2010s have purely been the years where we saw the immense power by which people were influenced by names that have been in and out of controversies quite often: BJP, RSS, Lal Krishna Advani and more. And with these names came an idea. An idea so strong that country is almost up in flames and made Mera Desh Jal Raha Hai a sullen reality. “Hindutva!”
The seed of Hindutva had been sown in the minds of people long before this millennia even began. And the Babri Masjid issue was one of the major milestones which displayed where the country might lead to if it was being lead by people so hungry for power that they might go to any extent.
Where with onset of the new millennia, the youth was seeking growth and a hope for new India. All they were getting in return was to face the humiliation for seeing India stuck in middle of major issues like Commonwealth games scandal, 2G scam and more. With these ongoing scams in UPA government’s total serving time of 10 years people of India demanded change.
And then from India’s right-wing a face emerges! A face with oratory skills so great that even the youth might not have anything to be sceptical about even though the propaganda in display will be nothing but similar to that was being shown for decades and will probably narrate the same story. Still somehow everyone will just be awestruck by his mere talent along with him a strategist so cunning who will brand its party like never seen before.
Year 2011
UPA is in power and India is fed up of the immensely corrupt people in power. And people who resonated with Anna Hazare decided to launch Anti-Corruption Movement. India’s anti-corruption movement was a series of demonstrations and protests across India intended to establish strong legislation and enforcement against perceived endemic political corruption. The movement gained momentum from 5 April 2011, when anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare began a hunger strike at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. The chief legislative aim of the movement was to alleviate corruption in the Indian government through introduction of the Jan Lokpal Bill. Another aim, spearheaded by Ramdev, was the repatriation of black money from Swiss and other foreign banks.
This movement was one of the main reasons why UPA goverment and the mainstream LEFT-WING will fall on its knees by securing only 59 seats out of total 543 seats in next elections and it will indicate how desperate were the people for a change and how this vulnerable desire of change will make the LEFT to lose its patriotic image. And to lose the image that one portrays is one big a deal and this is why big corps. invest immensely to brand what they say.
Being the strategists that they are the RIGHT-WING came forward and decided to use the then National Symbols (The flag, anthem, martyrs etc.) to re-brand itself as the leader of the second freedom struggle to topple LEFT from power, and which it will do in the upcoming elections and will become the monopolistic paddler of Nationalism that it is now.
Year 2014
The year to form the 16th Lok Sabha and NDA [National Democratic Alliance] is leading with ridiculous amounts of votes in the election process. As the time neared to end this nine phase election, It was known by every person in the country that BJP and its alliance will surely come to power.
16th may 2014, the day to announce the result, The National Democratic Alliance won a sweeping victory, taking 336 seats. The BJP won 31.0% votes, which is the lowest share for a party to form a majority government in India since independence. BJP and its allies won the right to form the largest majority government since the 1984 general election, and it was decided for Narendra Modi to lead the country and be the Prime Minister India seeks.
UPA government’s fall
1) Where the opposition was using social media to its full advantage to promote itself and make the youth read faulty history about India and UPA, the LEFT-WING was still busy being overly euphoric about the consecutive win of 2009
2) Relying way too much on its family-run party’s ancestry and the failure to understand the threat to its power imposed by the RIGHT-WING and its ideas of Hindutva that were being sown in the minds of young as well as the old also contributed and quite immensely.
The RIGHT that we don’t know
There’s much more to Right’s history than we know. Moreover, the Right and the left are equally inked with ideologies and decisions (Hidden deep in the archives and some are especially related to events of 1974).
Right’s main power comes from BJP and mostly from the RSS. The Bhartiya Janta Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are more closely related than we know and they played a huge part in nation’s history during the times of emergency imposed.
The protests that are being witnessed now related to CAA and NRC were nothing to the extremist protests that were seen by people in the era of Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS i.e BJP before 1980). BJP and RSS grew as a national force through student protests against authoritarianism and established themselves what they are now. Student protests started from basic problems they faced and as clashes with the police increased, protests grew bigger and moved out in the streets and some also aimed to bring down state governments. Soon following freedom fighter JayaPrakash, the student force (Yuva Shakti as JP himself called it) declared Sampoorna Kranti or Total Revolution against government of India.
The history we know or are made to know is only bits and pieces that Right allows us to know and hide the pieces they can just to ensure they remain in power and are questioned less often. Like the information they hid about student protests they once participated in where names like Arun Jaitley were prominent to lead city wide protests. And there’s still much more we people have to know about either the elected representatives or the people they are connected to. Relying on just one news source and believing it is not a good practice, the day we start to get fact-checked information that might just contradict the stuff we already know will be the day the quest for the truth will begin and will make us question the authoritarians now in the way the authoritarians were questioned then
The Rise of Hindutva
Right is dominantly pro-hindu and has enjoyed broad support among members of the higher castes and in northern India. It has attempted to attract support from lower castes, particularly through the appointment of several lower-caste members to prominent party positions. After BJS (political wing of RSS) government collapsed in July 1979, BJS subsequently reorganised itself as the BJP under the leadership of Vajpayee, Lal Krishan Advani, and Murali Manohar Joshi. BJP advocated hindutva (“Hindu-ness”), an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values, and it was highly critical of the policies and practices that should be of a secular nation.
