HINDU INDIA: THE SECURITY DIMENSION
AN ARTICLE PENNED IN 2003
Two popular views on China’s future contradict each other.
To some, Chinese power will rise to end the current unipolar moment. To others,
including China watchers in the CIA who periodically release their scare
mongering reports to the press, China will fall apart under the weight of its
own contradictions, the foremost of which is capitalism in a communist state.
Like crystal gazing has seldom been done with respect to India. India is seen
reflexively as a Great Power on the make, with a growing economy enabling it to
expand its military capabilities. The under-articulated contrary view is that
such a future is not axiomatic, but is predicated on continuing social cohesion
of India as a nation. This article analyses the dangers attending the rise of
Indian national power in conjunction with a decline in its social stability.
Such a scenario is not far fetched given the ascendance of
the political right on a divisive platform over the recent past. The run up to
the next national elections may witness further communal polarization, the
election worthiness of the issue being manifest in the Gujarat elections. In
the event of national elections returning the ruling party to power unmitigated
by its present coalitional constraints, the hindutva agenda to create a Hindu
India is likely to be unleashed overtly. The implications of this for national
cohesiveness are apparent. Thus the future of advancing Indian economic and
military power, accompanied with internal instability, will be realized.
Reflecting on the security dimensions of such a future indicates that the
current movement towards realization of Hindu India of hindutvavadi dreams is
not an unmixed blessing.
Rising Indian power will not go uncontested by its
perennial adversary, Pakistan. Indian strategy of replicating US strategy
towards the Soviet Union of the early eighties to push Pakistan into being a
‘failed’ state, would further corner it. To counter India’s hawkish approach,
two options are open to Pakistan. One is the expansion in scope of its proxy
war to include other parts of India in collusion with minority elements
influenced both by their own fundamentalist inclination and by the broader
communalization in the polity. This would complete the vicious circle, for it
will be taken as evidence of the fifth column status of the minority, in
keeping with the premises of hindutva philosophy of marginalisation of the
minority. Secondly, it would lower its nuclear threshold so as to negate the expanding
difference between the conventional capabilities of the two states. Indian
flexibility in resorting to force, furnished by its expanding capabilities and
by the incentive to use them being provided by provocative Pakistan, would thus
be constrained, further emboldening Pakistan. Thus Hindu India will not be able
to transcend the subcontinent to play a major role on the world stage in
keeping with its power trajectory.
The Huntingtonian logic of ‘clash of civilizations’ will
be on display in relations with China, for India would no longer be a state
pursuing its legitimate interests, but a state representing 5000 years of hindu
civilization finally coming of age. The undercurrents of antipathy towards
China are evident in Indian representations to the US President on Indian
motivations for going overtly nuclear. There is also prevalent the determinist
understanding in realist security circles that competition with China for space
under the Asian sun may turn military over the middle term. The very notion of
equating itself with China has an ego-boosting component to it. Arming itself
with long-range missiles and pursuing strategic nuclear weapon program puts
India into the big league. These tangible security assets supplement the false
pride that the other philosophical tenets of hindutva provide. The preparation
against the perceived Chinese threat over the long term can only result in
materializing the threat. Thus a Hindu India would open yet another front, as
also the certainty that its two adversaries so created would collaborate to
further threaten it.
Bangladesh is a state that bears watching, for there are
positive trends in its human development index that will have a bearing on its
national power over the long term. This, along with the issues of Bangladeshi
‘immigrants’ into India, makes it necessary to give it separate treatment,
rather than club it along with the other smaller Indian neighbors as is
routinely done. It is already implicated in providing a base for ISI activities
targeting eastern India. Since rival fanaticisms feeds on each other,
fundamentalism in Bangladesh and its anti-Indian tendency will only deepen with
the saffronisation of India. The use of the ‘immigrant’ issue by the right wing
in India will be handy for leveraging itself into power through a campaign of
vilifying the minority as a readily available ‘Other’. Corresponding treatment
of the hindu minority in Bangladesh will be taken as further justification,
since Hindu India would represent not mere citizens but hindus. Therefore,
India’s soft underbelly will be even more exposed, even as Hindu India rings
itself with neighbors in league with each other.
