allowed Modi to position himself as the only leader who has what it takes to tackle the problem. He unleashed massive crackdowns and internet shutdowns to punish India’s only Muslim-majority state. If anyone spoke about rights for Kashmiris, they were automatically anti-national.

Then came the abrogation of Article 370, which snatched away the state’s special status. Simultaneously, the state was split into two with Ladakh spun off as a separate Union Territory.

This has allowed the BJP to shift the focus away from its dismal economic performance. Growth is lower than it should be, disastrous impositions like demonetisation have shattered the rural economy and impacted small businesses, cost of living is soaring and unemployment hit a four-decade high. Flagship programmes like Make in India, Swachh Bharat and others have fallen far short of expectations and the middle-class is being buried under a mountain of rising costs and lack of jobs. Atrocities against minorities and lower castes are shamefully common. But, rhetoric on national security, hardline leadership and Pakistan has kept the focus away from these issues. It helps that a willing media has been co-opted into this project.

The role of institutions that should have acted as checks against unjustified and indiscriminate use of government power has been under scrutiny too. Several questions have been raised against the Election Commission choosing to ignore communal and incendiary statements by BJP leaders and even the prime minister during campaigning. During the Haryana Assembly results, there was a sudden shift in the trends as it became clear that the Congress was winning. The questions it raised were not addressed by the Election Commission. It has also been unconvincing in its justification to keep using electronic voting machines despite non-BJP parties across the political spectrum saying they did not have faith in the system.

The courts have come up with strange decisions on Constitutional matters and many judges have gone on record to praise Modi while still in office. Former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who presided over the Babri Masjid ruling, was sent to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP soon after he retired. This is the same judge that presided over a hearing into allegations of sexual harassment against himself.

Governors, meanwhile, function like extended arms of the BJP in states ruled by other parties. They have blocked legislation or delayed it endlessly and sought to overrule the decisions of elected state governments. The Supreme Court stepped in but the situation has not normalised. This is an assault on the federal structure of governance and on the Constitution itself.

So, there is a shockwave that has run through India’s elected and non-elected institutions.

I mentioned earlier that the RSS was formed to assert Brahminical superiority. So how has it and the BJP dealt with lower-caste anger against upper castes?

There have been several mobilisations of Dalits and other lower castes against discrimination by upper castes. The human development indicators among the lower castes are telling – for example, it is estimated that their lifespans are 15 years less than the higher castes’.

Dalits understood that their demand for resources and dignity will not be fulfilled without political power. They felt that existing political parties were not fully committed to their cause and there emerged from within leaders like Kanshi Ram who built Dalit political forces like the Bahujan Samaj Party.

The BJP understood this political urge and backed small parties that represented some castes or established alliances with existing larger parties. This ensured that Dalit or OBC unity never became a reality. And it ensured to an extent consolidation of the Hindu vote, across castes, behind it or its allies. Hindutva was presented as an umbrella ideology for all sections of Hindus and that the real fight was against Muslims. This pushed to the back Dalit anger against upper castes and replaced it with hostility against Muslims. This is why there was significant lower-caste participation in the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002.

This targeting of Muslims was done by tapping into local issues in different parts of the country. In the North-East and Bengal, for example, it was infiltration.

So, what we have is a far-right project that aims for a nation defined by Hindutva, a single language – Hindi – that is used nationally and a tight control on even what we eat, think, who we marry and a clear hierarchy based on religion and caste when it comes to rights, freedoms and resources. There is no space for cultural diversity, which is a founding principle of this country.

It’s not as if India’s essence is under threat anymore. In fact, the situation has progressed well beyond that. Sectarianism, casteism and authoritarianism have inflicted a tear in its social fabric, which will take a very long time repair – if at all it can be.

The younger generation must be sensitised to the immense danger posed by right-wing forces. There is a vast political, social and economic transformation sweeping the world, as we’ve discussed in the three episodes of this series. The inflection points have been events like the 2008 financial meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, wars and a host of others.

These have been seized by the right wing and have made societies, institutions and entire nations vulnerable. There is, therefore, absolutely no alternative to an inclusive society, democracy and shrinking inequality.

No one in their right minds believes that battling right-wing extremism will be easy. In fact, divisive, extremist ideas are rapidly becoming mainstream. However, democracy, freedoms, equality, multiculturalism, human rights and the idea of India as it was envisaged at freedom are worth the fight.

Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.