The BJP began to have electoral success in 1989, when it capitalized on anti-Muslim feeling by calling for the erection of a Hindu temple in an area in Ayodhya considered sacred by Hindus but at that time occupied by the Babri Masjid. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 by organizations seen to be associated with the BJP caused a major backlash against the party. The mosque’s destruction also led to violence throughout the country that left more than 1,000 dead. The party was regarded with skepticism and suspicion by many.
The term “Hindutva” was adopted by the right-wing nationalist and Indian freedom movement activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (also called Vir Savarkar) in 1923, while he was imprisoned for subverting the British and for inciting war against it. While imprisoned he wrote Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923), coining the term Hindutva. Savarkar though pro-hindutva wasn’t really setting out to create a Hindu nation. India was, he asserted, a nation based on hindu-ness in an organic sense.
The topic of Hindutva has now become disputed at much larger scale more or less because of the unclear facts about what the term truly means and what is being imposed on the people. The time we are in, the term is thrown vaguely almost everywhere. And politicians because they know about the level of clarity people have are now using it as much as they can to be in power by literally brain washing and creating the fear of non-hindus in the minds of the people of this nation.
People of India are either mostly not educated enough to even have a proper understanding about many topics or just not care about these topics and if you add poverty to the mixture you’ll get a set of people who may do anything just earn a sum of money to aid their survival.
Hinduism and Hindutva are very different topics. Shashi Tharoor probes the fundamentals and complexities of Hinduism, presents both its ancient texts and the modern beliefs of Hindutva descriptively and on their own terms to offer a lucid but brilliant account of one of the world’s “oldest and greatest” faiths.
“Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion which has always been able to assert itself without threatening others. But this is not what destroyed the Babri Masjid, nor that spewed in hate-filled diatribes by communal politicians,” — Tharoor writes in the book “The Hindu Way — An Introduction To Hinduism”
Hindutva ideology is a malign distortion of Hinduism, which is a religion of astonishing breadth and of awe-inspiring tolerance. Tharoor asserts that the Hindutva politics must be resisted for presenting a view of Hinduism that is at odds with everything the eclectic religion has sought to stand for. Hindutva seeks to refashion Hinduism as something it has never been. The Hindutva project seeks to reinvent Hindu identity with a new belief structure and a new vocabulary.
“BJP governments at the state and federal level are altering Indian history textbooks to conform with Hindu nationalist doctrine.” is one the many accusations BJP has faced to prove its fascist nature. One of the government spheres in which the sangh parivar has always shown interest is the teaching of history, not only because it contributes to defining the national identity, but also because the parivar believes the version of the past portrayed by secularists does not reflect reality.
With Modi Government entering its second term, Hindu far-right groups have increased their influence by deciding to change the content of school textbooks and tests. The party is accused of rewriting history in a bid to make India an entirely Hindu nation and erase the influences of other religions. This comes despite the Indian constitution seeing secularism as a fundamental principle.
For some time it has been made pretty clear by different BJP party members, Hindu Rashtra is what they demand and will go to any extent to achieve this dream of theirs. Now, logically you can’t make an existing secular nation into a single religion based nation within a day. To tackle this problem comes the role of a party’s strategist. If you look at the events that happened in the Modi’s regime you’ll find multiple events that may seem different and totally unrelated. But if you start putting them together like we do with puzzles you’ll see these puzzle pieces with weird little edges that fit together and start forming an idea of the whole picture.
Achieving Hindu Rashtra is one big step for power hungry people and it won’t be easy unless you start altering a nation’s history, removing important names from history, manipulating and creating sense of fear for people of different faith in the minds of people who aren’t educated enough, amending the existing acts like CAA to assist your ideas and decide people of what religion will stay in the country and creating detention centres , these…these events just might help you get there. But as long as the youth is educated and people have the right to protest and resist the government’s actions, you are safe!
Total Authoritarianism is what we should fear and the day the government gains immense power to control what you eat, see, read and know. Fear the day we lose our freedom to power hungry people. Fear the day when people of the country are reduced to nothing but bystanders in their own country. Fear the day when people become phobic to even resist minor changes. The day the people let their conscience die a painful death would mark a country’s darkest day.
So Resist as much you can, Read: read immensely so you know what and how to question the authorities, Create a better conscience, stop not bothering yourself with your nation’s trouble. Something that you don’t care about doesn’t mean it won’t affect you. Stop becoming the onlookers of your own destruction. The strength of the mass is often feared upon and the day when people start holding the government accountable for their actions and start calling what is wrong will go down as the brightest day in the nation’s history.
References for extensive reading:
https://medium.com/@arshdeep773/caa-nrc-detention-centres-and-its-impact-on-india-e846a87191a3 , https://thewire.in/politics/watch-the-bjps-hidden-history-of-extreme-student-protests , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Indian_general_election , https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bharatiya-Janata-Party#ref789897 , https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vinayak-Damodar-Savarkar#ref951778 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva , https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/hindutva-is-not-the-same-as-hinduism-said-savarkar/cid/1699550 , https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/hindutva-is-an-assault-on-hinduism-shashi-tharoor/articleshow/71358702.cms , https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/11/16/bjp-has-been-effective-in-transmitting-its-version-of-indian-history-to-next-generation-of-learners-pub-80373 , https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture/ , https://www.france24.com/en/20171003-focus-india-education-rewriting-history-textbooks-hindu-religion-secularism-modi-bjp-rss