Smaller Indian neighbors will be the sites of contestation
of Indian power with the combined power of its larger neighbors. While Bhutan
and Maldives may band wagon readily with India, Nepal and Sri Lanka can be
expected to balance Indian preponderance with an inclination away from it in at
least some issue areas. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist fundamentalism could gain impetus,
particularly if Hindu India feels inclined to take a religiously inspired
position on a persisting Tamil question. Nepal, already taken as an ISI base,
may continue as one if the Maoist insurgency grows. India’s interest in a
stable Nepal are particularly acute owing to a proportion of its army being of
Nepalese ethnicity and to contiguity of Nepal to India’s nexalite ‘badlands’
stretching from Bihar to Telangana. The status quo in the evolution of the
SAARC would continue to deepen. Growing Indian economic power would compel
these countries to seal off their economies to preserve them against Indian
economic preponderance. Unilateral Indian concessions, though making sound
economic and political sense, may be less forthcoming from adrenalin charged Hindu
India. Thus, while regions coalesce into economic blocs for greater
competitiveness in a globalised world elsewhere, South Asia will miss what
shall turn out the most critical trend as the century unfolds.
In its relations with the sole superpower, India has
already revealed a disturbing initiative towards being the ‘most allied ally’.
There are two fronts along which this association may be boomerang on India.
One is that India may lend itself to the ends of a policy of containment of
China, thereby enmeshing itself in Great Power games. While this may help the
saffron leadership for adopting attitudes of statesmanship, it bears recounting
that there is no region that has been left unscathed after having been embraced
by the USA.
Second is that in trying to gain American attention India
has been presenting itself as a similar victim of pan-islamic terrorism. One
end of the muslim terrorist arc stretching from Chechenya is deemed to be
ending in Kashmir. By projecting its understanding with USA as ‘natural’, India
is associating itself with the reactionary reassertion of neo-colonial control
of the energy resources, in league with its friend of recent vintage, Israel.
Thus, India is opening itself to targeting by partially quasi-nationalist
forces, presently deservingly designated ‘terrorist’. The restive minority in a
Hindu India could find tactical allies amongst these terrorist forces, quite
like the disaffected muslim underworld elements in Bombay who turned to the ISI
for engineering the retaliatory Bombay blasts in 1993. Thus ‘islam’s bloody
borders’, to use a huntingtonian expression borrowed by Mr. Vajpayee for his
controversial anti-minority speech in Goa, would be imported into India. The
future may find India on the wrong side of history.
The contradiction is that though Indian economic and
military power will continue to grow, it will be proportionately less able to
cope with the worsening security situation. Economic priorities will leave
considerable angst within the vulnerable sections of society. The ‘experiment’
in the ‘hindutva laboratory’ of making the lower classes and tribals
participate in anti-minority pogroms would help in psychological projection as
also distraction in the short term. Over the long term, the limitations in neo-liberal
agenda will surface to compound the internal security problematic. The kind of
military power invested in, to include high profile missiles and nuclear
weapons; and technology intensive and mechanized armed forces, will be the
least appropriate to address the security problems that will arise in Hindu
India. The police, in the tradition established by the Bombay police of
abnegating professional responsibility, or worse, in determining it to be the
service of the hindutva philosophy, will exacerbate the law and order
situation. A reversion to the days of the Emergency when a ‘committed’ civil
service was thought desirable will occur with similar results, only this time
the commitment to hindutva line will rob the Indian state of its traditional
neutrality and credibility in intervening in intra-societal conflict. Thus
Hindu India will be its own gravest enemy.
While the Gujarat electorate has bought the line that the
minority ‘threat’ in its midst can best be met by hindutva inspired governance,
it would be tragic were this to be replicated at the national scale as is the
endeavor of rightist formations. Their effort will be to emulate the resounding
victory of Rajiv’s Congress of 1984 in both substance and result. This strategy
will have to be combated first conceptually in intellectual discourse and then
physically at the hustings. The Geobblesian ‘hindus and hinduism in danger’
line has to be revealed as true, not from the directions pointed out by those
crying wolf, but from the scare mongers themselves. Hindu India will not only
endanger India, but also will constitute its own greatest threat. Hindu India
will not only menace minorities, but also hinduism and hindus.
